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obouI Ihe imporIonce of keeping shored resources under
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Why Walmart Cant Fix the Food System 1
Walmart is the biggest company in the United States
and the countrys largest food retailer.
1
Walmart is
so big that it has an unprecedented amount of power
in all sectors of the economy. Food is no exception.
When there is one player this large connecting food
producers and food consumers, consumers are no
longer the food industrys customers Walmart is.
And the saying the customer is always right has
never been more appropriate.
Walmart is such a large customer that even large food
processors cannot refuse any demands that Walmart
makes upon them. The companys model is based on
practices that drive consolidation; take money away
from farmers, workers and processors; and drive
agriculture to get more industrialized.
Walmarts business model is part of the problem,
which means the company is not going to be a mean-
ingful part of the solution to problems in the food
supply. Instead of succumbing to Walmarts public
relations oensive and pressure to be allowed in new
urban areas, all levels of government should look for
other solutions to increase communities access to
healthy food.
L S
2 Food & Water Watch
I
What started as a single discount store in Rogers,
Arkansas, in 1962
2
has over the last 50 years morphed
into the largest retailer in the world.
3
Walmart is
the biggest company in the United States and the
countrys largest food retailer.
4
Walmart is the worlds
largest private employer, with 2.1 million employees,
1.4 million of whom are in the United States.
5

Walmart has almost 4,000 (3,804) U.S. stores and over
4,500 (4,557) stores internationally in 14 countries.
6

Walmarts 2010 sales were $419 billion,
7
with the
company making $1.87 million in prot every hour.
8

Walmart opened its rst supercenter in 1988 in the
town of Washington, Missouri, selling food alongside
other retail products, and within only 12 years became
the largest food retailer in the United States.
16
Now
just over half of Walmarts business comes from
grocery sales.
17
One out of every three dollars spent on
groceries in this country goes to Walmart.
18

Walmart is so big that it has an unprecedented
amount of power in all sectors of the economy. Food
is no exception. When there is one player this large
connecting food producers and food consumers,
consumers are no longer the food industrys customers
Walmart is. And the saying the customer is always
right has never been more appropriate.
The company continually puts downward pressure on
its suppliers, forcing them to cut costs. With Walmart
as their biggest customer, suppliers have no choice but
to comply. When Walmart makes a decision to change
the way it does business, an entire industry will shift
to keep up. And despite what Walmart would have
the public believe, this decision is made with prots
in mind. As consumers and policymakers continue
to be bombarded with PR messages about Walmarts
eorts to help people live better, it is time to look at
the impact that Walmarts rise has had on our food
system and to reconsider whether the Walmart
model has any place in trying to x it.
US I
1
W
9
3,804 4,557
L
10

700,000

ns or InNunnv
11

12

13

M W


14
29
1

15

PHOTO BY JUSTIN COZART / COMMONS.WIKIMEDIA.ORG

Why Walmart Cant Fix the Food System 3
W W I D
>
More than just size and market share have enabled
Walmart to exercise such considerable control over
suppliers. Walmarts success is the result of several
very specic factors about the way the company does
business. In addition to being fervently anti-union,
19

Walmarts logistics and distribution model is much
dierent from other companies. The primary reason
for Walmarts incredible growth as a food retailer is
because of its model for managing the supply chain.
20

Essentially, Walmarts model boils down to sucking
money out of the supply chain.
Walmart bases its logistical operations on shifting
costs and responsibilities to suppliers. Walmart
requires suppliers to adopt supply chain manage-
ment, logistics, and data-sharing programs and to
manage their own inventory, even on store shelves.
21

Walmart was the rst to bring high-tech information
management into the grocery industry and demanded
that its suppliers comply with and use the companys
own information technology system, which includes
automated, scheduled delivery of products and control
of inventory, tracked electronically via universal bar
code.
22
Keeping track of this is the responsibility of the
supplier, not Walmart. The company even exercises
control over the design of products, forcing suppliers
to meet Walmart specications.
23

