Ep. 5 - Repair The World with Errol Schweizer | Gross To Net

Errol Schweizer scaled Whole Foods' grocery division from $1B to $5B as VP, launching brands like Beyond Meat and Vital Farms while setting national standards for organic and regenerative agriculture. Now he documents grocery consolidation and corporate profiteering as a Forbes contributor and newsletter writer.

In this episode, Errol breaks down how Whole Foods industrialized better-for-you food at scale, the economics behind grocery pricing power, and why Walmart's dominance shapes what gets grown and sold in America. He explains the math that drives food systems—from profit compulsion in publicly traded companies to the challenges of scaling regenerative agriculture—and makes the case for public grocery stores as a backstop to corporate food monopolies.

We dig into the uncomfortable truths about grocery margins, the difference between HEB and Kroger, why local food systems struggle to gain traction, and what it actually takes to operationalize the right to good food. Errol brings receipts on price gouging during COVID and explains why the middle of the food system—not farm-to-table movements or food tech—is where real change needs to happen.

If you want to understand how grocery actually works and what needs to change, this is essential listening.

Follow Errol's writing at The Checkout: https://grocerynerd.substack.com/

Transcript

George Milton: 0:22

Hello everybody and welcome to Gross to Net, the podcast that, looks at life and work and what we get out of all of it. I'm very excited for today's guest. He was a VP of grocery at Whole Foods for seven years, where he scaled the operation from a billion to$5 billion. Launched brands like Beyond Meat and Vital Farms in the national market. helped bring over 6,000 products to market, set the standards for non GMO organic, plant-based regenerative agriculture that shaped the industry. He got pushed out in 20 16, 18 months before Amazon bought the company. Now he writes a newsletter documenting grocery consolidation and corporate profiteering. to Forbes. Sits on an international food policy panel, a podcast, advises cooperatives in emerging brands. He co-founded a campaign to reform mandatory minimum sentencing and helped legalize cannabis in multiple states. He's lived sides. the executive who built the machine and the advocate trying to fix what's broken. Today's guest is none other than Errol Schweizer. Welcome, Errol.

Errol: 1:26

Thank you, George. Thank you for the wonderful intro.

George Milton: 1:28

I hope I didn't leave anything out man. I feel,

Errol: 1:31

that one from now on? That was great.

George Milton: 1:33

Here, I'll send it over to you.

Errol: 1:34

It's oh,

George Milton: 1:34

researching I know you're an accomplished guy, like I already knew that already. But, I am honestly very honored to be talking to you today. I was on your podcast a while ago talking about, I think last year we were talking about distributors. But man, you've had a wild career. is it right? you started at Whole Foods in 2002? At the store level.

Errol: 1:55

Yeah, I was a stock clerk starting out stocking the drink cooler. I didn't know what to do with me. Like I walked in off the street and was, honestly it wasn't, I was in a really bad place in my life. I'd worked in retail and wholesale, I'd done landscape in construction. I mean, I had a college degree and I just honestly didn't know what the hell to do with myself. So my wife was like, why don't you go work at Whole Foods? He'd always been shopping there. And we had had a newborn, so I needed some like benefits. I'd been doing some interesting work previous, like I'd worked in farmer's markets too. I'd done a lot of community organizing, like I said, a lot of retail, wholesale, And, I sort of walked in off the street and I said, Hey, can I work in produce? Like we don't have anything open in produce. Would you like to work in grocery? Then they didn't call me back for three weeks and I stalked'em until like they actually, Gave me a job. I'm very persistent. And, yeah. Then, I just kind of stuck with it. It was awesome. You know, at the time, it was like over 20, almost 25 years ago, and it was a very different company. It was, you know, just there was this sort of, you know, break the rules, break everything to, sell good food, better to apologize and ask permission. They had, gain sharing, which is a form of not necessarily profit, but you actually. I would share the surplus that you generated on your team. They had really good benefits that I had never had really good health benefits before. they paid terribly, but I managed to move up and was soon making, a decent hourly rate and there was just tons of opportunities. So I just, learned the business. I had done a little retail, so I kind of knew rudimentary. And, learned it from scratch and also, very quickly discovered the dark side of Whole Foods is they didn't train you, they just sort of threw you into it. And when, something big came up, you kind of had to figure out how to navigate it, which, so I learned very quickly how to survive as well. So, yeah, that was a long time ago and I stuck with the company for, you know, best years of the company, best years of my life. And, I've done a lot of things since then, too.

George Milton: 3:44

but So you were there. You were at Whole Foods. Yeah, over two decades ago, whole Foods was a totally different company. Whole Foods wasn't even, I'll admit on my radar back in 2002, So you tell me a little bit about what was attractive to you? Were, and you were a biology major, is that right?

Errol: 4:04

I have a biology degree. I was an EMT, and I was pre-med the EMT stuff kind of burnt me out. I did several thousand hours volunteer and then some paid EMT work. And then, I bounced around quite a bit in my twenties. I also did a lot of, environmental work. I was a environmental researcher and, environmental educator briefly in my late teens, early twenties. And so I've kind of got a little BA background in science. I, was attracted to Whole Foods because they had quality standards around what they were selling. I thought that was really interesting that they were considerate of the foods that they were putting on shelf. a few months after I started, I was able to take a educational course at Whole Foods to learn more about the standards. So I got to read some internal. Stuff as well as, you know, I read some other books, a lot of stuff that I had learned in college classes and a lot of stuff that I didn't, I took nutrition classes and, some things that Whole Foods was sharing, were very self-serving. And then some things were, super interesting, particularly around agriculture and food production. It was a competitive advantage, for the company, educated. Team members who could, sell this product to consumers, but also negotiate, with suppliers to make sure they were, complying with these standards. a lot of those folks who developed those were really influential on me.

George Milton: 5:22

That. Whole Foods was influential in the whole market as far as let's look at what we're putting in our food and what we're putting in our bodies and our pantries, et cetera. would you agree that the Whole Foods was the company that set the standard for setting standards?

