In this episode, EWG President and co-Founder Ken Cook talks with Errol Schweizer, a former Whole Foods executive. Schweizer writes the Substack “The Checkout Grocery Update,” advocating for food system workers and demystifying food systems and regulatory frameworks.
Cook and Schweizer discuss what drives grocery product prices, including the impact of major supermarket companies and wholesalers concentrating market share, among other factors.
They also talk about how presidential actions have affected grocery prices. Examples include interest hikes under former President Joe Biden and the “Make America Healthy Again” movement with President Donald Trump.
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Ken: Hey everyone, it's Ken Cook and I'm having another episode, they keep piling up. This one was inspired by the opportunity to speak with someone I really deeply admire. I think you'll admire him too. Once you get a chance to listen to this episode, every time I go to a grocery store. I see something I want to ask this guy about, and it's not just because my guest today is an expert in grocery stores.
It's because he has a real eagle eyed perspective on the whole food system that he's honed through a vast array of experiences up and down the food chain. My guest today is Errol Schweizer. I was introduced to Errol by another giant in the world of retail food, Walter Rob, a dear friend who was for many years the CEO of Whole Foods.
I had just given a talk at a banquet dinner and afterwards Walter came up to the stage with Errol in tow and he said, Ken, this is somebody you really need to know. And boy was he right. Errol Schweitzer was vice president of the grocery division of Whole Foods from 2009 through 2016. The Golden Era? I'm just going to say
He was one of the real bright lights and leaders at Whole Foods prior to Amazon acquiring it. Errol’s also an amazing writer. I'm jealous of how well he writes. He writes extensively at Forbes and he has a brilliant substack you must read if you're into food policy, politics, food culture at all, you must read every single installment of “The Checkout Grocery Update.”
Here's the thing. Hardly anyone looks at the food system and no one writes about it from the perspective that Errol brings. He excels at demystifying industrial food economics and retail operations so that the average person can understand the scope of these multi, multi-billion dollar industries.
Most of us have a weekly experience of going into a grocery store. That's our contact with the food system by and large. But Errol has a way of drawing out the meaning of that contact, relating broad debates like how grocery prices helped Trump get elected. Brilliant essays on MAHA, the phenomena of Make America healthy again and on and on. Erroll also has a deep concern and interest in the wellbeing of workers in our food system.
Definitely authentic in everything he writes, and he now collaborates with co-ops, unions and emerging brands. All that to say we have contact with the food system, ideally in farmer's markets, but let's get real. It's mostly going to the grocery store, and it's mostly going to these big grocery stores. So today we'll be discussing the food system, the grocery retail business, and the intersection of labor rights and the food industry.
I recorded this episode shortly before the recent MAHA Report released on September 9th, titled “Make Our Children Healthy Strategy” was released. The report has been receiving significant pushback due to the lack of any regulatory action. Alongside Kennedy's many suggestions of problems favoring voluntary industry compliance, pesticide policy reversals.
In fact, it backs away from criticism of pesticide use by farmers. It also cowers to the chemical industry as opposed to prioritizing, protecting children and families from toxic chemicals in our world. So while our conversation touches on our anticipation of that report, keep your eyes peeled for a deeper dive coming up.
Errol, thanks so much for joining me today and for spending some time with Ken Cook Having Another Episode.
Errol: My pleasure and mutual admiration society here Ken, I've been a long-term fan of EWG and the Dirty Dozen and the Clean 15 and the work you guys do. I spent a lot of time with your associates, Scott Faber, talking about issues back in the day as well. Yeah, just great to be here and thanks for having me on.
Ken: I want to jump into the lens you held up to the election debate that came down too often to the price of eggs and grocery prices, and I just remember reading your assessment of that debate and thinking, well, this is how we should be talking about it.
The real impact on, on people's lives. How these prices got to be, where they are, how they get stuck once they go up. That has really not much to do at all with presidential leadership and a lot to do with the structure of this, of this industry. What are the main structural components of the grocery business in your judgment, and I know it's diverse, it's packaged goods, it's produce, it's meat and so forth, but just in general, what drives what we see when we check out and see the prices and see the tab for the week?
Errol: Yeah, that's a great question. There's a lot to unpack there. So, you know, why are grocery prices high? I mean, let's just start there. The grocery industry, despite what you see on shelf, despite the diversity and the vast array of product, is highly consolidated, highly market concentrated to the point where any economist worth their assault, anybody who studies market concentration, sees extreme concentration of ownership in the grocery industry and there's different layers, different levels to the grocery industry.
Let's start with what is most apparent to you, your listeners. It's retailers, grocery stores and that includes dollar stores, discount stores, mass merchants, natural food health specialty stores, your local grocery, your mass, you know, market chain Grocer.
And there are tens of thousands of grocery stores in the US, but there's actually less grocery stores now than there were in the late nineties because there's been so much consolidation. Larger chains have gobbled up smaller chains. And so the largest seller of groceries in the United States by a long shot is Walmart.
When you add up Walmart plus Sam's Club, it's probably 25% to 30% of all grocery sales. Just from Walmart The next largest, significantly smaller, but still very big in many metro areas is Kroger. Kroger has absorbed over 20 other grocery chains primarily in the late nineties when antitrust law was fast asleep, nobody was enforcing laws like the Robinson Patman or the Sherman Antitrust Act, which are supposed to prevent these types of consolidation.