Supplier Pressure
Contracts with Walmart are non-negotiable as a rule: if
suppliers want to do business with the worlds largest
retailer, they must accept Walmarts terms without
modication.
24
Walmart has set up its operations with
suppliers to allow the company to shift liability for
setting prices, supply and distribution to the producer,
with no risk to Walmart. If there are perceived discrep-
ancies with an order, or even if not enough product is
sold, Walmart can charge the supplier a ne, known
as a chargeback.
25
These chargeback fees, which
have since become more common in other retail indus-
tries as well, can be signicant sometimes in the
hundreds of thousands of dollars.
26
When Walmart rst began to require some suppliers
to use radio-frequency identication tags, or RFID
tags, to keep track of inventory, it required those
suppliers to pay all of the costs of the technology.
27

RFID tags send out a weak radio signal that allows
the item to be scanned and tracked from a distance.
28

The technology was originally used to track pallets in
warehouses but has expanded to some clothing and
food items as well, including use on farms.
29
One estimate of the cost of adopting RFID technology
for a grocery manufacturer with $5 billion in sales
was about $33 million per year.
30
The cumulative
savings for Walmart for putting this cost on its
suppliers would amount to billions of dollars.
31
While
it has not required these tags on every product,
Walmart has forced suppliers who did not adopt the
technology to pay fees for untagged goods.
32
High-Volume Demand
Walmart sells an incredible amount of each food
product, much more so than a small or medium-
sized producer could ever hope to supply on its own.
For instance, Walmart buys 1 billion pounds of beef
each year.
33
For a company obsessed with increasing
eiciencies in its supply chain, it makes consider-
4 Food & Water Watch
ably more sense for Walmart to get meat from a few
large meatpackers than from numerous small, local
suppliers. In addition, these smaller producers are
probably less likely to be able to meet and aord
Walmarts technological requirements for managing
inventory, unlike the bigger players in the industry.
Organic Valley, a farmer-owned cooperative that
supplied Walmart with organic milk for approximately
four years, was selling 1.3 million gallons of uid milk
to Walmart each year.
34
Yet this represented only 3.6
percent of Walmarts total milk sales for that year.
35

After an organic milk shortage left the company
unable to supply all of its customers, Organic Valley
decided it would no longer sell milk to Walmart.
36

Organic Valley executives feared that Walmart would
purchase so much of the cooperatives milk that
Organic Valley would become beholden to the retail
giant and could be pressured to lower prices and thus
pay its dairy farmers less, something it did not wish
to do.
37
Rather than become so dependent on Walmart
that it would make the cooperative vulnerable,
Organic Valley stopped supplying milk to Walmart.
Buyer Power
Walmart is the largest purchaser of American agri-
cultural products,
38
and as such it has considerable
inuence over which foods are available to the public,
the methods in which these foods are produced, and
the prices paid to producers.
The incredibly uneven power dynamic between
Walmart and its manufactured goods suppliers is well
known.
39
It puts Walmart into an excellent position
to make demands on these suppliers, and Walmart
regularly does. The pressure to cut costs that has
pushed companies like Levis, Huy, Rubbermaid, Mr.
Coee and RCA to close up manufacturing facilities in
the United States and move them overseas
40
has also
hurt food producers like Vlasic, which was at one time
making less than one cent per jar of pickles in order to
meet Walmarts price-point demands.
41
This pressure
travels all the way down the food chain and has led to
increased consolidation in the food industry.
Walmart is now the biggest customer for many
of the top food producers and processors in the
country, including dairy giant Dean Foods, General
Mills, Kraft Foods and Tyson Foods.
42
Each of these
suppliers represents only a very small portion of
Walmarts total business, but the relationship is a
great deal more important to the supplier because
food processors, meat packers and other suppliers
cannot sacrice their sales to major retailers, but the
retailers can easily switch to alternative suppliers.
43