Errol: 5:38

I think on a national level at an industrial scale, there are others that I feel that preceded Whole Foods like Mrs. Gucci's. we gotta give a lot of credit to the Food Cooperative Movement, which I really think this is where this came from. The Food Cooperative Movement, in the United States really pioneered this stuff. What Whole Foods did was they were what I would call the popular front of it. They popularized it, they made it scalable and industrial. And that's where I end up disagreeing with folks on the sort of like Alice Waters farm to table, Michael Pollen. Side of things. And then I disagree with the food tech. what Whole Foods and other retailers like Natural Grocers or, a lot of the food co-ops, and then also regional chains too. A number of regional chains that really industrially scaled better view, products that were A middle ground between the conventional mass market, commodity agriculture that we all grew up on, and the small scale farm to table movement, which was, at the time, very influential, very vocal, but not necessarily, having much leverage in the actual supply chain. And so for me, there was a real pragmatic aspect of it and, you know, coming from where I did too. I grew up hating to eat vegetables. I, you know, I, I, my wife always tells me,'cause I love apples, now I'm obsessed with apples. She always tells me how when we first met, you know, we've been together like 26 years and she tells me when we first met, I hated apples. It's'cause all the apples I would grew up eating in the Bronx were mealy and gross. And it wasn't until like I had this opportunity to like work in the industry where like I would, I had. Apples that tasted good, that were fresh. It changed my life, it changed my perception of food and I applied that to a lot of things. So that's, that's sort of why, I take this position that is, supportive but really skeptical of the sort of very precious farm to table side of things, and very skeptical and even critical of the commodity chemical intensive conventional ag. Which sort of, you know, that's the oxygen that's everywhere. That's 95% of our food supply. And I really do feel there's a better way and that's a lot of the effort that myself and my colleagues, my friends, that I worked with for many years try to implement and scale up when I was at Apple Foods. and also beyond in the work that I've done, postal foods too.

George Milton: 8:01

I wanna talk about multiple things that you said in that paragraph first of all, can you talk a little bit about the food, co-op movement in the us Because it may be, I mean, we've got listeners on here who are not necessarily like CPG grocery Insiders and it's stuff that, it's stuff that's worth saying.

Errol: 8:21

I started out in the food industry as a grill cook for Sodexo Marriott services back in the nineties, and also as a stock clerk at a food co-op in college. So it's going back 31 years now. I started out in a food co-op, so a cooperative is a enterprise owned by its members, either their employees or their community members, consumers. In this case it was a consumer co-op and the majority of. Food co-ops in the United States are consumer co-ops. They're owned by community members, so the capital is owned, by folks who shop in the store and live in the area. whether or not you call it capitalism or socialized, system, it's really up for debate. It's COism, it's its own thing. It's an absolute like when people try to compare it, I'm like, no, a co-op is a co-op. It's not either of those. There is many kinds of co-ops. There's, like I said, employee and worker own co-ops. The biggest co-ops in the United States though are retailer owned cooperatives such as Wakefern and associate wholesale grocers, which are 10 times the size of the consumer cooperatives. Now, when you get to like Western Europe, it's very different where they've had much stronger antitrust laws and more of a social democratic framework. Western European social democracy, you know, we had very different economic and social system here in the United States in the last a hundred years in Western Europe. Western Europe has a lot more cooperatives. Cooperatives are very mainstream, very normalized. Everybody belongs to cooperatives in a lot of countries. Finland, Norway, Sweden, the Scandinavian countries, Denmark. The UK actually has about, 6,000 cooperative grocers. Co-op UK has several different, regions and sectors. France, Italy, huge consumer cooperatives. the two biggest cooperative sectors are actually Switzerland, where cooperatives have a monopoly in grocery. And then Finland, which I mentioned. And interestingly enough, in Spain you don't have a big consumer cooperative sector. Instead you have a huge worker owned, cooperative complex, So cooperatives are very mainstream around the world in that they are a type of enterprise owned by the members. They're not a joint stock enterprise like, wall Street, you know, publicly traded companies. They're not private sector, privately held like, owned by an individual or family like HEB or Wegmans, for instance. So yeah, cooperatives are very interesting and. Getting to the point of your question, a lot of the sort of supply chain standards were developed through cooperative wholesale buying clubs in the sixties and seventies came out of the counterculture. There was an earlier generation of cooperatives in the, depression during the New Deal era. And some of those cooperatives are still around, but cooperatives actually started in the 18 hundreds. Many of them were employee owned. United States has a very long history of the cooperative movement that actually predates. Uk, which takes credit for inventing consumer cooperatives. the Rodale pioneers out of the uk. but there were worker, employee-owned cooperatives in the United States. Benjamin Franklin talked about cooperative enterprises. On cooperatives because it's a really fascinating movement. And these wholesale buying clubs in the sixties and seventies said we want to eat better food. We are a little skeptical about some of the chemical intensive, industrial, products. The overprocessing that became popular in the Postwar America. And folks started buying like whole grains and trying to develop, organic foods. there was a sort of patchwork of state level. Organic production frameworks that came out of the Tilth movement that, you know, kind of really developed hand in glove with retail cooperatives and then some smaller privately held chains that eventually, you know, became some of the bigger corporate chains that we know of today. So that's a little bit of my understanding of where cooperatives come in, in terms of, pioneering, and sort of developing. Innovating. A lot of what we now are seeing as very mainstreaming of, healthy, better for you food. Not necessarily taking over the industry. Still a small market share, but in terms of renting space in our head, very visible now

George Milton: 12:15

I will, if you wanna share with me, a reading list, I can put that in the show notes. So anybody who's interested in, getting caught up on. Cooperatives or anything else we talk about here? Errol's gonna shoot me a reading list. We'll share it

Speaker: 12:28

be careful what you ask for. I read a lot, so I'll always be happy to share. I know

George Milton: 12:32

You're avid reader, avid writer. I'm interested too on the other side of it, because this thing that you mentioned a few minutes ago, this idea that we've been on a path of industrializing better for you. Industrializing organic and industrializing, like industrialized farm to table is kind of a oxymoron, but it's something that we're doing at least in marketing. I think that Whole Foods is doing a little bit of that industry, I mean the industry, the kind of like better for you CPG industry that I sit too close to does a lot of that, right? Where we're like, Hey, we've got a better blank, you know, pasta sauce, we've got a better for you, whatever. Right? And it's, and it's better for you because of how it's sourced or it's getting marketed, like how it's grown or what the ingredients are, or I guess what, you know, whole Foods campaign now, like what the ingredients aren't and, but in order to make a bunch of money on it, you have to industrialize it to a certain degree, right? I can't stay small. Whole Foods can't stay small. We mentioned in the intro, the growth of Whole Foods while you were there, and, how that sector continues to grow. how do you think about, and this is not a trick question, I'm just interested in like you think about the, that thing of industrializing these. All these small movements that are almost like small by their very nature, right? Like regenerative agriculture. It's hard to think about scaling regenerative agriculture because I don't wanna say that it resists scale, but it's not scale's, not the point