Then you got Costco, which is technically a club store. It's a warehouse that sells to the general public. After that is Albertsons similar to Kroger. It's a mass market grocery chain. It's absorbed dozens of its rivals. Kroger plus Albertsons, plus Walmart are usually the top one, two or three grocery chains in almost every major metro market in the United States, with the exception of New York City, which is very diverse in ownership.
And then after Kroger, Albertsons, you have another chain primarily in the East Coast called Ahold Delhaize, which is a Dutch/Belgian chain, owns Stop and Shop, Giant, Martins, Hannaford, et cetera. And then after that it kind of gets smaller. And so, Whole Foods is a relatively small chain. Under 2% market share nationally.
Even when you add an Amazon, you have regional chains like HEB, Publix, Wegmans, and then you have, you know, independence. You have bodegas and corner stores. That's just grocery. So all in, the top six grocery chains account for probably around 60% of market share. Highly concentrated. Alright, let's go one step back.
Who sells the grocery stores? Do you have wholesalers or food distributors? This is a lot murkier because depending on the department and the grocery store, you have different wholesalers that sell into them. So let's just talk about the department that I'm most familiar with. Center store, consumer packaged goods, which is usually more than 50% of what a grocery store sells.
You have four or five major wholesalers that service just about everybody. You have McLean, which is the largest owned by Berkshire Hathaway, sells to Walmart. You have United Natural Foods, which I just wrote about, had a cyber attack, which led to huge out of stocks and a cascade effect across the food industry because everybody who had shortages then went to other wholesalers to find product.
And some of those other wholesalers include SpartanNash, which is partially owned by Amazon. Unified's biggest customer is Whole Foods, which is owned by Amazon, and Amazon is hedging by buying shares in one of Unified's largest competitors.
Got to love the Brinksmanship. Then you have KeHE, which is an employee and family owned wholesaler that sells into a lot of specialty food and conventional grocers as well as Sprouts. So wholesale, highly consolidated. One step back from wholesale, you have consumer packaged goods. And see, this is where you got to dig in a little bit more because depending on the category and product type, you have different companies that are highly dominant.
Highly consolidated. Let's just talk about snacks. Everybody loves Doritos, I think. FritoLay. Pepsi owns FritoLay. 60% of Pepsi's business is salty snacks. Frito-Lay owns Lays, Ruffles, Chester Cheetah, Cheetos, San Titos, Tostitos, Doritos, Fritos, et cetera. More than 50% market share and salty snacks. Right?
Then you look at beverages. You got Coke, Pepsi, and Dr. Pepper, Snapple group. I dunno, it's like 80, 90% of the market after that it’s like some private label and some smaller brands, right? Then you have other categories like bread. You know, there's two or three companies that manufacture most of the bread in grocery stores. You have frozen entrees, frozen pizza.
All these categories have three or four major companies that dominate them. So it's not that any one company dominates the whole grocery store. It's just that because in a grocery store we have dozens of categories. Each category is typically dominated by two or three or four different companies. Right.
That's my world. You could also talk about seed companies. You could talk about agrichemicals and inputs. You could talk about fertilizers, you could talk about farm ownership and land ownership. It's kind of all the same. You know? This is, we live in an oligarchy. Everything's highly concentrated.
The wealth flows all the way up to the top. The rest of us get, you know, the pennies and crumbs. It's just how it is folks, get used to it. Doesn't mean we have to like it though. And so in the grocery industry, this market concentration also means pricing power, full stop. This is something that's agreed on by economists.
It's agreed on by like bankers and Wall Street analysts. We have a small number of firms that control a large share of an overall market, they could set pricing because there's not enough competition to offset the pricing. Right. And so what happened in the grocery industry from 2020 through about 2023 in particular, and this is something that I've tracked very closely, is that you saw a spike in prices.
Granted, there was cost pressures, costs were going up. There were real cost pressures. It's also been documented. I invite folks to read an economist named Isabella Weber out of the UMass, Amherst School, who's documented that companies, stores, manufacturers use the media hysteria about inflation, about the pandemic, about COVID-19, then about the Russian invasion in Ukraine to hike prices above the rate of cost inflation so that they were skimming additional margin.
And then you could see that in their earnings calls because then they were bragging about it back to their shareholders. The shareholders were like, why are your profits so high? We're a little worried. This isn't sustainable. Not that we're complaining. And it's over and over and over and over again in the Kroger earnings call and the Albertson's earnings call, the Walmart earnings call and the Pepsi earning Chrome, the Mondelez. Kraft Heinz, ConAgra, Kellogg's, General Mills, and I've documented these ad nauseum in my Forbes articles over the course of four years, going in and reviewing earnings calls, transcripts, or using groundwork collaborative.
They did the homework for me, I would sometimes reference their articles, and so I would look at market concentration of grocery retail, market concentration by category of consumer packaged goods, price increases by category, and consumer packaged goods and then earnings calls and profit dollars and then of course shareholder buybacks and dividends and you know, upward funneling of wealth. And look, correlations not causation, but where there's smoke, there's fire. And this was a raging inferno to the point now where grocery prices on average are 30 plus percent higher than they were in 2019.
Now I say on average, because key consumable categories are up 40 or 50%. We're talking about snacks or processed foods like processed potatoes where four companies control 90% of all potato processing, french fries, tater cots, hash browns. And they're being sued by retailers and bar owners for very obvious price collusion because they were using a software provided to them to essentially fixed prices.
