Whole Foods MarketPosted 8 years ago under Uncategorized
Whole Foods Market, Inc. is a corporate run superstore that claims to sell only foods free from artificial ingredients, yet as much as 30% of their products (including the prepared fresh food bar and personal care products) contain genetically modified and synthetic ingredients, including the pesticides engineered to kill insects and weeds (that otherwise deplete profits from their bottom line). The first Whole Foods store opened in 1980 in Austin, Texas, which still remains the headquarters of the largest undercover GMO-pushing market in the North America. With nearly 100,000 employees and over 400 outlet stores spread across America, United Kingdom, and Canada, the company experienced rapid growth by acquiring hundreds of natural food chains over the last few decades, including “Bread & Circus,” “Mrs. Gooch’s Natural Foods Market of Los Angeles,” and “Bread of Life” stores. By 1999, Whole Foods had opened its 100th store.
Whole Foods hides their use of GMOs and cheap, toxic raw materials
Despite the store’s ambiance and overall fresh market look, Whole Foods supports hiding all genetically modified foods from the public’s eyes, by concealing GMO’s in nearly every product they sell that is not labeled certified organic. The “fresh” food bar has pre-prepped salads that have no labels for ingredients whatsoever, and most of the salad mixes contain dense amounts of GM soy and GM canola oils, fueling sickness and cancer in the unknowing and unsuspecting health conscious shoppers who believe that everything they sell is in the best interest of the consumer, when it’s clearly not that way at all. By selling cheap, toxic raw materials as part of their major profit center, the company has morphed over time to increase their use of processing plants, and even created their own “365” product line. (1)
In order to better trick consumers into believing in their so-called mission, Whole Foods utilizes lingo and verbage from actual sustainable farming practices in their slogans and product descriptions, as well as on social media and in other marketing endeavors. The CEOs are quite crafty and manipulative in their language and diction, implying that everything they do is in the interest of sustainable agriculture, as they even claim to help small and mid-sized farmers, all while accumulating their competition and putting others out of business that take a bite out of their market share. For example, in 2014, Whole Foods purchased seven different “Dominick’s Finer Foods” locations in Chicago. (2)
Acquisition of the competition and antitrust violations
By 2004, Whole Foods dove into the UK market by taking over seven Fresh & Wild stores. Then, in 2007, they merged with US “Wild Oats Markets” and acquired their common stocks, enveloped their debt, but in that process faced a challenge from the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) that Whole Foods was violating federal antitrust laws by eliminating their own close competition of the other natural and organic supermarkets across the nation. Whole Foods motive was to eliminate other large sellers of organic foods so they could RAISE their PRICES and REDUCE QUALITY. (3) Whole Foods CEO John Mackey then also became the subject of a SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) investigation as he blogged highly opinionated comments under an alias name “Rahodeb” on the Whole Foods Yahoo investment message board. With substantial evidence acquired by the FTC showing Whole Foods did intend to raise prices after the consummation of the merger, Whole Foods finally agreed to sell the Wild Oats chain.
The Whole Foods self-created “quality standards” is just a front to sell cheap toxins at high prices
What Whole Foods deems “natural” have proven to be nothing more than the “all-natural” claim on conventional foods, which means absolutely nothing. Their “minimally processed foods” rule out the use of cloned animals and artificial sweeteners, but the term doesn’t mention a bucket list of other toxic ingredients, including heavy metal toxins and genetically altered, lab-made synthetics. In their claims to be “environmentally friendly” and “ecologically responsible,” their are deceiving each and every customer, because all foods GMO are made using toxic pesticides, including glyphosate, a known carcinogen that destroys the nutrients in soil, kills butterflies and bees, and has even been declared by WHO as a “probable carcinogen” (cancer-causing) herbicide ingredient–which constitutes 50% of Roundup, the world’s most popular weed-killer sold by Monsanto. (4)
Whole Foods also claims to avoid selling eggs from hens confined to battery cages due to “animal cruelty concerns,” but supporting the new FAKE GMO labeling bill, they are basically funding corporate CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) that fuel the fast food industry and the ultimate abuse of animals (and food and the environment) worldwide. Though Whole Foods carries many USDA-certified organic foods, those foods are NEVER inspected for heavy metal toxins, such as mercury, aluminum, cadmium, tungsten, or lead contamination, and many of their organic products and raw materials are imported from China, the most industrial-polluted country in the world.
