Business

CEO Tells How Detroit Led Whole Foods' To Rethink 'Our Core Values'

May 28, 2015, 11:29 AM by  Alan Stamm

Whole Foods' boss shares a life lesson he gained from opening a Detroit store two years ago: 

"When people say stuff can't be done, they're wrong," chief executive Walter Robb says Wednesday morning at the Mackinac Police Conference of business, political and nonprofit leaders. 

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A cheese specialist identified as "C.J." prepares to package Parmesan Reggiano at the Midtown shop. (Facebook photos by Whole Foods)

"This was a project the Wall Street Journal said was a business plan gone off the rails, and nobody said it could be done. . . You just have to believe," he adds, according to Khalil AlHajal of MLive.

Robb gushes that the June 5, 2013 grand opening at 115 Mack in Midtown was "one of the greatest days of my life."

Self-promoting hype? Maybe in part, but hear the man out about Detroit as an eye-opener:

"We started out with community activist groups having the idea that Whole Foods had nothing to do with the community and that it wasn't going to contribute," Robb said. "By really engaging and trying to listen and by starting from a place of really respecting the community and listening to where they were and what they were doing [we learned] these are no food deserts.

"These are places where lots is going on, and your job as a company is to come in and be part of that and participate. And this led to us really overhauling our core values as a company, serving and supporting our local and global communities as a result of re-imagining what's possible between a company and a community when dialog happens. . . .

"There's tremendous disparity in food access in this country. There's over 6,500 areas that don't have access to fresh, healthy food like most of you enjoy in your lives. And in the city of Detroit, the health outcomes, the life expectancy in Detroit is some 10 years less than in Oakland County. . . . That is a moral problem that business needs to do something about."

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Robb, who came to the Detroit Regional Chamber conference from his Austin headquarters, also spoke about cooking classes at Detroit's store, stocking products from local small businesses and retaining nearly 70 of the 90 workers hired at the launch, MLive says.

"This idea of putting the community first is really at the heart of the store's efforts," Robb said.


Composite from the Detroit store's Facebook page.

A link to Mlive's report earns digital nods of appreciation at Reddit, where these are among Detroiters' comments:

► It's so delicious to remember all the butthurt from the naysayers who kept going on and on about how idiotic it was to have a Whole Foods in poor Detroit and "nobody will be able to afford it" and so on and so forth. Even more delicious is remembering all the assholes who said "who will shop there?, nothing but white hipsters with rich parents," blah blah blah. Any given day, walk into Whole Foods and what you see is a microcosm of Detroit as a whole: About 75/25 black-to-white customers.
The takeaway I got from monitoring all of those conversations was this: People think black Detroiters don't have money to spend or don't want/can't afford nicer things. -- "PrimeSuspect"  

► The underestimation of the spending power in the City of Detroit is astounding. The Meijer on 8 Mile is the highest-grossing Meijer in the entire chain.
Sure, there are a lot of poor people in the City, but everyone needs to buy certain goods and deserves a quality place to buy those guys nearby. -- "Khorasaurus"

► I distinctly remember the amount of bitching that went on about Whole Foods coming to Detroit. The local residents can't afford it, it's only for rich white people, this does nothing to help Detroit, etc. I'm sure there's someone out there that still has a protest sign sitting in their closet. -- "LeftDetroitThrowAway"


Read more:  MLive


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