So it's price collusion Robinson Patman, clear antitrust violation, break 'em up the big potato cartel. But yeah. Potatoes, frozen potatoes are 65% more expensive than they were four years ago, and it's because four companies control 90% of the processing in frozen potatoes. And so, this is the type of stuff that I've been documenting ad nauseum.
I also write in a nonpartisan way. I'm a free thinker. I'm a critic of everybody. But I was trying to at first appeal to the folks who were running for office. And then in office. And then even advocated on behalf of when Kamala Harris actually put together a plan to make all the anti price gouging laws in this country consistent.
And so the hysteria from the mainstream media and the mainstream economists and, and most of the food industry was out of this world. So I went and I read what she was saying and I was saying, this is like really weak. I don't know what people are complaining about because I've actually advocated for price controls for about five years now.
She wasn't advocating for price controls, but everybody said she was. And so when you don't have a government who's willing or courageous enough to set pricing, you're essentially seeding price controls to the monopolies, to the oligopolies, to monopsonies. They are setting prices, so it's one or two ways.
And then the other way would, if you break them up and then you actually have a real free market, which I would support too, I just don't see that happening. So, essentially market concentration means pricing power. Your food is more expensive because a lot of these food executives raked it in, and the investors and the shareholders and the asset managers raked it in, to the point now where they're demanding higher and higher profits and it's coming out of employee wages and staffing levels.
And we're still seeing some food price inflation that's above producer price inflation due to the tariffs and trade war and packaging. The main grift happened from 2020 to about 2023. That's when the vast majorities of pricing actions happened, and that's when the vast majority of the profiteering happened.
And I'm going to say this - demand has flatlined. Demand, consumer demand has not spiked, therefore, driving up food prices. And I've seen economists on the left and right and center, folks that I admire, like Krugman and Ortega, et cetera, parrot this with no data to back it up. And then radio silence when I would text or email them saying, I have consumer syndicated data showing that prices are up 30, 40% in these categories.
I've documented, correlated evidence, that profits skyrocketed dividends, buybacks, and without a doubt, consumer trends are flat or down in most of these categories, particularly relative to 2019. So what does this mean, Ken? This is, this is the real upshot. People are buying less food, especially when you look at it relative to population growth.
Well, what's going on? Well, this is where you get into an ethical dilemma. This is where you get into what we call food apartheid, food insecurity. You have close to 50 million people in this country who are food insecure or skipping meals or missing meals who can't afford to eat, right? And you have an administration now that wants to cut $200 billion from supplemental nutrition allowance, from SNAP.
You already have a crisis in wage earners, where wages aren't keeping up with the cost of living. People can't pay their bills. Credit card debt is skyrocketing. Credit card defaults are skyrocketing.
Everybody's worried about money. Everybody's worried about the economy, and so the result here is that profits skyrocketed. Prices spiked. Demand has flatlined or declined in many consumable categories and people are just, aren't eating enough. And the federal government, especially now under this new MAHA/DOGE/Trump regime, is looking at cutting back severely in food assistance. So that is the state we're in.
Ken: Yeah. And it's a sorry state.
I think it's fair to say that this was right in front of Democrats to try and do something about if they wanted to address the kitchen table issues of working people. Why is it you think, why Democrats seem so able to take on more abstract issues but won't face something like this head-on? Again, whether you go about breaking up the monopolies or trying to do something about prices directly.
What about the fight scares them off or puts them off so much?
Errol: Yeah, I mean, Democrats today are kind of like the country club Republicans of when I was growing up. They just want to go out to brunch and not, and just not deal with shit. Just that's, they just want to like, you know, want everything to be okay and want the status quo, want stability.
That's kind wild, actually because you know, like my income plummeted over the Biden years because he let the Federal Reserve run the economy, which was a huge upward transfer of wealth to the banks. Those interest rates killed the food industry for a couple years. Nobody wanted to do what I do, which is, you know, product innovation, you know, working with startups, emerging brands, small businesses, cooperative and independent retailers.
Nobody had any money because interest rates were so high. You know, that's Bidenomics. You know, my problem with Bidenomics was that they had some good ideas and long-term vision and strategy. You know, I think they cut back a lot from what they were, you know, hoping to do, the ambitions, but by not talking about public ownership of industry like in other very wealthy countries like Norway, by not looking at selective strategic price controls to tamp down on inflation and instead relying on the central banks who are accountable to no one really, except other banks, to just set high interest rates, it punished working people, small businesses and entrepreneurs.
That alone was insult, but the insult to injury was when the liberal economists like Paul Krugman said that we were smoking crack for complaining that it was vibe flation. When Weber first came out with her research, she was excoriated by the liberal economists.
You know, luckily I'm just a grocery nerd. I'm a slug, like nobody cares what I think other than maybe some folks in the food industry. So when I started writing about this, it was mostly just met with radio silence. And I was documenting actual industry data, consumer data over and over and over again to the point where I dedicated one of my articles to Paul Krugman.
because you know, I mean there's some stuff that he writes that I like, and then there's other things that I think he should just shut up about because he doesn't know anything about. And he did incomprehensible damage to the political fortunes of the Democratic Party by not taking action on those issues.
And the key thing here is that. The GDP and stock market, the macroeconomics of Biden, were cruising along, were crushing it, but the household economics, the personal economics were devastating,
Ken: which should be the home court for Democrats.
Errol: Like I said, they're the country club Republicans of the eighties.