Errol: 14:14

And we need to talk about scale. I think let's start there.'cause I think it's very polarizing and that some people fetishize scale. And some people, are afraid of it. You know, I think I blame EF Schumacher for saying small is beautiful and writing a book about it. And a lot of people internalizing small is small. There's good things about staying small and there's really bad things. A lot of small businesses don't pay a living wage. So, I mean, scale is scale. I, when I think of scaling this, I also think of replicability. So I don't just think of monocultural laying out, you know, just, homogenizing. In fact, a lot of the scaling that we did at Whole Foods was about replicability and diversity and allowing different models to flourish. We had a very regionalized model at the time, which was not so easy to manage, but allowed, some diversity and individuality as well. And that's really important. So when you talk about something like regenerative agriculture, I don't believe you could just scale regenerative agriculture into these million acre farms like you see in the Midwest. I do think you could scale organic and regenerative agriculture everywhere by doing it everywhere in smaller, medium scale plots, which I think has been shown, especially by like Rodale Institute and some of their research. You can be growing a lot more food in this country. We're like importing the majority of our produce now. we're seeing more imports of meat. When you think about what we actually grow in this country, feed, it's ethanol, it's commodity ingredients. When you drive across the Mississippi Basin in the Midwest, it's thousands of miles along the highway of just corn and soy, not food. So when we talk about we can't scale regenerative agriculture, I mean, it's kind of laughable to me. We can't scale organic agriculture. Anybody could do it. You could do that anywhere. We have to look at the economics. Obviously we know there's market demand. People want to eat this, and we have to figure out connecting those two. When you consider what we actually grow and where it goes in this country, it's farcical if it wasn't so tragic and destructive. So for me, that's the real motivation of you look at. The externalized costs, things that don't end up on the balance sheets that me and you are so familiar with. Balance sheets and p and ls. What does not appear on the balance sheet of a food company, like a meat company, is very obviously the climate impacts the carbon, the pollution, the soil degradation. a lot of people are obsessed with glyphosate. Justifiably, so there's much worse herbicides, but glyphosate is sort of the really visible one. Very bad, but not as bad as say, atrazine or paraquat. Diquat two, four D. When you talk about glyphosate, what's it all being sprayed on? It's these monoculture, corn and soy for feed for ethanol, right? And for me, like a big part of what we're talking about here is also we need to consider what all this land is being used for and imagine a lot more possibilities. So of course that there's scale there, there's an enormous amount of scale and it doesn't have to be, like I said, homogenized, monoculture the same everywhere. You can grow a lot of the same produce that you do in Northern California, in Kentucky, and there's all those old tobacco farms in Kentucky. You can grow amazing produce in downstate New York, in the black soil region of Orange County. There's, great plains in upstate New York and there's great plains in Maine. these places around the country are not growing as much food as we could be. Not to mention the fact that it would be great to see more community gardens. I did community gardening in New York for many years and a lot of what we did was fighting developers who wanted to turn it into overpriced condos. why is that not a priority to grow more food closer to population centers? And I know a lot of places around the country, like New England has a regional food plan. I worked on one in Austin for 10 years, a regional food system plan with a food policy board in Austin. In Austin, which is a great food town, one of the best food towns in the United States. Less than one 10th of 1% of the food consumed there is grown locally, and it's mostly some beef. And eggs. There's a little organic produce, but not much. Nothing compared to other cities. For me, that's terrifying to think of how little food is actually grown in the area. Texas is completely dependent on food imports, primarily from California, although there's a huge food production ecosystem in the Rio Grande Valley, but it's not feeding Texas. this is why when I talk about scale. For me, if you wanna really have a food systems conversation, you have to talk about scale. this is the sort of polarization that, there are folks who fetishize scale, like the chemical intensive agriculture, side of things as well as a lot of folks in the tech forward, plant-based side. who understand the caloric math that we're talking about. And like I said, the other side of that is this sort of precious farm to table, movement, which, I sort of blame Michael Pollan for setting the tone, perhaps a little too critically, in the wrong direction around this. And not talking realistically about what this would mean outside of the sort of interpersonal narratives that he wrote about. And I love his books, but it also. For me in the work that I've done, was never practical and I'm a very pragmatic person. That's the thing, like everything that we did at Whole Foods was we were a publicly traded company. We had a profit and loss. We had a really aggressive group of investors who wanted us to make, you know, two or 3% net income, higher than that, ebitda every quarter. My margins went up 350 basis points when I was in that job, and we had to match price with Kroger, Walmart, trader Joe's. I always find the whole paycheck. Nian iss really funny. I was like not my department. We were matching prices on hundreds of items and we were working with suppliers to plug more their promotional dollars into right into profit dollars. So we were making money by selling more food. And that's what I mean about scale. It's like you translate that into you gotta grow the better for you organic, regenerative side of the food sector. How do you do that in a for-profit system? Whole Foods pushed the limits of that. I don't know if that's possible now, I don't see anybody doing that to the level that we were attempting to back then, and I'm not knocking folks. I do think the economics have changed, and I think the challenges, the competition, the consolidation that made all that much more difficult than it was 20 years ago when I was starting to do this. But, you know, I could talk about how we did it, how we tried, and that's a lot of what I'll be writing about in the next year or so, to bust some of the mythologies. I think there are both from the good food movement, but also from the fetishization of scale, fetishization of commodities, conventional ag And I also wanna say one thing, when we talk about better for you, I always try to. Make sure folks understand it's a marketing term. I don't think we have enough science to actually back up a lot of what we're saying when we call stuff better for you. We just know that there are definitely things that are worse for you. I think we could definitely say many of the ultra processed foods snack junk foods are worse for you. We could definitely say conventional meat and meat, processed meat are much worse for you and worse for everything and the environment and workers. And so like we always gotta couch this sort of better view in a relative sense because it's not a regulated term and it's not a scientifically defined term, unlike let's say like organic foods, which has a federal definition or non GMO, which is a sort of industry recognized, privately held non-profit definition through non GMO verification or international definitions, as well. So anyway, better for you is sort of a relative sense. And it's, I think. I think it's a better term to latch onto than quote clean label, which I think has some very problematic, connotations, particularly, in the age of, hashtag maha. that's

George Milton: 22:30

No, I mean that's a lot of good stuff there. talking about scale, I think one of the things that you're touching on here, and I don't know if you said the word explicitly, but I think in the middle of this, when you talk about. I think some of the stuff that I think people should follow your writing for is this idea of what happens in the middle, right? Like what happens in the middle that gets at, that ends up netting what we see in our food system and what gets prioritized in our food system and what actually. What actually gets the attention, what actually gets to see the light of day and get scaled, whether it's brands or, or something like better for you, which I, I think, you know, the opposite of that might be like the, you know, better for you BFY and then the ultra processed foods, which I feel like is getting the UPF label, I feel is getting, like the Maha thing is put UPF, front and center where you might've been hearing it for. Decades. like it's something that