Walmart is such a large customer that even large food
W dont talk
publicly about their experiences supplying
Walmart, the story of Vlasic pickles should

industry. In the late 1990s, Walmart noted in
its own sales tests that a gallon jar of Vlasic
pickles priced at $3 sold extremely well, so
the company asked Vlasic to allow gallon
jars to be priced at $2.97 at every one of
its stores.
44
Walmart used this as a state-
ment item to show the public it had low
prices.
45
This made Vlasic only one penny
per jar, if that, but sold tremendously well,
even causing consumers to stop buying the
v
dropped 25 percent.
46
Why Walmart Cant Fix the Food System 5
processors cannot refuse any demands that Walmart
makes upon them.
In order to compete with Walmart, other grocery
stores in the industry have tried to emulate the
companys practices, becoming bigger, consolidating
operations and putting downward price pressure
on their suppliers and workers. This industry-wide
pressure means rising consolidation in the entire food
chain, all to keep up with Walmart.

Since Walmart moved into grocery sales in the late

1990s, many other retailers have also consolidated
their operations to try to compete. This consolidation
across the grocery industry has given the largest
retailers considerable power as buyers of groceries,
and has also signicantly reduced the number of
buyers of products from regional food producers.
Supermarket chains are now very concentrated, with
half of all sales going to just four companies.
47
At
the local level, the top four chains can control more
than 70 percent of the marketplace.
48
Walmart alone
controls more than 50 percent of the grocery market
in 29 markets across the country.
49
These retailers with high market share can exert
this power over food manufacturers, meat processors,
produce shippers and other suppliers to reduce their
prices. This buyer power favors the largest suppliers,
who can best negotiate with the large retailers and
who then pass on the cost-cutting pressure to the
farms and ranches they buy from. Large retailers can
represent between 10 and 30 percent of a suppliers
sales, which gives the retailer signicant bargaining
power.
50

The phrase get big or get out has been used for
decades to describe the pressure on farmers to grow
larger in order to survive increasingly consolidated
markets. And the phrase could be used to describe
the pressure on food processors as well. Many food
processing rms justify their own mergers as an eort
to create stronger bargaining power to use with large
food retailers like Walmart.
51
Even as large suppliers
merge to increase their power with large retail buyers,
smaller food processors and manufacturers may exit
the industry after determining they cannot get fair
prices from the major buyers.
52

C C N
Walmarts approximately 3,800 stores in the U.S. are
located predominantly in rural and suburban areas,
but the company is determined to move into urban
markets.
53
Walmart saw same-store sales (sales at
stores that existed in the prior year) decline for nine
straight quarters from 2009 to the second quarter of
2011.
54
Customers were no longer spending as much
6 Food & Water Watch
money at Walmart as they used to.
55
In order for the
company to continue to increase its overall sales and
satisfy shareholders, Walmart must instead open new
stores. The company has estimated that there are
billions of dollars in new sales waiting for it in urban
areas. So why hasnt the company already opened
stores in cities?
Walmart has made numerous attempts to expand
into cities but has been met with intense opposition,
having its eorts rebued in New York, Los Angeles
and, until 2006, Chicago.
56
Walmarts failure to break
into urban markets is due to organized opposition
on the part of citizen and community groups who
have seen that allowing a Walmart into a community
brings with it low-paying jobs with few benets, and
furthers a cycle of poverty. The companys treat-
ment of workers, suppliers and local communities is
well known, and across the country, what were once
vibrant downtowns made up of local businesses have
become ghost towns after the opening of a Walmart.
57