The problem with the Democrats is unwillingness to confront concentrated power and wealth, and that's, to me, the biggest betrayal.
Ken: No, and it seems like you know the elements of that, that came through in the last presidential campaign, won food prices and then the Make America Healthy Again phenomena was also right there for Democrats to have done something about, you know, it was way too little, way too late. So many of the regulatory decisions are just punted decade after decade.
For example, at the Food and Drug Administration. It's really inexplicable that, for example you wouldn't start with these kitchen table issues and instead, and I, you know, I want to be careful making the contrast here, but why should you try and get people concerned about climate change first before you've gotten their attention and shown you want to do something about food prices?
The quality of food, the health of food. And from that foundation, make the case for energy prices and energy security and energy independence that's renewable and clean. It just seems like we start with the abstractions instead of what's there right on the plate.
Errol: Yeah, and I think it's a losing strategy because you have to start with people's material needs.
Yeah. And I was a community organizer in the Bronx for a bit. You have to start with material needs and what impacts people day to day and tie that back to their needs and wants and desires. Right. And if you speak about it in the abstract and then you speak about it in this sort of lofty sense, they eventually react to it.
You know when I was very supportive of like DEI and ESG, this sort of like corporate responsibility. Yeah. I think there's a place for that. I think there's, there's other things you can do. I don't think they're bad, but when you have that and then you have the economics that are gutting, household wealth, gutting, household economics, you're going to get a reaction to the things that you've been posturing on.
And a lot of it I feel for the Democrats in particular was virtue signaling as opposed to real holistic integrative changes to people's fortunes, not just food prices, but housing prices, you know? The price of, of education, childcare, the fact that the Democrats on and on again can't ever seem to protect the right to abortion.
Anytime they're in power, they can't seem to get it over the line to raise the minimum wage. You know, I've advocated for a living wage that's tracked either to corporate productivity or corporate profitability. If it was tracked to productivity, it would be 26 bucks an hour. If it was tracked to profitability, it'd be 44 bucks an hour.
Instead, it's 7 and change. The Democrats are a mostly useless bunch, except for there's a couple that have some energy and are at least saying things or have worked harder for their constituency. But in general, anytime they're in power, my prediction, the elected Democrats and you'll get a much worse set of Republicans four years down the line because the Democrats don't do anything.
Right, now with MAHA, and I did read the Sam Kass interview and I thought it was very good. It's one of the best things that Sam has actually done. I think he really nailed it on the head. You know, I think some of the points he made, particularly around why are we focusing on artificial colors and seed oils, and I totally agree with.
I mean, it's actually kind of bonkers. Like I was nominally supportive of a seed oil free certification because it's a food trend and there's concern and people have a right to make informed decisions. But now that the fact that it's become like the vanguard of MAHA is ridiculous.
Ken: I mean, EWG has spent years and millions of dollars on advocacy to try and get some of these additives out of our food supply. They, you know, they only benefit the companies.
But I agree with Sam, you know, this, this should not be the central thing that we're claiming is at the root of chronic disease in this country, or that it's the job one for the food program at the Food and Drug Administration.
It's important. We have, I don't know, maybe a half a dozen or more petitions in front of the FDA now to deal with these additives. We're all in. It's as against everything else we're worried about, and I did an interview with CNN about the MAHA film that came out recently. My feeling is twofold:
One, it's not clear that they're actually getting anything done in the food space at FDA. They’re hoping to get the companies to understand and, and talk with them about voluntarily doing something that's not clear.
Errol: That's, that's not how you deal with big food. Like I negotiated with Pepsi and Coke and Kellogg's and General Mills.
The only way to deal with them is to kick their ass, to pound their heads into the pavement, force them into submission to do your bidding. Okay. You don't get voluntary commitments from sharks.
Ken: Yeah.
Errol: Not to eat you.
Ken: Especially when there's blood in the water.
Errol: Yeah. Oh my. We're all gushing blood. So when I saw that, I was like, it's just virtue signaling.
This is the worst kind of liberal virtue signaling pasted onto the GOP. I read the MAHA report, I was like, there's a lot of great content in there. Granted a lot of it, you know, was chat GPT’ed and inaccurate. But it's like, it's stuff that you've been working on and that I operationalized at Whole Foods.
Like we built supply chains to create the actual infrastructure to implement and deliver these types of products and foods to people because you don't just get voluntary commitments, you force them into submission to do your bidding. Right? And you can either do that through consumer demand, you could do that through the power of the purchase order, like what you see with the Coalition of Immokalee workers eliminating like slavery in supply chains through forcing these, these brands and growers.
So this type of rhetoric that they're putting out I think is really damaging because it's creating a lot of froth and resistance to some of their actually good ideas. And then once again, what have they actually produced? And like I'm purchasing, you know, supply chain professional. It's like, what have you done for me lately?
Getting a voluntary commitment from Pepsi and other companies to eliminate artificial colors. I don't care. You know why? because the main ingredient in Pepsi is what's destroying this country's agricultural system, that's high fructose corn syrup. It's what's destroying people's bodies. It is poison. We banned it at Whole Foods.
In our case, sugar is poison. It's like, no, you're missing the point here, Bobby. It's about high fructose corn syrup, which is grown over several hundred million acres of land and requires the use of millions of tons of glyphosate. Roundup. Proven all over and over and over again to be linked with cancer.