Speaker 2: 23:31

Yeah, the label UPF was developed by Carlos Montero and Brazilian researchers, and, it was about 15 years ago when they realized that these foods were taking over their food supply and developing countries. And they didn't wanna end up the United States, like the United States. They already had problems with like hunger and poverty. But what they didn't have was the obesity, diabetes, non-communicable diseases that they were seeing climb rapidly. And so they developed this as sort of a framework for understanding the impact of these ingredients. It's not necessarily a great framework for production or consumption. That's why I think, you know, I've, I've worked on for a couple years with non-G project, a definition around non UPF. I know a number of states are doing the same thing, and there's some talk in the federal government about how to define this in a way that industry can comply with and actually. Do things about, I mean, that's the main thing is NOVA Framework, is a scientific research facing definition. NOVA is not a euphemism by the way, just means Nova Carlos Montero, and other researchers. And there was a recent, series of articles from the Eat Lancet, group around the impacts of UPS and how to mitigate that, that I invite folks to read more about, you know. But I think my point here is that we don't. Need this, we can do better. We know how to do better. We don't have, I think, enough resources or prioritization. We don't have any of that from the federal government. I think everything that hashtag MAHA has been saying runs 180 degrees counter to what the Trump administration is actually doing. With the exception of that, they're talking about reforming grass, generally regarded as safe. Standards, which I have been supporting for years. everything the Trump administration has done is 180 degrees removed from what we've been working towards in the quote. Better for you movement, which is really funny'cause you have a lot of, BFY, organic, regenerative. Money, very wealthy individuals from the industry who have bankrolled Maha. So for me, it's, mystifying to think about their ideology versus the, practical application of that taking food stamp, you know, snap benefits away from millions of people. deregulating, PFAS, herbicides and pesticides, cutting regional, food procurement budgets. You talk about how do you make, FY everywhere. Well, you need markets for it, you know, you gotta connect farmers, manufacturers, and consumers, and they cut billions from doing that in the public sector, particularly in school lunches. So to me it's like we, we, just got our knees cut off federally. And then in terms of the injury itself, you know, I'll, I have obviously criticisms of Whole Foods, I could talk about that, but I'd rather actually say they still do more things right than any other retailer at that scale. my main criticisms of Whole Foods are around sort of labor and sort of treatment of employees, but in terms of what they actually sell, it's still pretty damn good. And I know they're catching some grief because they have a robot that could fet you some Pepsi in one store. to me does sound ridiculous. I don't know why they're doing that, but you know what? Their ais are probably running the show there now. in terms of, whole foods versus other conventional grocers, they're still the market leader and there's others that I think do better, but not at their scale like Natural Grocers, or a lot of the smaller food cooperatives and then also some conventional chains where they've carved out a big chunk of the store. Wegmans has an amazing organic selection much of the year. It's not always consistent from store to store. And I'll say like in Texas, HEB and Central Market, and I think the one downside of this that we need to talk about, you know, and I'm sure a lot of your, your listeners are familiar with business, and how business works is that bus business. For-profit enterprise is legally bound to be profitable, you have to, you have to at least break even, but if you want to grow, you have to be profitable. You're not profitable. You're having to either borrow money to survive, or you're, it's a shell game. You're moving money around from parts unknown. So the sort of compulsion to profit. Is a double-edged sword in that it could encourage growth and innovation. Like I think it was very motivating for me when I worked at Whole Foods to be able to share in the surplus. That was a big part of the program was we could share not even the profit in the surplus of what we actually sold. That was amazing. Helped me pay my bills. On the other hand, profit margins. What is driving food prices up and that's something I've documented ad nauseum now for the last five years. tired of writing about it because I've given thousands of examples of how big companies in particular utilize real cost pressures, supply chain disruptions, to raise prices above the rate of cost they received to raise prices above the rate of general inflation

Errol: 28:52

about this.

George Milton: 28:54

And you wrote about this a lot in COVID, right? Where it was very popular to talk about supply chain and prices and all this sort of stuff. we saw that a lot where our company was not taking these price increases'cause we didn't see the prices increasing the way that. the rest of the industry was taking them. The big food companies were taking 30% on price and stuff during this time, and you look at the raw inputs and there's not the backup there of it actually costs 30% more to make,

Speaker 2: 29:22

yeah, I found like receipts on like Walmart and Kroger where they had taken 70, 80%, a hundred percent cost in Price increases on like 20% cost increases. I had examples at Whole Foods where suppliers had sent in a 10 or 15% cost increase, and Whole Foods took 40% at retail. Everybody was doing it, and that was because inflation. It was real. And there was an opportunity, an unprecedented opportunity in the industry to skim some margin to pad the margins.'cause before that you couldn't do that. it was always competitive and deflationary. It was race to the bottom pricing. It was the opposite problem, particularly driven by Walmart and dollar generally, you're always having to look over your shoulder with lower cost operators, that if you got a cost increase from a supplier, it was a throw down. It was like. You're gonna hold this till next year, or I can't take this now, or you better be sharing, sending this out to rest of market. Like it was always a negotiation. And I, I'd go into, local co-op where I was living and talk to the buyer there, and he said, my biggest problem is that I'm getting a hundreds of new shelf tags every week because UNFI, the wholesaler is sending me all these price increases and I can't control it. You know, these smaller chains, they are price takers. They're not price makers. So they're just receiving these cost increases. And to an extent, even Whole Foods is, or Natural Grocers. It's different than when it's vertically integrated, where you have like a Walmart or a Kroger where they, they own control much of their supply chain, or they're a much bigger portion of a wholesaler and they're like, oh, no, no, no, we're, we're, we're not gonna take this, particularly in Walmart, where they could pretty much dictate that to suppliers, which they've essentially said to suppliers, don't send us any more price increases this year. Unless you know what's good for you. So, yeah. I've documented this ad nauseum in the pages of Forbes. I wasn't writing for a fringe, like college weekly or anything. I've been a Forbes contributor now for five years, and I've written over a dozen articles on this.