Many urban communities have organized to try to
stop Walmart from entering their city to try to avoid
this fate.
58
I
Walmarts impact on workers, rural towns, main
streets and the environment has been documented
in countless books, articles and campaigns by labor
unions and other advocates. The company knows it has
an image problem, going so far as hiring consultants,
doing studies and running ads to try to repair it.
59
As
part of its eorts to overcome opposition to its attempts
to enter new markets, the company has unleashed
numerous announcements about new initiatives to
improve its environmental performance, social respon-
sibility or long-term sustainability. After years of
trying to reinvent its image, the company has latched
on to food as the issue that will cast Walmart as a solu-
tion instead of a problem. And when it comes to food,
the company is getting some very high-prole help.
W
Bringing Healthy Food to Food Deserts
Walmart has found a new public relations angle that
it can use to wedge its way into cities. In early 2010,
First Lady Michelle Obama announced her new
campaign, Lets Move! This campaign had the admi-
rable goal of solving childhood obesity in the United
States within a generation.
60
However, it quickly
became clear that this campaign would also be used to
advance the urban-expansion agenda of Walmart.
In January 2011, First Lady Obama partnered with
Walmart as part of the Lets Move! campaign. This
partnership included not only a commitment on
Walmarts part for minor reductions in sodium and
sugar levels in some of its products by 2015, but
also an announcement that it would open up new
stores in so called food deserts.
61
Walmart created
its own nutritional denitions for what it considers
healthier denitions that are, according to nutri-
tionist Marion Nestle, not particularly challenging.
62

The U.S. Department of Agriculture denes food
desert not simply as a lower-income area with no
access to fresh food, but as an area without access to
a supermarket or large grocery store.
63
A supermarket
is dened as a retailer with annual sales of $2 million,
and it must contain all the traditional major food
departments, including fresh meat and produce, dairy
products, dry and packaged goods, and frozen foods.
64

This requirement can generally be met only by large
national grocery chains. A smaller local grocery co-op,
corner store or bodega, which may in fact provide
fresh fruits and vegetables as well as cycle more
PHOTO BY MATT H. WADE / COMMONS.WIKIMEDIA.ORG
Why Walmart Cant Fix the Food System 7
money back into the community, does not count under
the USDA guideline, a fault that the department is
well aware of.
65
This corporate-friendly denition
makes sure only the opening of a large national
grocery chain can eliminate a food desert, a situation
that Walmart is using to its advantage.
In July 2011, First Lady Obama made a second state-
ment on behalf of Walmart and other large retailers
when she announced that Walmart was making an
oicial commitment to open up or expand 275 to 300
stores in underserved urban and rural areas.
66
To the
general public, this sounds like a solution that helps
everyone: low-income populations in urban and rural
areas will be able to obtain lower-cost, healthy and
fresh foods that they did not previously have access to.
But this talk of supplying good food in food deserts
is simply a public relations tactic that Walmart is
using to try to expand into urban markets, an area it
has unsuccessfully tried to break in to for years.
The lack of access to healthy food in many communi-
ties is too complex to solve simply with the siting of
a big-box store. Providing a place to buy fruits and
vegetables is one step, but we must also consider the
long-term reforms needed to ensure that the system
providing those fruits and vegetables is sustainable
for everyone at every stage of production.
Walmarts model for supplying the fruits and
vegetables it will sell in food deserts is part of the
problem. By driving down costs at every step in
the chain, the Walmart model makes farmers and
workers poorer, and it increases the odds that fruits
and vegetables will be produced in environmentally
irresponsible ways or be imported from countries with
lax standards. This comes on top of the burden borne
by Walmarts employees who are paid poorly with
few benets. Cheap fruits and vegetables might look
good on paper, but it is not so simple when costs to
employees, workers throughout the food supply chain,
and the environment are left out of the equation.
W
>
Walmart announced in October 2010 that it would
be buying more locally grown produce. When
most consumers think of buying local, they imagine
smaller-scale, diverse farms operated by families.
But Walmart is not increasing its purchasing of local
produce in order to help farmers. Instead, this is a
business decision designed to help its image while
increasing eiciencies and cost savings.
67
One way the
company benets is by spending less money on fuel
by acquiring produce from the same state and cutting
down on food that is spoiled or damaged in transit
across the country.
68
But because Walmart deals in volume not by buying
small lots from numerous farms buying local
doesnt necessarily translate to supporting the types
of agriculture consumers might imagine. Walmarts
8 Food & Water Watch
distribution and logistics model favors the use of very
few suppliers, and fresh produce is no exception.
Walmarts actual goal for local food is minimal: while
Walmart wants to double the amount of locally grown
produce it sells by 2015, this would only increase what
Walmart denes as locally grown to 9 percent of its
produce sales, a goal it estimates will take four years
to achieve.
69