The subject of billion, billion dollar lawsuits. Our fructose corn syrup, Roundup, Monsanto, Bayer, and it's like artificial colors. Really?
Ken: Yeah. The one element is that the things he could do, like the straightforward regulatory things on food additives and contaminants and so forth in food, he hasn't done.
And then he helped bring in a Trump administration, and this is where the distraction part of it worries me, that is doing tremendous damage to public health through other departments of the government, EPA in particular comes to mind. The sort of original sin is thinking that if you elect Trump, you're going to get all these positive environmental and public health things to happen.
That is not possible. The whole agenda is deregulatory. And the area that Kennedy does control that's been, it seems to me, virtue signaling soundbites, podium moments and so forth.
Errol: But then also devastating cuts to essential programs like NIOS, like National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health and killing extreme heat related regulatory processes.
I think there is this virtue signaling and these sort of voluntary agreements, but when you look at where the regulatory power is being put, it's leaning very heavily to big business, which is what the Republicans have always been really good at. And I think it has been a major misdirection.
I use the word misdirection for those who are interested in like magic tricks because it's like, look at this amazing thing, but don't look at what I'm doing behind my back. And that's what the whole administration feels like with MAHA. Every time they put out a statement, they killed that $1 billion in local food infrastructure.
This is really about playing right into the hands of industrial agribusiness. As much as there were some legitimate criticisms in the MAHA report that gets them all frothy and riled up. But what are you actually doing? And this is what I want to say, especially if MAHA folks are listening, you have to strike fast and strike hard against these enemies.
You have to put them in submission and not telecast your punches. And that's what they're doing right now. The other two main points that I made about the MAHA report, which are close to my heart, close to my experience, is the fact that their budget cuts on SNAP and food assistance run counter to everything that they're saying.
I mean there's clear research that you give people more SNAP, they'll buy healthier food. If you give people higher wages, they'll eat healthier because they could afford to. I've seen this research from bankers, investors in the food industry who are saying, well maybe if our government actually subsidized the right things and not all this high fructose corn syrup.
The industry would grow and we would make a higher profit. Yeah. So the fact that you have like, you know, certain sector of capitalists actually saying this and actually have shared some of the research with me, which validates everything that I've been saying and working towards, the fact that they're killing local food infrastructure.
But the main thing, you know, particularly around talking about wealth inequality, ownership in governments, the same week they released the MAHA report, the FTC decided not to pursue an antitrust case against Pepsi and an unnamed mass market retailer. Starts with W ends with T, has Sam Walton in the middle.
I mean, come on folks. You know? We, we ain't stupid here. They dropped the case saying it was a waste of taxpayer dollars. They really don't give a fuck here. How do you say you're going after the causes of chronic disease and childhood chronic illness and non-communicable diseases, the two largest purveyors of garbage junk food, to get them on an antitrust case, particularly the fact that both of them have disproportionate market share in their particular categories, whether it's snacks and beverage for Pepsi or for overall for groceries, for Walmart through the FTC, which for, you know, a good 18 months towards the end of Lena Khan's term, she kind of woke up and went after the food industry.
Which, once again, I was appreciative, I was supportive, but she took way too goddamn long and didn't actually get anything done, other than not allowing the Kroger Albertsons merger to go through, which is a big deal. But this FTC Pepsi thing, that started during the Khan administration and her successor Ferguson has shown his hand saying that, that we're not going to pursue that sort of thing.
And for MAHA to just be radio silent on that, to be radio silent, USD infrastructure, and then also to legitimize the USDA budget cuts against SNAP by saying that we need more able-bodied men to get back to work and stop lollygagging and freeloading, like parroting the same right wing talking points about snap that I've been hearing since I was in grade school when I was going to school with kids on food stamps both whose parents were working two or three jobs.
And that's where I think a lot of the concern I have with MAHA is this appeal to privilege. And wealth and respectability without actually giving the folks that see at the table who are most impacted by the decisions that they're being made. That you're willing to regulate whether or not people drink soda, I'm no fan of soda.
Ken: Let the record show.
Errol: Let the record show, not a fan of soda, but if you're not willing to regulate what people are paid, if you're not willing to create living wage standards, fair wages so that folks can have enough money to make their own decisions, and it's been shown research wise that you know, people will eat healthier if they can afford to, and then turn around and say, well, we're not going to allow you to eat junk food with government money, I think is complete hypocrisy.
But also shows that your bias is towards regulating personal behavior as opposed to corporate behavior and, you know, the whims of big business and profiteering. So for once again, it just de-legitimizes much of what they're saying because these are like the cornerstone, keystone, you know, linchpin issues to solving chronic disease epidemic is addressing wealth inequality, poverty and access, particularly due to market concentration and profiteering, like if these things are not on the table, it's just virtue signaling and really what I'm saying, it's just the misdirection. You're just, it's just the magic signal. Look, look big and shiny, but don't look behind my back about me stealing out of your pocket.
Ken: And it's extra shiny. I think, you know, in part on Kennedy's name and his earlier reputation as an environmental crusader.
Errol: Yeah, I met him back in the day. Nice guy.
Ken: Yeah. I can't say, I can't say I know him at all, but I will say that no one who knows what he knows as an expert on the high end of environmental policy, could think in a million years that the Trump administration would do any of the things that Kennedy promised he would try and do on pesticides and regenerative agriculture and other environmental and public health issues.
