Northfield has three grocery stores: Cub Foods, Econofoods, and Just Food: Northfield Community Co-op. I feel Northfield is fairly representative of many towns, in that there is more than one grocery store, attempting to target different groups of consumers (although possibly overlapping) by offering slightly different services (be it low prices, a wide variety or products or brands, organic, locally produced, exotic, etc.). I wanted to explore the grocery stores of Northfield in order to get a feel for how these different stores target their consumers. I was particularly interested in how well they provide information to consumers in terms of GMOs. While I realize that there is no requirement at this point for producers to label their products as GMO or GMO-free, I wondered if the stores would be able to tell me anything more than what I could read from the labels of the products myself. I set out for interviews at all three stores.

Questions:
1. Who is your primary market?
2. How do you feel about buying and selling foods that contain GMOs?
3. Do you have any standards or guidelines when you decide what to sell at your store in regards to GMOs?
4. Do you think that products should be labeled to tell consumers if GMOs are in their product (GMO or GMO-free)?
5. How do you think that a mandate by US policy to label a product as GMO or GMO-free would affect your consumer market? (Are you for or against it?)
6. Additional comments?

Results: (click below)

Conclusions:

Of the three stores, I was only able to interview a manager at Just Food. While first upset, I soon saw this 'lack of information' to actually be information in itself. Just Foods, which focuses on supplying its community with local organic food and educating them on health, consumption, and sustainable living practices maintains an open, transparent connection with its consumers. It strives to provide its consumers with the very information I was looking for, and because it is so adamantly opposed to GMOs, they had no problems answering my questions.

In my opinion, if Cub Foods and Econofoods were as opposed to Just Food in terms of GMOs, they would have either told me so or it would have been made more obvious on their websites. The fact that the individual store managers did not know where their products came from (aside from the warehouse) and refused to comment (referring me to the corporate office), tells me that these companies do not keep their employees well enough informed of their values. How important is the safety of their consumers to them?

Difficulties:

To be honest, I was not entirely happy with the way my exploration of the grocery stores went. When I first created my informed consent form, I did not think it would be needed; I had never had a problem in my past in obtaining information from interviews for classes and people were always more than willing to help out. How naive of me. What I had forgotten was that this project was different: the results would be displayed for all to see on the World Wide Web. Interviewees were less eager to participate because they felt their jobs were at stake.

In order to obtain any information whatsoever about Cub Foods or Econofoods, I had to call the corporate office. As it turns out, this was not much help, as I was declined an interview at the Cub Foods corporate office, and was not even able to get through to anyone at the Econofoods headquarters.

Sarah Roach
Environmental Studies Senior Capstone, St. Olaf College, 2005