Walmarts denition of local is broad: obtained
within the same state as the store.
70
And the goal
is not 9 percent of products sold in each store, but
a combined 9 percent of the produce of all stores.
71

This means that stores already located in major
agricultural states like California, Texas or Florida
can easily make up for the lack of same-state produce
in other states. In larger states like California
and Texas, so-called local food could be traveling
hundreds of miles, greater than the distance between
Richmond, Virginia, and Portland, Maine.
W
DKW
Walmart has also made a move into organic food,
announcing in 2006 that it would double the number
of organic products on its shelves.
72
Walmart made
this decision in an attempt to attract wealthier
consumers and to help its image.
73
However, the
Walmart way of doing business is having negative
repercussions in the organic industry, as it has in the
rest of the food industry.
When Walmart talks about organic, it is dierent
from what many consumers expect. It includes
big food companies making organic versions of
the processed foods that are already on Walmarts
shelves like Rice Krispies and Kraft macaroni and
cheese, which these companies can make organic by
replacing high-fructose corn syrup with cane sugar
and removing or substituting preservatives or other
ingredients.
74
There is little evidence that Walmart is
concerned about the principles behind organic agri-
culture, and it will likely accept the bare-minimum
requirements for ensuring that a product ts USDAs
organic labeling requirements. An executive in charge
of perishable food at Walmart admitted that the move
into organics is simply a merchandising scheme, and
that organic agriculture is just another method of
agriculture not better, not worse.
75
When Organic Valley was considering ending its
supplier agreement with Walmart, dairy giant Dean
Foods was waiting to get in line. Deans Horizon
Organic milk brand was willing to oer lowball
prices to Walmart, prices so low that Organic Valley
could not begin to compete. The company knew that
Walmart was only interested in price, not whether the
dairy farmers could make a living.
76
Dean Foods is
now a supplier of organic milk to Walmart.
77
Walmarts own private-label organic milk brand has
been harshly criticized. The dairy cows are raised
in factory-farm conditions, with thousands of cows
housed in a single facility.
78
The cows eat predomi-
nately grain and are grass fed only while they are not
being milked about two to three months out of the
year.
79
Whole Foods Market executives toured one of
the facilities in 2006 and found it unacceptable.
80
Why Walmart Cant Fix the Food System 9
Walmarts priority when it comes to organic products
is nding the cheaper product, rather than meeting
any principles of organic agriculture.
81
Walmarts
continued expansion into organics will favor those
large suppliers that use factory-farm methods to
produce their products as cheaply as possible, poten-
tially pushing out of business smaller-scale, organic
producers who could not otherwise compete on price
or volume.
W
Sustainability
In 2005, during a low point in the companys public
image,
82
Walmart announced it was going green,
83
and in 2006 the company listed three goals it would
try to achieve over the coming years:

creating zero
waste, using 100-percent renewable energy and
selling more ecofriendly products.
84
Since that time,
Walmart has announced numerous initiatives in
an eort to cut energy costs and waste, all to make
the company run more eiciently. The company also
obtained the positive image benets of these decisions
and won over many of its critics.
85
By diusing criticism, the company is able to expand
unopposed into more markets. Walmart executives
do not see the sustainability goals as a form of
philanthropy, but as a growth strategy.
86
Walmart
has clearly stated that going green is simply about
cutting costs and saving money.
87
Former CEO Lee
Scott noted that the rationale for these initiatives was
purely economic, stating, what Wal-Mart has done
is approach this from a business stand point and not
from a point of altruism.
88