They just don't go together. And I do worry about what the MAHA followers, they seem to be almost as loyal to Kennedy as MAGA followers are to Trump. It's worrisome to me because I think of those as kind of our people, the people that think about
Errol: Absolutely. Yeah. And I have plenty of friends who are involved.
Ken: Yeah. Think about health, think about the connection between food and wellbeing just generally, the blinders not to look at the social justice angles, how can you deregulate coal-fired power plants and all that they're going to spew into the environment and be worried about a few food additives and not say, hey, you know, we should be doing both of those things.
We can get rid of the bad food additives, but let's not unleash toxic chemicals from coal burning power plants. That's the piece of it that's most worrisome to me is this compartmentalization and the sense that things are going really well because we're writing about them in a MAHA report, but the important things in there don't have the force of government behind them.
They're not taking on the pesticide industry, quite the reverse.
Errol: Oh yeah. No. This budget bill is like the big AG is salivating, like all the big AG interests have written extensively about how much they love this big budget bill, this big beautiful bill.
And to their credit, I have seen some MAHA participants, leadership, you know, start writing. I know Elizabeth Kucinich and Dave Murphy and I appreciate them speaking out. They're saying this beautiful bill is terrible. It runs against MAHA. We need to fight it. We need to rally the troops. We need to keep these folks honest. And you know, when you lie with dogs, you can't complain about getting fleas.
So I guess they're trying to pull out the flea spray, but. I appreciate their effort. I don't know how much how far it'll go because, you know, the big dollars in the GOP are, have always been in big agribusiness. You know, I hope to see more of that energy. Because you know, to Kennedy's credit, he did bring this coalition with him.
It is precedent I think that he's not just another corporate or government functionary. As critical as I've been, he's brought his people with him. I think they're not working hard enough to allay the damage that is happening under his name.
And also, I think they've been highly ignorant of some of these programs that he's cut and the extreme damage that they'll do to health and wellness, particularly around cancer research funding, occupational safety and health, et cetera.
Ken: Yeah. The N-I-E-H-S, the one part of the National Institutes of Health, the institute within NIH, that worries about the environment and its effect on our health. Nyash you've mentioned? Yes. If you lie down with a dog, you risk getting fleas. The other bromide I'd throw out is you know, silence is consent.
Errol: Oh, absolutely.
Ken: My impression was that people who were beginning to think holistically about the relationship, just to name one area between food and health, or between food and climate, how food has grown, agriculture and climate, all of these areas that were finally starting to get attention.
I thought there would be a broadening effect where people would follow breadcrumbs, put more pieces of puzzles together and see that you, you know, you really can't just go after one thing that's popular, like getting a few coloring substances out of Fruit Loops. I mean, look, we've done it.
Errol: actually worked with General Mills to get the colors out of Fruit Loops a few years ago and their sails plummeted and they put the colors back in.
And you know, I also tried to get them to get the glyphosate out of their oats and the fructose corn syrup in the BHT out of their preservatives. And, you know, there wasn't enough pressure to force them to do that.
Ken: Yeah. And it doesn't feel like the pressure should be on if MAHA's what it claims to be, but I don't, doesn't feel like there's necessarily pressure there now either.
Errol: Yeah, and I also want to bring up the one other thing is like, when we say make America, what, what does America mean to MAHA? Because you know, the other thing in this big beautiful budget bill is $130 billion to fund ICE. They're rounding up people, whether or not they're citizens, documented, undocumented, illegal, law abiding, who knows?
They're kidnapping people off the street, trafficking them to locations unknown. So we have an American Gestapo now called ICE and MAHA has been completely radio silent. Particularly around the fact that they're going after many people in the food industry. I'm publishing a newsletter talking about four different food industry workers in Vermont, as well as, where I am now in Austin, Texas that were kidnapped off the street from their workplace or from the courthouse steps by ICE Gestapo thugs who should be defunded and disbanded.
This is an illegal organization. This is a terrorist organization. I could tell you, I've been asking MAHA folks, I said, what do you think about immigration? What do you think about customs enforcement? What do you think about workplace raids?
And look, the Democrats were terrible on this too. Biden deported more people than Trump. Obama deported more people than Bush, I mean. The Democrats are very subtle about it. The Republicans like to make a big show out of it, but what they're doing now, $130 billion in additional funding is going to be catastrophic to immigrant communities.
And really we should be seeing it as enabling ethnic cleansing, which has happened in this country over and over again when they decide to end the Bracero program in the 40s and 50s. They started doing these types of raids on work camps to gut the Mexican, American, Filipino communities that have been doing farm work. You can consider the great migration north from black people fleeing white plantation settler violence as a form of ethnic cleansing. And that too was related to the food system.
These were all people who worked the land as sharecroppers and tenant farmers. Our country has a very ugly history here of white supremacy and white nationalism that MAHA's playing into. By not speaking out about these issues now as they're happening to people in the food industry, their families and communities.
Ken: I completely agree. You can't really be focused on the link between nutrition and health and leave out all this context. So what do you make of it seems as if, because he experienced political pain, Trump has pulled back from some of the enforcement activities on farms and ranches.
Errol: It's just a statement.
There's no proof that they've actually done that since he said that I've continued to track activity, particularly through farm work organizations like Migrant Justice United Farm Workers mm-hmm, worker centers, as well as two companies that I've worked with, Loca Doro and Farmhouse Delivery have each had one employee in recent days, kidnapped and trafficked by ICE.
