Okay now for some pretentious stupidity which is unavoidable at Whole Foods. First up, a claim from an organic oatmeal product that it is wheat-free! Awesome… seeing as how oatmeal is made from cut and flattened OATS and not wheat.
Next up: sparkling fermented tea. Um… somebody actually drinks this stuff? Was something wrong with the regular sparkling iced tea that we had to make it emulate vinegar?
What the?!? … there’s a box of plain old non-organic non-snooty Cheerios down there in the snooty organic cereal aisle. How did that get in there?
Most oatmeal is cross contaminated with wheat. I don’t know why, but I know folks who truly need to be gluten free, and it’s a real thing.
Michael
Next up: sparkling fermented tea. Um… somebody actually drinks this stuff? Was something wrong with the regular sparkling iced tea that we had to make it emulate vinegar?
kombucha. The most disgusting thing known to man. My friend works at a tech firm up north that replaced their soda machines, with kombucha dispensers. They are evil.
They really need to put a warning on that shit that it is the kiss of death for folks with Acid Reflux.
Hints from a Whole Foods shopper who likes to pinch pennies where she can (they may not all apply to Canada, but what the heck):
The store brand, 365, is pretty good quality and usually no more expensive than Trader Joe’s or such.
Shop the sales flyers, here they come out on Tuesday (sales run Wednesday through Tuesday).
Follow them on Facebook or whatever you can stand to do social-media-wise and watch out for their Friday-only one-day sales; these will usually apply to all of the US and Canada and are very good deals. Like Bing cherries for around $2.50/lb, which is in line with NYC Chinatown pricing but definitely better quality.
Staples in the bulk bins (dried beans, etc) are usually pretty good value. Granola and stuff not so much.
Whole Foods screens the ingredients of the foods they sell like no other. If you don’t understand what you’re eating, trust that they do. They won’t sell anything sketchy. I’ve had clients have their products rejected by Whole Foods because of ingredient issues.
@Rachel: thanks for the tips. They currently have a billboard outside marking their 1 day specials for opening week. I picked up 2 kg of seedless black and red grapes today which was today’s one day special. 
@Michael: Absolutely agreed on quality – these guys deliver over and above on that. I can tell just by looking at the quality of the meat, fish, cheese and bread. I’ll never ever knock them on that. I also didn’t know that oatmeal is cross-contaminated with wheat. Without that knowledge, it did seem like an easy target to make fun of for perceived obnoxiousness. My bad.
@Charlie: Your friend should quit. The stuff must have been invented in North Korea.
I have been known to bring home some sick quantities of fruit during the one-day sales… 2 kg sounds quite restrained.
Re: kombucha, my mother actually brews her own. Apparently the cool kids call it “booch”. ![[bleh.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/c/cbb27a94fa73081862abf910a8bfa05e2ae2f5c3.gif "[bleh.gif]"){kind=small}
What kind of ingredient issues? How do they screen more than others?
I know people who have worked with Whole Foods and they won’t promote things they can’t market. There are a couple of different cocoa sustainability initiatives (I forget the exact names), one of which is more well known. That is the one that Whole Foods seeks out, even though it is not as comprehensive in its scope as the other.
No trans fats in the store. No non organic stimulants for another. Other natural grocers I work with, who will go unnamed, buy whatever they can resell. Ingredients be dammed. Their words, not mine.
I usually only go there for duck eggs but it’s not really in my neighborhood.
Tran,
The quoted phrase has been reported as racist, and my thought is that perhaps you were being sarcastic, but wanted to clarify here
That shit is nasty. Got a friend who actually makes her own. It’s still nasty.
Racist? To me it just sounds matter-of-fact, ie that’s what Tran observed in the store.
I thought he was being sarcastic as well, as you can’t just read that line by itself, if you read the paragraph as a whole you can see he was mocking the demographic at whole foods. That’s what happens when you selectively read! (not you todd, the person reporting)
Ditto.
+1
Hi all,
Yes, to clarify, I was being rather sarcastic given the extremely homogenous crowd I observed at the Whole Foods the first day I was there. I mean, come on, you can clearly see in my photo of the people at the takeout food counter a whole bunch of rather generic and somewhat stereotypical Caucasian folks milling about and funnily enough now that I think about it, not even an upwardly mobile Asian person in that shot even though they were the only other demographic I saw there. I am one of the latter too, BTW, but I thought it would’ve been disingenuous to post a selfie of myself shopping when I was trying to be flippant.
What is particularly absurd about the whole situation is that Canada is allegedly far more multicultural and inviting than the supposedly very mean and racially divided US and yet you wouldn’t know it from walking into this new Whole Foods, though this is due to gentrification of my neighborhood itself and obviously not the doing of Whole Foods itself. Still, I’m surprised at how happy they were to pander to it up here in Canada but even more so now given the comments of the much more diverse clientele at American outlets people here have commented about.
Sorry if my intention was not clear to anyone. I sure hope it didn’t come across that I was actually HAPPY that the demographics I mentioned were nowhere to be found. That was obviously not the intent at all. If anyone thinks I was too heavy-handed with that kind of sarcastic sociological comment, believe me, I’ll be happy to post a photo set of the No Frills supermarket I mentioned and you can have a look at just how different that clientele is starting with a lot more elderly shoppers. That would definitely show the very marked contrast.
I guess I would categorize that more as ingredient screening vs. ingredient quality. I have no doubt that they are more proactive about screening. I was curious if you knew what separated them as far as ingredient quality.
If you go back and read my original comment, I said screening. 