Walmart is the largest private consumer of elec-
tricity in the United States,
89
so any reductions in
electricity usage mean big savings for the company.
While Walmart claims it wants to be more reliant on
renewable energy, it has also stated it will not use
renewable energy if it is more costly than traditional
sources.
90
This is Walmarts line in the sand: once
sustainability becomes unprotable for the company,
it will stop using it as a criteria in its decisions.
In the meantime, the company has not made much
progress in meeting its sustainability goals.
91
As part
of the waste-reduction goal, Walmart has demanded
that suppliers reduce the amount of packaging they
use in their products.
92
What on the surface seems
like a decent step is really one more change Walmart
pushes on its suppliers that has little positive benet
for the environment and a big benet for Walmarts
bottom line. The ultimate goal for cutting packaging is
a meager 5 percent reduction across the supply chain
by 2013.
93
But even this minor reduction allows the
company to t more products into a container, boat
or truck, which means less money Walmart spends
on shipping.
94
As a Walmart executive pointed out, a
2% reduction in a packages size is worth millions and
millions of dollars.
95

In 2010, Walmart made yet another demand of its
suppliers in the name of sustainability, asking them
to analyze the carbon lifecycles of their products and
then try to reduce their energy use.
96
Suppliers must
pay all the costs associated with meeting this goal,
while Walmart gets to claim credit for the results.
97

And while this program is not mandatory, Walmart
has made it clear that it only wants to do business
with companies that share its goals.
98
The message to
suppliers is clear: either get with the program or lose
your biggest customer.
C
As Walmart looks for new markets, especially urban
ones, the company has embarked on an ambitious
public relations campaign to convince skeptical local
governments and communities that Walmart makes
10 Food & Water Watch
peoples lives better. Food has become a cornerstone of
the companys public relations oensive. However, the
reality of what Walmart has done to change peoples
access to food, improve nutrition or expand organics
does not live up to the companys hype.
Walmarts model is based on practices that drive
consolidation; take money away from farmers,
workers, and processors; and drive agriculture to get
more industrialized. Walmarts model is part of the
problem, which means the company is not going to be
a meaningful part of the solution to shortcomings in
the modern-day food supply. Instead of succumbing
to Walmarts public relations campaign and pressure
to be allowed in new urban areas, local governments
should look for other solutions to increase communi-
ties access to healthy food.
The federal government can make that easier for
communities by:
Investigating the impact of Walmarts monopoly
power in the food chain and in local retail markets,
including anticompetitive practices that result
from Walmarts disproportionate market share.
Any investigation should look at possible anticom-
petitive practices in Walmarts relationships with
suppliers and impacts on local markets.
Creating food and farm policy that re-establishes
regional food systems that will provide healthy,
aordable food to all communities. Federal farm
policy should strengthen food assistance programs
that ght hunger and improve nutrition such as
the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program
(SNAP) and the Women, Infants, and Children
Supplemental Nutrition Program to ensure that
low-income Americans have the resources neces-
sary to aord healthy, nutritious foods and prevent
hunger. Additional policy solutions can also
include SNAP incentives to promote purchasing
of healthy foods such as fruits and vegetables and
whole grains, and expanding Electronic Benet
Transfer (EBT) availability at farmers markets
and other community venues.
Why Walmart Cant Fix the Food System 11
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N. December 1, 2010.
WM S l A u P A
walmartstores.com/aboutus/297.aspx, accessed September 12, 2011.
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accessed January 4, 2012.
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31, 2011 at 5, 11, 55.
7 l at 4.
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WM S l 1 n l WM S-
8 M u C ! M S
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WM u A L u-
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l C l
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30 Feder (November 10, 2003).
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