So I feel it's another misdirection from the Trump administration. He's saying something to keep his people happy because they're freaking out. His farmers are freaking out. Business owners are freaking out. All these people that voted for him are seeing their businesses gutted because he's got these ICE gestapo thugs doing workplace raids.
Like that meat company, Glen Valley Foods, they kidnapped 76 of employees and he's like, there's no way forward. I don't know what tomorrow means now. Like you just destroyed my business. So he's putting this statement out. Meanwhile, like I said, they're going to still plan $130 billion increase in the budget and the workplace rates are continuing according to the people experiencing them, particularly, farm workers and food system workers.
So it's just more virtue signaling and misdirection.
Ken: And do you think that there will come a tipping point? What's your sense of when this is going to affect food prices and the food system? It's obviously affecting these people already, but
Errol: There are certain industries like the dairy industry that are wholly dependent on undocumented immigrant labor because dairies are full-year, year-round businesses. They can't do H2A, which is temporary workers.
Ken: And week long, seven days a week. Yeah.
Errol: Seven days a week. Cows don't milk themselves. That's what migrant justice likes to say. You know, I think it's going to take a lot of enforcement action, which is really going to gut a lot of these rural communities in Vermont, upstate New York, and Wisconsin.
Where you have all these small family owned dairies. And therefore going to drive more business to the big corporate owned dairies, like Walmart does its own dairy processing now, Kroger does its own dairy processing, Coca-Cola, you know, Fair Life. Huge. These huge factory farm dairies will probably benefit from that, on the one.
You know, I think the other side of it is California, central Valley, Salinas Valley, you know, these agricultural heartlands, the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, where they're doing these enforcement actions. You know, they're saying that people aren't showing up to work, crops are rotting in the fields.
I've not yet really seen it impact supply chains and pricing just yet. To me that's kind of a very passive way to look at it. I think as a food industry, I've been saying we need to stand on principle to not only protect, but ensure that people in our supply chains, in our industry, are making living wages and right.
Ken: Yeah, paid fairly.
Errol: You know, If you grow food, you belong here. I believe in amnesty and citizenship for folks in the food industry who have come here undocumented or illegally. We need on principle to stand with food system workers regardless of their immigration status and ensure that they have a path.
These people are also the heart of rural communities. That's why you can get good Mexican food pretty much anywhere in the United States now. It's because rural agricultural supply chain workers, uh, from Mexico and Central America, that are everywhere, and they're revitalizing this country. This country is a nation of immigrants.
Unless you're Native American, you're an immigrant. That privilege, you know, that freedom should be granted to folks who have come here and they're working and they’re law abiding and they're building up their communities. To me, that's the issue. Not whether or not the crops riding the field are going to make strawberries 10 cents more expensive.
The food industry needs to stand up now. I think MAHA needs to get their act together because silence is complicity on this and it's criminal what's happening.
Ken: Yeah. How do you encourage someone to see what else is going on and not just focus on a narrow set of issues like food additives, for example, and then what would you encourage someone to do?
Errol: Yeah I mean, if folks like, who are, you know, tied into MAHA, you know, they're reading my newsletter, or maybe they're, they're starting to wonder, or like I said, you know, my old friend Dave Murphy put out a statement saying that we don't like what's going on. It's just a
Ken: I saw it. Yeah. It was a great statement.
Errol: I think it was a great statement around, you know, agrichemicals and agribusiness and subsidies. Like, join the crowd. Start pushing. You know, this is what I said when Kennedy first got elected, and I feel this way about all politicians, and I've supported a few politicians throughout the years.
When they get elected, our job is not to kiss their ass, it's to kick their ass. We're a constitutional republic. We elect our own dictators, and once they become an elected official, we have to keep them accountable. We have to keep them in line
Ken: A hundred percent. Yeah.
Errol: And I say this also as somebody who, you know, was close to power when I was at Whole Foods, I was two or three levels down from the CEO. I, you know, I hobnobbed with big wigs, big shots all the time.
So the thing with politicians is like, it's not like you're rooting for the Yanks, man. This isn't like Aaron Judd. Going up to bat. No, no. These folks now need to be held to account. The purpose of this is to keep their mouths open. And that’s what Bertolt Bright, the playwright once said. You know, you have to kick their asses and get together with your people.
Think critically, don't just follow the rhetoric. You know, if you're posting, you know, stuff on LinkedIn or Twitter about how happy you are about voluntary commitments, about artificial colors from the largest, multinational, processed food conglomerates in the world, um, you know, I have a bridge to sell you.
Ken: Yeah. Yeah, no kidding.
Errol: Instead, think about the fact that the administration is doing a lot of things and it's putting money towards things. Those are material things that it's doing that shows where their priorities are. And much of that runs counter to the promises they're making to you. So I think it's okay to push and I think it's okay to also break from MAHA.
Ken: I think that's right. And you know, first of all, a lot of people thought they were electing Bobby Kennedy, I think, but they weren't. They were electing a guy who was going to go and work for Trump.
Errol: And in HHS, not USDA. A lot less to say in food. Most of the MAHA report revolves around USDA policy.
It's actually. And that's why the recommendations were so light on food. It's because he doesn't have say on that.
Ken: Yeah, that's exactly right. And he simply hides behind waste, fraud and abuse arguments on Medicaid, for example, and SNAP and, and other big issues before us now in the big beautiful bill.
