Every time I hear about a new promotion somehow involving Whole Foods, my Spidey Sense tingles. I live near a Whole Foods, so this usually means free food for me, though often it means free green slime with wheatgrass or some such nonsense. That is, if I can get some free organic goodness before the thousands of hippies who must live somewhere near me come crawling out of the all-natural woodwork for some soy -culture bio-slime of their own. Message here is that Whole Foods isn't just a place to buy organic produce that isn't really much better for you or the environment than its conventionally-grown counterpart, it's also a marketing kingmaker.
This summer, when Discovery Communications relaunches Discovery Home as an eco-lifestyle channel, Planet Green, Emeril Lagasse will host a cooking show that will take place inside a Whole Foods using organic and sustainably produced foods. I can't think of a better commercial for either Emeril or Whole Foods. Bam! But I see two problems.
First, the show will no doubt be advertiser supported. I'd prefer just an unadulterated half-hour of Lagasse prancing around the aisles of the market, picking out his ingredients and getting down to the business of bamming spice into gumbo. Spidey Sense tells me that format could be lucrative without commercials.
Second, Whole Foods has a bit of a credibility issue when it comes to sustainability. Many of its organic foods are produced far away from its store locations, so they are not in fact sustainable. But even though I really hate shopping at Whole Foods (the crowds, the prices, the holier-than-thou attitude of even the bums panhandling outside, and the general lack of good chicken), I do believe that Whole Foods is a "good" company, one that doesn't just pay lip service to community responsibility. I suspect that if it becomes more apparent that they have a problem with sustainable and organic clashing, they won't throw advertising at it; they'll try to solve it.