George Milton: 31:12

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 31:12

no, this was, this was very, for a mainstream audience. That's why I write, I write for a mainstream audience. I write for the business press, I find the business press to be refreshingly honest. Like I don't actually read op-eds, I don't read a lot of, news unless somebody tells me I have to. I, I'm much more comfortable in the business press'cause it's, it's dollars and cents, it's material, it's just math. And that's what I do. I just write about the math folks. And so if you don't like my math. Argue with the math, but the math doesn't care about your feelings. And that's a lot of what I've written about. And you know, we used to say that at Whole Foods too, groceries, just math. And this was a big internal debate at Whole Foods.'cause there was the folks who were more concerned about feelings and there was the folks who were concerned about math. And I was on the sort of the, the math side of debate of gross margins and profit dollars and what we were selling, how much we were selling, what we were retailing them for. Versus, you know, how folks felt about that, et cetera. And for me, the math always wins. And right now the math is what's holding back food systems change. That's the big problem. The math and the food supply. The math and retail. The math and wholesale. The math and consolidation, the math and profiteering. There's a lot of great ideas. There's a lot of great feelings about. Regenerative agriculture and there's a lot of great feelings about plant-based foods and food technology. And right now the math doesn't bear out the fact the possibility for large scale change unless we directly address structural problems. That's a lot of what I've been writing about, these last couple years. Structural problems in the industry that are benefiting incumbent players and just making the rich richer

Speaker: 32:53

math.

George Milton: 32:54

back. I wanna come back, and talk about. math that doesn't support it. What does that really mean? I wanna talk about some of the incentives that don't support it. What are we talking about when we talk about for-profit companies that are trying to have other missions Stay with us. We will be right back. And we're back. We are talking with Errol Schweizer. we promised before the break that we were gonna talk more about grocery prices in the us. I would love to dig into a little bit,'cause you've written about this,

Speaker 3: 33:58

I.

George Milton: 33:58

I will say the amount that I've written about it is one 10th of, one 10th of 1% of what you have written and said about it. But the fact of the matter

Speaker 3: 34:07

Fact to the matter is

George Milton: 34:08

of the groceries in the US are sold to us by a few big companies. Most of it reports up to. Wall Street or it reports up to a share price, some way the companies selling us our food are mostly on the hook for profit

Speaker 3: 34:26

Profit.

George Milton: 34:27

and share price and growth. my take is that it's not necessarily a great incentive for in general as a people that. of our food is answering up to a share price and shareholder value. Maybe tell me what you think about that, and we'll get into it a little more.

Speaker 3: 34:50

Yeah, let me just say

Speaker 4: 34:51

First, the sort of joint stock company, invented, 500 years ago. You have this sort of outside, investors, shareholders, that put up the money, take some risk, find some folks who can operate, the business or maybe they themselves, and so, a lot, a lot of interesting things have come outta that, obviously. Whole Foods, was able to grow by becoming a publicly traded company. I always wanna start with well, here's why it works. And, there's some positives about it. The major problem we have though is that whether it's a 90 day or a six month, timeframe, they always have to report back positively. That line must always go up. And we know that the economy is cyclical. obviously lately it seems more bust than boom. But line must go up is the real thing here. the line has to be, sales revenue, market share, profit dollars. in recent years it's also been margin rate. We had record profit margin rates on Wall Street, for publicly traded companies throughout the pandemic. Which is something that I think we need to talk about more. The two are related as I've documented. And so you have the incentive here to grow at all costs, grow in the short term and to please shareholders to the point where, uh, something economists have documented called Price Profit Spiral. Where shareholders reward monopolies, oligopolies market leading companies because they can control prices in their market sector, they can manage their supply chain costs more effectively'cause there's less competition and therefore generate higher profits so their stock price goes up. So the shareholders reward these companies for bad behavior for essentially skirting. Antitrust laws that are really unenforced and make them larger and more profitable. You know, and I think I wanna start with the biggest first. We need to talk about Walmart. If you're not talking about Walmart in terms of the food supply, you're missing the point. I do shop there, by the way. I'm not boycotting Walmart. Hard to avoid them. They're a great retailer. I'll start with that. They have everything and their prices are amazing. And they're an excellent operator, but they're also a relentless merciless operator. How did Walmart get so big? Let's start there first. But we have, we actually have laws in this country to regulate business that just were an enforce for about 40 years. Something called the Bork Doctrine. Robert Bork, a jurist, many years a scholar, said we should not regulate companies based on antitrust laws that had been in place because we can get better prices, better efficiency, better service if we let'em get rid. And so, going, you know, 40 years before the Bork Doctrine, we had something called Robinson Patman Act. Implemented during the Great Depression to regulate the pricing behavior, the market power of larger companies that were getting better deals at the expense of competitors. So they were getting deals that were adversely proportional to their size, like they were getting deals that were not just based on truckload versus half truckload pricing. They were leveraging their supply to bully suppliers for better costs, meaning the competitors. Prices actually were higher because the manufacturers had to balance their margins on the back of these bigger power buyers. You see that a lot now. There's actually a lot of documentation around that. we call it the water bed effect. there's a lot of, criticism that it happens. Pretty much very widespread. I wanna stick with Walmart. Walmart between Walmart and Sam's Club is about 30% of all grocery sales. They've increased their market share by about two percentage points in the last five years. Walmart's been not only the largest, but one of the fastest growing companies for 40 years. Because of the Bork doctrine, Walmart was able to grow. With very little pushback from regulators. They were able to open stores all over, particularly the Heartland Center of the country and put local supermarkets out of business. And what they mostly put outta business was sort of like mid-scale supermarkets. Like if you're like a little, corner store, bodega Green Grocer, you could probably survive a Walmart. But if you're a full service supermarket. Once Walmart starts selling food and they could, you know, they would sell it, you know, 20, 30% cheaper. When they would open, they would put companies outta business. And then there's a lot of scholarly documentation showing that once Walmart controlled the market, they actually would raise prices. they had pricing power. so over the years we let Walmart get really big. And so Walmart's not only 30% market share, but they're in the top. Three grocers in almost every major metro area in the United States except for New York City. New York City is actually one of the most disaggregated grocery markets in the country. So Walmart is top three grocers almost everywhere in parts of Oklahoma, north Texas, Arkansas, like the sort of Walmart heartland. 50 or 60% market share in many metro areas. Like I said, like they're a great retailer now that they own that space. They sell everything. They don't run out when you compare, like Walmart, stock levels and inventory and service levels compared to Target. I mean, target tries to match Walmart on price, but Target can't operate like a Walmart.

George Milton: 40:42

been pretty well publicized lately.