Up until 2011, Whole Foods Market was carrying personal care products marketed as “organic” even though they contained ingredients NOT listed by the USDA as acceptable for use in organics, including highly toxic petroleum-derived, synthetic and chemical ingredients that are PROHIBITED in organic foods. This list includes lotions and shampoos made by Nature’s Gate, Jason Natural Cosmetics, Kiss My Face, and more. Whole Foods is known to exploit any openings they can in organic regulations in order to sell more products at the cost of customer health. Then, in 2011, personal care products sold at Whole Foods were required to follow the USDA National Organic Program standards that apply to organic food, which means at least 95% of the ingredients of each “organic” labeled personal care product must actually be “certified organic.”
2009: CEO John Mackey admits that Whole Foods LOST TOUCH with its natural food roots
In a Wall Street Journal article, the Whole Foods CEO confessed that his stores sell “… a bunch of junk.” In an attempt to disguise their junk food and mislead customers (instead of actually changing what they buy and sell), the stores hired team members who answer customer’s “healthy eating” questions, suggesting recipes and meal plans to meet their goals, even though those plans are bogus and involve eating GMOs they sell without labels regularly. Whole Foods has created a marketing plan to help the FDA and USDA hide GMOs from the American public in the new DARK ACT bill while lying across social media that they are fully “transparent” and care about environment and ecological impacts of sustainable farming practices.
Whole Foods sells so many non-organic products that to actually become transparent would reveal that they push GMOs and that a majority of their profits come from feeding their “blind” consumers toxic food that makes them a fortune. If Whole Foods really became transparent, they might just go bankrupt overnight. Their fake “eco-scale” rating system in their grocery department for cleaning products supposedly measures the environmental impact, even though Whole Foods could care less about the environment, animal welfare, human health, and sustainability in general.
Neighborhood market “feel” is all smoke and mirrors
Whole Foods Market purchases products mainly at the regional and national levels so they can get massive volume discounts, robbing small and mid-sized organic farmers of even more business. A very small percentage of their “unique” produce comes from local markets so they can appear to have a commitment to neighborhood markets, but it’s all a con. While secretly promoting genetic engineering of food behind closed doors and negotiating for the promotion of legislation to destroy the labeling of such toxic food, Whole Foods Market and their CEOs are literally bulldozing American’s rights to know what’s in their food, especially food that is touted as healthy, local, and natural–when it is clearly not that at all.
April, 2007: To help cover up their insidious agenda of selling processed, contaminated food at high prices, Whole Foods Market launched the “Whole Trade Guarantee,” trying to glorify their emphasis of “ethics and social responsibility” regarding products they import from developing countries around the globe. They claimed to give fair prices for produce and utilize and promote environmentally friendly and sustainable farming practices; however, nary is the health-conscious consumer who doesn’t know that Whole Foods’ partner in crime, Monsanto, is all about destroying the environment with Roundup (comprised of 50% glyphosate) and other known toxic pesticides and toxic herbicides that kill animals, insects, humans, and soil nutrients across the globe, all while monopolizing the seed industry to try to turn all seeds GMO. Whole Foods appears to also engage in philanthropy, as they donate at least five percent of their annual net profits (from selling processed foods and GMO’s labeled all natural) to “charitable” causes.
Complete hypocrasy of supporting Monsanto while calling the business responsible
Even Wikipedia, in its slickness, admitted that Whole Foods wants all American consumers to be in the dark about what’s in their food, as they published in their entry of Whole Foods Market, “In July 2016 they supported the anti-labelling GMO bill known as the DARK act.”
The Director of Organic Consumers Association notes that Whole Foods basically uses the term “natural” as a marketing tool, while functioning as a big-box retailer, disregarding almost entirely issues of ethics and sustainability, much like Walmart and Cosco. Other food activists say Whole Foods’ marketing of “local food” is more hype than substance. This is all but obvious in their support of Monsanto, the worlds most evil corporation that all but buries small and mid-sized farmers in every country they infiltrate.
