Brahm’s Blog

Check out the recent media play that People’s Grocery has been getting:

CNBC’s “Street Signs” ran a “Green Collar Economy” series this week. People’s Grocery was featured on the April 23rd show, entitled “Growing Green”. Click here to check it out.

The Sundance Channel is running a new show called “The Good Fight”. Click here to listen to a 35 minute podcast interview about People’s Grocery.

Local Bay Area channel KRON 4 will run a segment on Bay Area Backroads about urban farming which will feature People’s Grocery. The show will air on Saturday May 3 and Sunday May 4 (same show both days) at 6pm.

Back in March 2007 I wrote a blog post entitled “Urban Grocery Store Gap” about the entrance of Fresh & Easy into urban neighborhoods and my concerns that this would eclipse the opportunity for local entrepreneurs to start grocery stores to meet local food needs and, thereby, capture local spending power for local reinvestment. When I wrote this article, I and many others were nervous that this company, which is a subsidiary of the UK-based Tesco (the third largest retailer in the world) would have extreme advantages over small and local competitors and would undermine our progress in engendering locally-owned food retail ventures.

I have to confess that I have since shifted my thinking about Fresh & Easy quite dramatically from the time when I wrote that post. As we have gotten to better understand People’s Grocery’s own business model and positioning (as well as current allegations being made that the majority of Fresh & Easy’s stores in Los Angeles, Arizona and Nevada are falling short of sales goals by as much as 70%) I have gained a confidence that we can actually compete with Fresh & Easy very well. In fact, I now welcome the opportunity for People’s Grocery to compete with Fresh & Easy as a way of contrasting the economic and social impact of multi-national corporations, and the global economy upon which they thrive, to the impact of locally-owned and operated businesses on local economies and communities.

The key breakthrough in my thinking about Fresh & Easy came from a number of visits I made to food stores in other regions that are strongly competing with bigger players like Whole Foods and Kroger. These mission-driven companies have built their strength and positioning on unique competitive advantages that set them apart from the large corporations — advantages that those large corporations simply can not create themselves.

So while Fresh & Easy will certainly have competitive advantages that People’s Grocery can not replicate (industry knowledge, scale, global supply chains, technologies, political influence, capital), People’s Grocery also has a set of competitive advantages that Fresh & Easy can not replicate either (community relations, values, local knowledge and experience, brand and story, customer and brand loyalty, local supply chains, cultural positioning). The way we will compete with Fresh & Easy is to differentiate our business based on the unique value, experience and relationships that we offer to our community, which are qualities that Fresh & Easy is unsuccessfully trying to create.

Another reason that I now see Fresh & Easy’s entrance into our market area as a having a potential upside for People’s Grocery is that sometimes a larger corporate player can actually grow the overall market to provide more business opportunity for smaller businesses in the same industry. Starbucks is a good example of this. While on the one hand Starbucks has most certainly hurt local coffee shops, it has also grown the gourmet coffee market dramatically, which has been a boon for other small coffee shops.

Whole Foods is another example. While Whole Foods is often criticized for destroying independent natural food stores, the company has also been instrumental in the dramatic growth in the overall organic food industry, which has benefited those independent stores that have survived. San Francisco-based Rainbow Grocery Cooperative’s extraordinary growth over the last two decades, averaging about 15% a year, has been a great example of this.

Fresh & Easy may in fact engender a similar opportunity for smaller food retailers. Fresh & Easy is pursuing a strategy of opening smaller format stores of 10,000-15,000 square feet. This is spurring competitors like Whole Foods and Walmart to begin designing their own small format stores. People’s Grocery too will benefit from the emergence and acceptance of small format stores as this is exactly the business model that we have been planning for.

I guess the lesson I’ve learned is that there’s always an upside to everything. It’s also a lesson that we small players have our own strength to stand on and value to offer in a world of giant corporations.

Much fanfare is being made about the upcoming Slow Food Nation conference, to be held from Friday, August 29 to Monday, September 1, 2008 in San Francisco. Among this fanfare were criticisms laid against Slow Food by Bruce Sterlings in the March 2008 issue of the online magazine Metropolis, where he accuses Slow Food of snobbery and elitism. Predictably, the response from Slow Food to this article on the Slow Food USA Blog was to attempt to deflect and counter every detailed point that Sterling tried to make in an effort to prove that Slow Food is not elitist and, if it is elitist in some regards, why it was justified for being so.

The question for me about Slow Food is less whether it’s elitist or snobbish, but whether it’s relevant to people of diverse economic and/or cultural backgrounds. A lot of people don’t feel there is sufficient economic and racial diversity in Slow Food to engender it as a true movement and that the lifestyle and cultural renaissance that Slow Food advocates is not accessible to people of less privilege, income, etc. This is certainly true for us at People’s Grocery as our experience is that people living in low-income communities and communities of color aren’t compelled by, or even aware, of what Slow Food is doing. This is not to say that Slow Food isn’t trying to engender a more inclusive and multicultural movement. But such issues will continue to engender criticism, some of it fair and some of it not fair at all.

Perhaps, when criticized in these ways, Slow Food should not just strive to defend itself from criticism but also acknowledge where its movement is trying to grow and change. Being transparent and open about such challenges and the efforts made will help shift perceptions/criticisms of Slow Food to give it more of a chance of offering meaning to many more people and creating a transformative revolution greater in magnitude and scope. This would be a courageous act on Slow Foods part and would significantly increase the respect it was given by food justice organizations striving to address inequities in the food system. As in all matters regarding undoing social and economic inequality, the first step to becoming an ally to people of color and low-income communities is to acknowledge the privilege one has and the ways one contributes to the perpetuation of inequity. In its effort to connect with communities of color, as well as increase their participation at the Slow Food Nation conference, Slow Food would do very well to make such acknowledgements.

The Global Oneness Project recently produced a short video about People’s Grocery. according to the website, the purpose of the Global Oneness Project is to explore “how the simple notion of oneness can be lived in our increasingly complex world”. They have produced lots of great videos in addition to the recent one about People’s Grocery.

Last week, the People’s Grocery film produced by the Global Oneness Project was featured on Karma Tube as the video of the week. This video has also been licensed to two TV networks, Link TV and Starfish media. .