Speaker 4: 40:44

It's very public now because Tar, what Target had going for it was they tried to be woke for a few years and tried to appeal to, the sort of movement in this country for, diversity and equity and inclusion. It was all very shallow and fake. And then, you know, as soon as the political wind changed, they threw that out the window. Consequently, their comps tanked because why else were folks shopping at Target? They have some good prices, but like it's, you know, you compare them to a Walmart or regional operators like, like a Kroger division, like Fred Meyer, or, or in the upper Midwest Meyer, M-E-I-J-E-R. Target, we'll, we'll table target with Walmart though. When Walmart first started growing, they were also an early adapter in a lot of the bigger technologies and operational. Processes. So they started using satellite technology, auto replenishment, and inventory they started using, barcodes. We sort of take barcodes for granted, shelf stickers as opposed to just like having a hand sticker every product. they invented cross docking. You know, moving a pallet of product from one end of the warehouse to the other to get it from point A to point C with the warehouse in the middle. Not being in that warehouse for more than 24, 48 hours. And I think the main thing about Walmart is they built these massive stores that sucked all this business,

George Milton: 42:09

Old is.

Speaker 4: 42:10

Large scale, global complex supply chains. So when, when you think of a Walmart it's not just a store, a storefront, there's nothing behind it with Walmart, you gotta think of like those supply chains, like stretching for thousands of miles across time and space to get all that stuff into that store. And so they've transformed supply chains to meet the needs of their business. In a way that is really unprecedented. You know, when we talk about like centralization and planned economies, what do you think Walmart is? Walmart has nothing to do with most of the neoclassical economic dribble that they teach. Luckily, I've never taken an economics class. I've read some of the textbooks and I can't believe that this is what all these kids learn. Walmart is a planned economy, privatized. Held mostly by the Walton family and, you know, investors, massive economic planning, massive centralization to make the Walton family richer every quarter. And I don't say that lightly, the Walton family still owns almost 50% of Walmart. They get almost 50% of the profits. when you think about like Walmart price gouging profiteering when you think of Walmart's, 98% fill rate for suppliers or their payment terms, or the fact that they do cyclical regular layoffs for middle manage, it's like every, six months you'll see like a sub headline In supermarket news, Walmart lays off 1200 associates to make, some middle management roles more efficient. Or the fact that they still pay far below a living wage and their wages have gone up. Not as much to say, like inflation. They have raised wages. the Walmart where I went the other day, I think they're advertising like 17 an hour overnight. Stock clerks, which by the way, that's what I made at Whole Foods in 2005 was 17 an hour.

George Milton: 44:13

role or in a similar

Speaker 4: 44:14

I was a, associate team leader. So still doing stock, still stocking, so not really a very different job. I'm assuming that an assistant manager at a Walmart's probably making, I don't know, 25 an hour, probably still hasn't kept pace with inflation. And when I say living wages, I usually use the MIT scale of living wage, where they calculate that based on a metro area or zip code, in most areas around the country, it's. 30, 40 an hour at least these days. So all these things that, Walmart does and then you also gotta think of the food that Walmart sells. Walmart has a very large produce department. They actually sell plenty of organic produce. Walmart has an enormous meat department, no meat cutters anymore.'cause the meat cutters tried to unionize about 20 years ago. So they fired them all and went all full. Self service. So you see in Walmart, they have huge upright cases of meat that stretch for about a hundred feet in every store. Walmart is completely dependent on the JBS, Tyson, national Beef Cargill, industrial CAFO supply chain'cause who else can make that scale to service not just one Walmart, they have 4,700 stores, so it's enormous amount. Of product they need. And then obviously very large center stores. And the reason why I keep talking about food at Walmart is about food is about 60% of their business. They sell plenty of other stuff. I just bought a set of weights there the other day,

George Milton: 45:40

Can tell, man.

Speaker 4: 45:40

Oh yeah, no I'm a buck 50 soaking wet. yeah, I do lift weights. I'm not a bodybuilder though. There's a Big difference. So Walmart sells all this stuff. one more quick point is the price and the product assortment. All filters then back to, their profit, which then, is pocketed by the Walton family. So not even the institutional investors in this case. And you're talking about almost 50% of their profits just go to one family. I think that sometimes gets lost on us when we're talking about Walmart's essentially a family business too. Sorry, go ahead.

Speaker 3: 46:16

Yeah, no,

George Milton: 46:17

no, I think Walmart's a

Speaker 3: 46:18

obviously.

George Milton: 46:20

example and a fantastic one of scale. Like when you're talking about scale, I do think that there is a lot of benefit to being a superior operator, like the ability to be stock, right? Like it doesn't really matter. How great your, originative agriculture program is at a co-op grocer if they can't stock it and serve their customer base, however large that customer base is. And I know that we're, here in Texas, we look at HEB, I think HEB is a, completely family owned business and they haven't had the, they're not quite the scale of Walmart, but they certainly are excellent operators.

Speaker 3: 46:59

They're one of the few chains that out competes Walmart in a metro area. They're one of the few.

George Milton: 47:06

and the ability to do so at scale is a huge benefit

Speaker 3: 47:09

That's

George Milton: 47:10

important.

Speaker 3: 47:11

gotta be like.

George Milton: 47:12

be like a crack operator to do that. I think general, one of the things that I've seen is that there are a lot of, and I'm here in Austin, a great town to be in as far as like you care about that sort of stuff. the co-ops here are great in Wheatsville the first place that we ever got in that sort of scene is great in Austin, but you talk about the amount of food you mentioned earlier, the amount of food that we're actually buying that's grown here is

Speaker 3: 47:37

I don't wanna be.

George Milton: 47:38

wanna be shitty about it, but I'll say that like a lot of the folks and a lot of the programs that I've seen it, it's more oh, that's cute than, a. That's a business interest and that's like a thing that people are gonna that people are gonna be from 10 years from now, right? There's a lot of great, if you say and I've set this, I've set this as a goal for myself numerous times, and I'll say that I've continued to fail at it. I'm gonna only eat local food in Austin. I'm sure you've tried this. maybe there's people who do it, but you're not growing 90% of that food, you can't do it. It's undoable or you're talking about,

Speaker 3: 48:15

Talking about.

George Milton: 48:16

about you might triple or quadruple your grocery bill to barely get the same stuff that you might get it HEB or Walmart or Whole Foods or whatever, and you feel better about shopping at Whole Foods. I feel better about buying, Washington Apples at Whole Foods I do about buying apples at. At Walmart, but it's just

Speaker 3: 48:35

at the time

George Milton: 48:36

I,

Speaker 3: 48:37

apples.

George Milton: 48:38

and it's also

Speaker 3: 48:39

I want,

George Milton: 48:39

I'm not gonna get them locally grown in Austin very often,

Speaker 3: 48:43

apples are hard to grow in Texas.

George Milton: 48:44

not gonna be the apples that I want to

Speaker 3: 48:46

but no, they're not very good.

George Milton: 48:47

we had an apple tree for a little while and we were out here trying to grow all of our own food In a little backyard and we had an apple tree and a peach tree and it was like, peaches were great. Texas peaches are great. Texas figs are great. Texas apples not so great.