“Operation Whole Foods Hidden Camera” catches employees blatantly lying about GMOs to customers
Also known across social media, as it went viral, as the “Organic Spies” video, Whole Foods actually trained their employees how to lie to customers to benefit the store financially while enriching Monsanto’s mission, and that means hiding GMOs in what appears to be healthy, natural food. The video features secret recordings from 12 Whole Foods stores in Los Angeles, and captures employees lying about GMOs found in the products they sell. Here are just a couple of the employee lies quoted directly from the recordings:
“It’s against our policy to carry anything that’s grown with GMOs in it.”
“… Because the bottom line for all Whole Foods is no preservatives, no additives, no added growth hormones, no GMOs, absolutely, that’s for everything.”
These are completely fabricated and scripted lies, handed down from top management, and spewed from the mouths of the employees, in what many critics call “bait and switch” marketing. Whole Foods even goes so far as to call GM corn a natural product. In fact, Whole Foods has mastered the art of bait and switch. Watch one of the “Organic Spy” videos right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db8-xEr5bP4
Whole Foods has been the subject of multiple controversies, including labor issues, unethical business practices, and even FAILURE to support farmers and suppliers. Alternative media has completely exposed Whole Foods’ LIE that they are going to label GMO-containing products in North American stores by 2018. Whole Foods was required to pay nearly $1 million in settlement charges for charging more per weight than its labeled ingredients. The company even continued to engage in this illegal and deceptive practice after the settlement, well into the year 2015, including in New York based stores–per the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs investigation. They’ve also faced charges for allowing and selling HIGH LEVELS of carcinogens (1,4-Dioxane) in personal body care products. This cancer-causing toxin was found in their “365” brands also and without a warning on the label. The Whole Foods argument was that the levels of health risk were not in “excess” of California’s “Safe Harbor” levels (Proposition 65).
Whole Foods and the Organic Trade Association support hiding ALL GMOs and banning state rights to label them
Every marketing LIE purported by Whole Foods, their CEOs, and their employees are blown wide open by their continued and uncompromising support of Monsanto and the new DARK ACT pro-GMO fake labeling bill passed by the US government to deceive all Americans and sell them cancer-causing, pesticide-laden food. The new law gives the USDA the right to call any products with less than 50% GMO ingredients “non-GMO.” That means a product containing massively contaminated corn and soy can be labeled non-GMO, just because half of the ingredients are fillers that are not GMO.
While pushing for this bill to be passed by the US government, Whole Foods blasted across social media that they were NOT supporting the bill, so that consumers would not protest during the decision making process, and it would be TOO LATE when they found out what happened. The new DARK ACT 2.0 (Monsanto’s Stabenow-Roberts bill) (9) law also does NOT require animal products derived from GMO-fed animals (7) to be considered bioengineered. That means cattle, chickens, turkeys, pigs, and even fish can be pumped full of artificial hormones, antibiotics, and fed poisonous feed for years, and then sold as “all natural” at Whole Foods stores, under their guise of healthy and “sustainable.” This blows the Whole Foods slogans out of the water–that they care about the environment, people, animals, nutrition, and sustainable farming practices.
The result: the USDA (10) puts an unreadable “scannable QR” code on GMO products that contain more than 50% genetically mutated ingredients (6), so that consumers must carry smart devices and scan the codes to determine if the food causes cancer or not. Still, there is no proof or validity to the code since all food manufacturers can choose whether or not they want to participate in this, and since there are NO LEGAL RAMIFICATIONS for any company or corporation that does not comply. In other words, it’s like saying criminals only go to jail for crimes if they turn themselves in and admit what they’ve done, because the police cannot arrest them or charge them with anything otherwise. Bottom line: GMO labeling means nothing at all and the whole bill is a farce to hide GMOs forever in America and ban all states from their inherant rights to protect their citizens and consumers.
The DARK ACT causes millions of people to unknowingly eat foods that cause cancer tumors, digestive disorders, infertility, and dementia
As much as 99% of all US foods will fit under the umbrella of “non-GMO” because of this worthless bill, that allows all companies and corporations “voluntary” participation and which has ZERO penalties for non-compliance. (5) What company in their right mind would turn themselves in for food “treason” and admit their products cause health detriment, only to lose business and possibly go bankrupt? None. This is pure chemical and agricultural violence supported by Whole Foods and their continued deceptive marketing practices. (8) For two decades, Whole Foods has tolerated chemical violence in agriculture and sold unlabeled GMOs to unsuspecting customers, all to widen their profit margins and open more stores, all the while putting organic small and mid-sized farmers out of business. This is systematic fraud as their awnings on many store fronts boldly claim, “Nothing Artificial, EVER.”
