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Selling the sizzle…

Sometimes I wonder whether the folks in food retailing are wicked smart, dumber than a box of rocks or just don’t care about main street consumers. The media is all atwitter again this week about Whole Foods’ new “animal welfare labeling,” yet another marketing move by the warm, fuzzy, touchy-feely, way, way expensive food chain out of Austin, Texas. Allegedly, according to research being embraced by various supermarket chains, retailers are now convinced that “humane” is the next big thing in meat and poultry marketing.

Whole Foods is hooked up with the Global Animal Partnership (GAP) and will rate products on a scale of 1 to 5 on the gang’s “welfare” standards. But before we embrace this effort, who/what is GAP?

The GAP board of directors includes Joyce D’Silva, director of public affairs for Compassion in World Farming (CWF); Margaret Wittenberg, global vice president, and John Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods; Steven Gross, “corporate consultant” to PETA, and CEO of Farm Forward, an anti-factory farming group; Wayne Pacelle, president and CEO of the Humane Society of the U.S. (HSUS); three organic/natural/free-range meat and dairy producers, and a New Zealand animal behaviorist who works for a private Kiwi ag research group. The “leadership” team at GAP includes Myun Park, co-founder of Compassion Over Killing (COK) and a former HSUS farm animal program executive; Sara Miller, who may or may not still be HSUS’ director of member loyalty/conferences and events, and Dr. Ian Duncan, a Canadian animal welfare professor.

Why organic and natural producers would get anywhere near HSUS and PETA and the folks who used to/still work for them is beyond me. My cynical self says it’s because they might believe the affiliation somehow gives them an animal rights seal of approval in the marketplace, a pass on the demands of the moonbats, that Whole Foods will hold the activists at bay. This may be an “advantage” that continues right up to the point where even organic or natural is unacceptable to those zealots who would define for the rest of us not only what’s “humane” and “compassionate,” but what’s socially and ethically acceptable in our lives.

This is every animal rightist’s and organic producer’s dream organization. It’s a serious mutual admiration/marketing cabal, apparently controlled by Whole Foods, HSUS and the folks who wish to keep Mssrs. Mackey and Pacelle happy. It’s a group made up of the vegan and vegetarian leaders of the world’s largest animal rights groups, including those who make no secret of their desire to see animal agriculture disappear, and those for whom affordability for 95% of the population is no concern. This gang is all philosophy and no practice, or as we like to say in the real world, all hat and no cattle.

It’s great marketing spin for Whole Foods, given its niche market in food retailing. However, it’s also likely other supermarket chains will try and jump on board this holistic bandwagon, buying into the silliness that all America is waiting for “happy animal” labels. Any supermarket chain executive even contemplating such a program needs to pick up a phone book, then the telephone and call any or all of national organizations representing cattle, swine, poultry and dairy farmers and ranchers. Each and everyone of these groups has – and will share and cooperate with the retailer – science-based standards of production that are producer proven, and which won’t force the supermarket to start charging $20 a pound for steak or $6 a gallon for milk.

And to the national farm and ranch organizations: Take a page from the Whole Foods/HSUS product marketing handbook: Package your standards and practices and reach out to the retailers before they reach back down the chain and make unreasonable or silly demands, complete with press releases.

To my mind, these cynical efforts to manipulate the public perception of farm animal care have little or nothing to do with building a better world on or off the farm. It’s all about bucking up the bottom line.