Speaker 3: 49:02

Think Texas Beach

Speaker 4: 49:03

terrible, but Texas figs are the best. Really? Texas grapefruit and Texas figs. Well, I, what I wanna say though, here is. First off, I, I actually wanna say I did something similar. We had a little homestead, outside of Austin for 12 years, and I grew food. I, I, you know, I wanted to see how I, how much I can grow. And I think at most, like in the winter in Texas, barring, catastrophic freezes, we were able to grow about half the produce we needed for our family. Just produce. And we had eggs, we had chicken, so we had a ton of eggs. Way too many eggs. but you know, our grocery bills are still really high, not nearly as high as they are now. So no, I've done that. I've done that sort of homestead thing. It was amazing. It was also really expensive. When you think of the capital expenditures you need for all the equipment, seed irrigation, and then your own time and energy, the amount of work. Then we had, you know, we had two catastrophic freezes in three years. 21 and 23. And then I gave up and you know, we, you know, we, we also needed to raise money for medical bills. And so, but I was also done, I was done with the homesteading'cause it was just so brutal, so much work. And the weather was so erratic. So it can be done. But, yeah, man, you've gotta be like superhuman. And I think that the other side of this. is competing with Walmart is really hard, and there's only a few retailers that do it really well and that could fend them off, and HEB is one of them because they're essentially the Walmart. They're one of the best operators in the country, privately held. They have an employee ownership share. They have a lot of employee retention, not the best wage rates. People are obsessed with HEB, they love HEB. It's the National Grocer of Texas. It's only in Texas and Mexico and, you know, I guess they're a great operator. They're much better operator than Whole Foods. Much better supply chain, much better replenishment, much better pricing, much better quality. The employees still, care like people, like, you know, you walk in there most of the time, you could talk to a person and they really enjoy being there and they're working really hard and they seem to be treated pretty well for a grocery store. On the other hand, like a lot of the problems with the Texas food system are, are because of H-E-B-H-E-B needs a certain level of scale for production, and so they're very dependent on that homogenized, concentrated animal feedlot supply chains too. If you're in Austin, you essentially have a huge grocery monopoly between he Walmart market share wise. That's 75% of all groceries sold in Austin. HEB and Walmart after that is like Costco. And after that is like, I think Randall's maybe or Target Whole Foods. Then you've got a lot of carias, Mexican markets, Wheatsville, co-op, I love Wheatsville. They're well under one 10th of 1% market share. They're rounding here. Really the Austin Food System, HB, and Walmart. So then you have to think about. What are the priorities of the supply chain? What are the priorities of growers? It's whatever, HEB and Walmart says it's what they want. And when you extrapolate that out nationally, it's what Walmart says, and it's what Kroger says. Everything else is commentary. And so that's where I sort of come in with this like, we need to pay attention to scale and we need to think about. Who's making these priorities in the food system and what their priorities are Publicly traded companies, you know, it's profit and it's profit at a rate that is really

Speaker 3: 52:43

inconceivable to mortals like,

George Milton: 52:47

Yeah, it is.

Speaker 3: 52:48

yeah.

George Milton: 52:48

when you talk about Walmart, you've got a handful of Waltons who have 50% ish of the profits of Wal. That's, I know that. I feel like we've gotta do a bit of a lightning round because I want to talk about, I wanna talk about. where you think it's going. you've written a lot lately about, public grocery stores, maybe let's talk a bit about public grocery stores.

Speaker 3: 53:15

Yeah, I've written about it for five

Speaker 4: 53:16

It's great. The world has caught up to me. I started, yeah,

George Milton: 53:19

I'm hoping that the world that this episode is gonna help the

Speaker 3: 53:23

that's fine.

George Milton: 53:24

you're, you're, you're a thousand light years ahead of most of us. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna plug right now and I'll plug again at the end. But you should follow the

Speaker 3: 53:31

Thank you

George Milton: 53:31

Errol's newsletter. For sure and follow his writing on Forbes, which I'm subscribed to you as a writer on Forbes. I follow all this stuff and I'm like,

Speaker 3: 53:39

almost.

George Milton: 53:40

I've almost always hold on, wait a second. They did what? Or what's happening now? Like when I read your stuff. So let's talk a little bit About public grocery stores. Then I wanna talk a little bit about your life because don't answer this question now, right? I wanna talk public grocery stores because it's a good pivot from where we're talking about Walmart and HEB and things like that. I also want to know, like you, have a very, to me, fascinating life, right? Where you have chosen to continue to be an activist. And that's a hard. Thing to do. You've continued to be outspoken.

Speaker 4: 54:11

Yeah, I don't think it's such a big deal either. I've been writing about it for five years. I wrote about it starting when I was in Austin on the food policy board saying we need some sort of backstop or alternative in the food system.'cause we have enormous food insecurity in Austin and we also keep running into these catastrophic, weather events that snarl supply chains.'cause nobody is holding inventory, like HEB holds some inventory. And so there's no, backstop in the food system. I'm not talking about food banks Food banks are downstream. Grocery stores. where do you think food banks get the food from and from grocery stores and manufacturers? I'm talking about we need something upstream, and so I wrote a piece, for my newsletter, for my podcast, and it was picked up by the Center for Good Food Purchasing called Why We Need a Public Food Sector. I wrote that in March, 2021, talking about the economics of the grocery system and the fact that we've allowed. For-profit, private sector to monopolize the food supply. think about that for a second. Everything needs to generate a profit. I just think it's kind of crazy, like maybe we should have at least something else that has at its heart what I call operationalizing the right to food. 83% of Americans support the right to food. I actually believe it should be the right to good food, not the right to crappy food. Right to good food. We need something and I consider it some sort of like a public service. Just like when you open your tap, water comes out when you, God forbid there's a fire, fire department comes. there needs to be a backstop, an alternative, and I unintentionally used the wrong word for a while. I wrote a utility, and I actually didn't realize this till later. A utility implies a monopoly. I don't mean that, and that's something that moving forward, I stopped using and I just call it public grocery sector. So that's the first thing. Very simple concept for me, at least in my head. Second thing is this already exists and a lot of the discussion around this I consider. A lot of bad faith criticism, particularly from folks in the grocery industry who just like went knee jerk conniptions, like, oh, this is Soviet totalitarianism. I was like, no, honestly, there's something called the military commissary system, like who told me about it? My friends in the Army, you know, I grew up, I, I grew up in the Bronx. Like I knew a lot of folks who went into the military. I used to go visit a friend, you know, At base all the time. Just, I was recruited. I decided not to, I was recruit. I, you know, I almost, I almost went that route. I just have bad knees,

Speaker 3: 56:43

so wouldn't have worked out

George Milton: 56:45

Errol, can I pause real quick?'cause there was something in the, kind of first point you made about public grocery where we talked about incentive. The number one incentive for a Kroger or a Walmart or any of these companies, their number one incentive has to be, has to be to make a profit. It has to be to increase their share price, to have that quarterly earnings, whatever it is, it's that incentive first, and that is bolstered by people get fed, right? a result of people getting fed. They're making revenue and their stock prices, whatever, that's a secondary thing that people get fed and don't starve to death.

