Hey, Whole Foods: Let Your Talent Feed Us

I have been a loyal Whole Foods shopper since I moved to California in 1999/2000. I grew up spoiled by the wonderful Wegmans markets in Western New York, with their abundant quality produce and progressive emphasis on bringing a diverse realm of ingredients deep into cities that are otherwise ethnically homogeneous. So, arriving out here, I was excited to explore a market that aimed to improve our awareness of what we eat. By working with organic and local growers, Whole Foods established a company ethos that makes me feel good to be a customer, despite the fact that the prices reflect a certain premium to be paid for this peace of mind.

In parallel, Whole Foods has been able to attract a very high quality workforce. As you get to know their employees, you will find they tend to be highly educated workers who could choose from a range of jobs, but aspire to work for a company in which they believe. I can certainly sympathize with that, working at a company like Google which also has a well-defined positive company identity and thereby also attracts amazingly talented workers. To retain these quality contributors, Whole Foods pays well, offers full benefits, and caps executive pay at 14 times what the lowest paid company employee makes.

Yet, there is at least one major difference between our two workplaces.

At Google, the employees are encouraged to constantly innovate and create new and better products. Small teams are given the resources to experiment with new product ideas and have the freedom to launch new initiatives even at early stages in their development. There is very little centralized planning. Instead, innovation bubbles up from the engineers and product managers themselves as they dream up new ways to solve end-user problems.

The end result for you, the user? Well, when you visit Google, while you know you will be able to count on the core search offering being there for you, you can also expect a host of new offerings will await you across our properties. New features are constantly being rolled out and you can be to sure to find an assortment of novel experiments in our Google Labs.

In contrast, at Whole Foods, the prepared foods experience, while high quality, rarely evolves or changes. Despite CEO John Mackey's belief in empowered teams and local decision-making, these days, Whole Foods serves the same chow, every day, every night. Sure they may rotate something out seasonally, but it will be back next year in its same form to be sure. In addition, from store to store, there isn't much variation either. Their Sonoma Chicken Salad is predictably uniform whether you pick it up in Cupertino, San Mateo or San Francisco.

Thus, Whole Foods has all of these wildly talented and motivated employees, who are unfortunately confined to slinging a corporate-planned menu for literally years and years without variation. Ugh.

There must be a better way. In the current system, the customers suffer as we encounter the same damn food for sale in Whole Foods every single time we walk in there. The company eventually loses my business as I fatigue of eating the same food upon each visit. The poor employees are stuck merely replicating recipes and layout from a preparation and display chart cobbled together in a central office.

If Whole Foods were to return autonomy back to the chefs of individual stores and allow them the freedom to independently develop menus infused with spirit and creativity, I am confident, the consequences would be felt immediately. Customers would enjoy a new energy when visiting the store, discovering a wide variety of unique and intriguing dishes. They would feel compelled to come back often lest they miss something delicious. The store itself would see the repeat business tick up and would also benefit from the sales more Whole Foods products that patrons buy in an attempt to recreate many of these new dishes at home. Above all, the employees would feel that they are truly stakeholders in a local, community, creative effort to deliver a wonderful and healthy shopping experience.

I am sure there is a bureaucrat within the bowels of Whole Foods who will read this and want to convince me of the economies of scale that are achieved by centralized planning and others who will wax on about the increased liability risk that could result from anomalous menus. Humbug. Rediscover the roots of the company that made a visit to Whole Foods so special. Walk away from your excel spreadsheets and spend some time thinking about your customers and the employees that serve them and I think the next chapter of Whole Foods becomes obvious.

Hurry up, by the way. I am hungry. :)

Comments

[adam]

I used to eat their burritos when I lived in pac heights - Then, I discovered the freakin mission.

good point, though, why try so hard to be like everything else?

[Fred]

> At Google, the employees are encouraged to constantly innovate and create new and better products. Small teams are given the resources to experiment with new product ideas and have the freedom to launch new initiatives even at early stages in their development.

This is what we have all heard about Google as well... But how does it work in practice?

What I mean is, new services from Google are always launched in an orderly fashion. This implies some "culling" of ideas before they are officially launched, and it also implies that some initiatives are NOT launched. If every team truly has the freedom to launch anything, then your service offerings would, it seems to me, be a huge unruly mess.

Where/how does this culling take place? How do you avoid bruised egos from canned initiatives, if everyone is "supposed" to have the freedom to launch anything?

[Steve Lerner]

Ah the joy of being in the technology industry. What is the marginal cost for Google to roll out a new service? Pretty much zero. You can amortize the cost of the development... but most of Google's services have relatively insignificant marginal cost.

Food on the other hand, has costs. The food itself- especially if organic, maybe the heat required in the trays, the paper carton to take it away with, the handfuls fo fork and napkins people use...

In order to maximize profit from take-out food at Whole Foods, they have to lower the cost of goods sold by developing a national menu. They also need to make sure they guarantee a level of quality that can be monitored. If the local stores start cooking their own inventions, there will have to be national quality monitors at each store.

Add all of these elements up and you'll see why they don't have locally made items. Yet. You can break this mold by setting national standards and letting local cooks get a share of the profit from local specialities.

In fact you can even have separate marketing locally for anything interesting that comes up.

But it requires custom setups, which are the bane of operations.

I find most of the Whole Foods take out to be pretty bland. But then again, I live in New York City...

-Steve

p.s. check out my new site documenting the build of hand made electronic music devices: http://streetelectronics.com

[Chris Sacca]

Fred - Thanks for the comment. I would suggest watching a video of the speech Marissa Mayer gave to a class at Stanford on our innovation process. In it she talks about how we try to morph projects rather than kill them.(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soYKFWqVVzg) Ultimately, users are the arbiters. If they don't get/like something, then it won't see a broader launch.

Steve - Good to hear from an old friend. That said, you sound exactly like the MBAs I presume are at Whole Foods HQ setting these policies.

First of all, we certainly do have marginal costs of launching services at Google. Machines and bandwidth are not immaterial.

One disadvantage we have is that, in contrast to a grocery store, it is hard to localize our launches to small groups.

Nevertheless, while you may be right in stating that cost reductions may be maximized by centralizing the buying function and achieving scale, I disagree that this will lead to maximized profit. Instead, as you can see form my narrative, I stop eating there after the menu becomes too predictable.

Similarly, all of these notions that quality would somehow suffer if menu planning were localized just ring hollow to me. The best restaurants I know of are all mom and pop local operations.

By the way, one fact I didn't note above is that the Google Chefs have hardly ever repeated a dish on the menu over the 7 years that they have been cooking there. Only for the most famous and favorite meals will they allow repeats. Fascinating to me.

[abercrombie and fitch uk]

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[Abercrombie and fitch london]

houghts on aerodynamic stabilization? What would a white sail with blue wedge lined by silver look like? Real pretty I recon!! Is this design known as the flying wedge?

[abercrombie fitch]

It is hard to say such a thing is clear.