The other element of this is, as a citizen, you may vote for someone for a single issue that really animates and drives you. There is such a thing as a single issue voter, but there is no single issue politician. And once you give them your vote for that one single issue and they start doing all this other stuff, all the more reason for you to critically examine that and then speak out, just like you did on your original issue.
The contradiction between what's happening at EPA with mass rapid deregulation of pesticides. Industrial contamination forever, chemicals in our drinking water, et cetera. It's wholly inconsistent with the whole notion of making America healthy again by worrying about diet and health and environment and its impact on us, and not trying to medicate our way out of all of these health crises.
You can't do that and let the environment or you know, the food supply go unaddressed, and that's ironically enough what seems to be happening.
Errol: Yeah, I think I once again put this at the feet of the Democrats who've really not done anything about these issues since. You know, the Republicans beat it out of Michelle Obama.
Yeah. And I also feel that the way, the Democrats handled the economy and some of the policies around COVID-19, you know, I think really fueled the fire of this MAHA movement, that’s brought it, that's what brought a lot of people in. And also the folks who are bankrolling, MAHA, you know, they have these, natural organic product millionaires and billionaires who have seen, you know, once again, another democratic administration do nothing about it.
Granted, of course, it was the Republicans who fought most fiercely against any kind of regulations around the food system. You know, they threw some money in organic, they threw some money into local food processing.
They, for some reason, were obsessed with like decentralized meat processing infrastructure ven though it's like, you know, 10%, less than 10% of the food sector.
Like, you know, was, you know, a big disappointment. Yeah. But also not necessarily a disappointment for those of us who've learned to not really expect much from the Democrats.
Ken:Yeah. Not a surprise,
Errol: But once again, fueled, uh, this new Republican coalition and we don't really have a sense if there's a concerted effort from the Democrats to actually do anything about it.
You know, they mostly want to roll over and play dead, or they'll, some of them are attending rallies and saying mean things. But I think it's going to take a considered grassroots effort for any of this stuff. You know, I think that's what folks need to keep doing is talking with your friends and neighbors and about these issues and continue the grassroots.
Like that's for me, especially as somebody who's in grocery and purchasing like public demands, is what will drive this. And we can't just rest on our laurels and go back to brunch if, you know our guy or our gal gets elected. Yeah, that's right.
For the MAHA folks, you know, there are certain things that RFK maybe can do. He's not doing them. And the things that he's talking about, he's really just forecasting, his punches. Frankly, this is what worries me most, Ken, is we're going to see a backlash to these things. We're going to see an upswing in the sort of like big science, corporate science, this fetishization of technology and scale that is wholly divorced from any sort of reality of actually how to produce things and manage supply chains.
And it really just plays into, you know, the largest businesses, you know, the largest interests, market share, dominating, forces that would love to have more of that because it's centralized control. Right. You know, I think that's the other concern I would see is that there's a backlash to this and thankfully what we have on our side is that consumer demand wants more organic food.
Younger people in particular want more healthy, sustainable, ethically grown, ethically produced food. So, I mean, I feel the momentum is still on our side. It's just a matter of yes. Forcing federal policy along with us, as well as to make sure that we've got better rains on, on big business that's trying to push in the opposite direction or worse greenwash, what we're trying to do.
Ken: Yeah, no, no question about that. And I, I think one of the worries that occupies a lot of our time here in our government affairs shop in particular, is that part of this backlash will also be to focus on, you know, preempting efforts at state levels to do some of these things, you know, we fear that that could be the grand bargain where we make some modest steps in the direction of dealing with, say, food chemicals.
But in return for that, there's this effort to make sure there isn't a patchwork quilt of different rules in different states. So let's. Take away the ability of states on to regulate pesticides more stringently than the federal government
Errol: Or the poor Crate law. Yeah. In California. Yeah, for sure.
Or, or even West Prop 65. Absolutely. And look, I've lived in Texas on and off almost 20 years now in Austin, where Austin's tried to do all these sort of progressive things and the state comes in and says, nah
Ken: No. We're going to take away that power. Yeah.
Errol: Yeah. These progressive municipalities in Texas, all the big cities in Texas are very progressive.
The state comes in and says, no, you can't do that. We don't like that.
Ken: Yeah. You'll eventually take this MAHA energy and put it into federal preemption and very limited voluntary driven programs. I mean, look at what the EPA administrator is saying. We're not going to regulate any of these chemical issues, we're going to deal with it through innovation.
And that's a code word for don't regulate, let the companies self-certify, let them bring more chemicals onto the market. More pesticides, right? That's, that's, that's Zeldin's formulation.
Errol: Yeah. Garbage for anybody who's actually done that sort of work in the food industry, you always want to work first with third party certifiers because you can't let a company do its own thing.
You got to get some, some neutral observer to, to validate against that. But really the only thing that'll keep these folks in line is something legal. It has to be contractual. It has to be legal obligations, legally binding. There's a potential for market driven, but that's for positive incentives to grow their sales.
Legally binding is, if you want to get them to stop doing bad things, that's how you do it.
Ken: Yeah. Errol, you've been so generous with your time. We could talk about a million things more and we will, I'll have, I'll have to have you back on because, every time I read your newsletter on Substack, I want to read more so.
Brother, thank you so much for all you're doing. Let's, let's get you back on this show as soon as we possibly can.
Errol: I just appreciate all the work EWG has always done that you and your team do, and just thanks so much for having me on.
Ken: You bet, brother. Thank you to Errol Schweitzer for joining us today, and thank you out there for listening.
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