Whole Foods CEO Walter Robb caught on video helping Monsanto push through the anti-GMO labeling law
While pretending to want to label all GMOs by 2018, Whole Foods CEO Walter Robb was behing the scenes wholly supporting hiding them from everyone. Unfortunately for him, he was caught on video in a focus group touting the new law, as if it helped the Whole Foods mission, knowing it deceives Americans across the board. Here’s the liar blatantly supporting the bill, as captured on video:
Question: What’s your take on – – is this a bill that should get passed or not?
Whole Foods CEO Walter Robb:
“My view on the bill is that, and I’m pretty intimately aware of it, is that I think it’s an incredible thing that Sen. Stabenow has put together with Sen. Robert, when you take a look at the atmosphere up there on Capitol Hill, that this much was accomplished together.
Whether it passes or not is an open question of the next couple of weeks. The alternative is that Vermont goes into effect and then there’s a number of other states behind that, it makes it difficult for manufacturers to be able to label and label to that different standard… and frankly the Vermont bill while it’s… the national bill would have never happened if Vermont had not passed. There just wouldn’t have been the pressure… it’s a very imperfect bill. It doesn’t cover a lot of products, there’s gaps and inconsistencies that ultimately are probably better addressed through some sort of a national standard.
And I think the way she’s put the bill together, which is to give manufacturers choices, is I think the marketplace and the customers will take it from here… so obviously, I think she’s done a great piece of work… we are already are out there further with our commitment to full transparency by 2018. We’re not gonna… we’re looking at how these two live with each other, but we’re already past that, but I think in this day and age, to come together, to create some sort of a reasonable standard that manufacturers can… and gives the customer a lot more information is a pretty good thing.”
Walter Robb, in other words, wants to help evil manufacturers of cancer-causing foods choose whether or not they want to put a label on their products, that more than 90% of Americans already said they want labeled. He literally praises Monsanto operatives for their deceptive engineering of this horrific law. It’s a huge financial win for Walter Robb and he just can’t praise Monsanto enough for their shilling efforts. (11)
Robb thought nobody would see the focus group talk. After some investigative journalists and food activists caught wind of it, Whole Foods, came out in complete denial and posted a response to their Facebook page:
“There is no truth to these claims. We have always advocated for more transparency in the marketplace, because we believe people have a right to know what’s in their food. That’s why we were the first (and are still the only) national grocer to set a deadline for GMO transparency in our U.S. and Canadian stores.”
Any consumer with any intelligence who is literate can read the highlights of the bill and realize it is an ANTI-LABELING bill written in gross violation of the sovereignty of several states and flies in the face of consumer’s rights to know what’s in their food. The code is completely unreadable to humans, and most low income families are at risk if they can’t afford a smart phone, if any companies even choose to participate, which they most likely will not. The bill undermines Vermont’s GMO labeling bill which would have gone into effect just days later. The entire goal of Whole Foods behind-the-scenes agenda is to hide the fact that at least a third of all products sold at Whole Foods Market are loaded with unlabeled GMOs, heavy metals, toxic pesticides and glyphosate herbicide.
Walter Robb has mastered the language of healthy eating and sustainability so he can deceive his consumers into thinking the company cares about their best interests. Thanks to him and his cohorts, GMO labeling laws across America have just been completely obliterated, and possibly forever.
View the documentary (short film) on Whole Foods Market betrayal of organic consumer industry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_vKeup9XNI&feature=youtu.be
Sources:
(2) http://www.naturalnews.com/054674_Whole_Foods_Organic_Trade_Association_chemical_violence.html
(3) http://www.naturalnews.com/054549_Monsanto_Whole_Foods_GMO_labeling.html
(4) http://www.centerforfoodsafety.org/files/gmo-labeling-to-senateoppose62916_29341.pdf
(5) http://www.naturalnews.com/054894_Whole_Foods_Market_GMO_labeling_fraudulent_marketing.html
(6) http://www.truthwiki.org/cancer/
(7) http://www.truthwiki.org/gilles-eric-seralini/
(8) http://www.truthwiki.org/glyphosate/
(9) http://www.truthwiki.org/monsanto/
(10) http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/265-34/34968-usda-forces-whole-foods-to-accept-monsanto