Yesterday I went to the Berkeley Farmers’ Market and had a very interesting conversation with one of the vendors.
1. Whole Foods had called her and asked her if she would like to put her product in their stores. No thanks, she said. “Are you kidding?” they said. No, she said. She didn’t want to put her product in their stores because she didn’t want that sort of volume. She was more interested in supporting smaller stores. She told me that Whole Food’s increased interest in local vendors had come about because of Michael Pollan’s criticism of Whole Foods in The Omnivore’s Dilemma. (Pollan had coined the term Big Organic and wondered which side — the more virtuous or the less virtuous — Whole Foods was on.)
2. The vendor next to her, The Fatted Calf, who sell salami, beef jerky, sausage, duck confit, and other meat products, had been forced to stop selling to stores and restaurants when someone called the USDA to complain that they didn’t have an office for the USDA inspector. That’s right: no matter how small your business, you must have an office for the USDA inspector. It’s an absurd burden to put on a small business. As I have heard others say, big businesses welcome government regulation. Because they can afford it and their potential future competitors, now tiny, cannot. Supposedly the regulation protects consumers; it may or may not but it certainly protects big businesses. (Does requiring an office for a USDA inspector protect consumers? I think not.) We need organic consumer protection. The current version is like heavy-duty insecticide. It kills small businesses.
On #2, absolutely. However, what is the point of the USDA if it only applies to large organizations? As you say, though, maybe the cost is more than the benefit, and so the whole thing should be cut back. As you point out, the regulatory burden is no big deal for existing large organizations, but can easily be a big deal for a newcomer.
#1 sounds like someone has lost perspective from reading too many blogs.
What percentage of Whole Foods shoppers have ever heard of Michael Pollan?
It’s not that the USDA shouldn’t regulate small businesses; it is that their regulations should be “scalable” — produce the same regulatory burden on large and small businesses. As it stands, they are far more damaging to small businesses.
The vendor who made that point about Pollan and Whole Foods doesn’t read a lot of blogs. I think she’s probably right. I’ll post some evidence to that effect at a later date.