Speaker 3: 57:24

Very much so.

George Milton: 57:25

other public facing especially, HEB is always doing community stuff, not that HEB wants you to starve, it's

Speaker 3: 57:32

It's not incentive, it's,

Speaker 4: 57:34

there's a different, it's not the, that's the wrong word to, to politely correct you. It's, they're legally compelled to that's their DNA, they have to, you have to make a profit if you're a for-profit enterprise, if you're, if you're a C corp. S corp, LLC or what, you can't run the business at a loss and breaking even is really dicey. That's like hitting, you know, that's like hitting the bullseye. And if you wanna grow and if you want to like, pay your employees more next year because of, inflationary pressures on wages, there's all these reasons why it's a compulsion. You, it's a legal structure. The thing is with food, I see what HEV does, I feel is different though than let's say a Kroger or Walmart.

George Milton: 58:16

What you're

Speaker 4: 58:16

And particularly like Kroger, Albertsons is like publicly traded or the, or the manufacturers like PepsiCo, Kraft Heinz, Nestle, ANOVA, in that they're heavily driven also by shareholders in many cases, institutional shareholders, pension funds, you know, the BlackRock state streets. Occasionally activist investors with a big mouth too. And so they need to promise those shareholders every quarter. It's always really fun reading their annual reports and their quarterly earnings goals. What they're promising the shareholders. Kroger does this, it's just amazing what they promise to shareholders in terms of profitability and how they, achieve that profitability, what they say versus what they do, but also how they also hold themselves back with Kroger, for instance, like their e-commerce. Loss leader maybe a lot more profitable if they got rid of like all that Ocado nonsense. So I guess this is the problem is sorry, go ahead.

Speaker 3: 59:09

need me to address?

George Milton: 59:10

Well, I guess, Sorry. No. I was just gonna say that the, you're correcting me from incentive to compulsion, which is stronger. I think that the, on the public grocery side, the incentive or compulsion requirement there is

Speaker 3: 59:24

Yeah.

George Milton: 59:24

feed people, right? To make sure that people do not starve is number one. Am I correct or. Making sure that people

Speaker 3: 59:33

No,

Speaker 4: 59:34

I've modeled it out like the commissary system to sell, you know, the commissary system takes barely a markup, and they are large, so they have low wholesale costs, so they're selling at retail. what I hear is 20, 30% lower than standard. So you're still buying food. It's still like dignified. I consider food banks to be extremely undignified, stigmatizing, snap at least gives people the choice. you just give folks a card with cash on it. Not enough, but it's a lot more dignified and snap is about 187 for an individual and feeds almost 10 times as many people as all food banks combined. You know, a public. Grocery sector if we're modeled on the commissary. And it's a big if, I don't know. I mean, I'm, I'm talking to a lot of people who are thinking about this right now and it's hard to talk to them about the grocery model and how grocery actually works.'cause what they wanna do is feed people. So that's the thing. They're coming from what, we have enormous food insecurity in this country and they're coming at it from, we have enormous food insecurity and hunger and obesity and all these other problems in our neighborhoods, in our communities, in our family. And so you have public officials, you have community groups, advocates, food security organizations who are, strapped for cash and not receiving the donations they used. And they're looking for what are alternative models? We're one of the few countries in the world that doesn't guarantee the right to food. Despite the fact that, you know, you ask people about it, it's like kind of common sense. I, when you talk about people who don't think that it's usually kind of mean-spirited, they're like, no. People can't afford food, they should starve.

George Milton: 1:01:12

And people who have that view

Speaker 3: 1:01:13

Oh yeah. They're usually, wealthy,

Speaker 4: 1:01:15

Anglo-Saxon males.

George Milton: 1:01:16

seldom

Speaker 4: 1:01:17

So this is the thing, how do you operationalize that? And that's the question for me. You can give people cash, or you could also create what I call a backstop, an alternate supply chain that is not in any way compelled to make a profit that is not incentivized, that purely exists. And like one of the best examples I don't talk about this a lot'cause I think there's problematic aspects of it, but in Utah, the Mormons kind of do this to an extent. The Mormons stock food. the Mormon church has some public stockholding in terms of like individuals make sure they keep food in the house, And then the church makes sure that there is supplies of food available for the community in case of need. Now, it creates problems in that the food bank system is then a little dependent on the church. There's obviously a problem with separation of church and state there when, Mormons in Utah kind of, run the state. But I think it's an interesting model and once again, it kind of exists and we don't talk about it because it's part of, this one religious, sect, other countries around the world, like Switzerland does this. Switzerland has a very interesting food economy. I'm trying to write about it a bit more. I did visit Switzerland for an IEZ meeting last year, like Geneva. Essentially it's two co-op chains of the monopoly in, in Geneva. Consumer co-ops. Switzerland has some set of price controls, so they have normal everyday prices that are kind of higher than other countries around them, like France. But they didn't get as much price inflation because they were capped how high prices could go on basic items. And Switzerland does some stockholding. Now, Switzerland is about the size of, I don't know, Houston, But when you consider the resources we have at our disposal to look at some of these other examples and the fact that we already do this in the military, and of course the Republicans who, you know, hate anything good in the world, wanna privatize the commissaries. if you attach a profit motive to the commissary system, quality will go down, prices will go up. That's where you're gonna get your profit margin. I'm in the food business, I would

Speaker 3: 1:03:30

know.

George Milton: 1:03:32

Yeah, that's that middle of it there. I want to, talk a little bit about what you, Errol are optimizing for, because I don't get the feeling that you're optimizing for maximum wealth. it seems like there's a lot of change. That you wanna make, or that you wanna see or be part of. And there's already a lot of change. if you just replay the intro, you've been involved in a lot of what I would consider to be positive change, in our supply and food systems. Over the last couple of decades. What is it? What is it you want to get outta the next, let's say, couple of decades? what do you wanna see out there?

Speaker 3: 1:04:07

I mean, my first thing is

Speaker 4: 1:04:08

I need to make a living, obviously. I have very high medical expenses. I'm a caregiver, for family members. So that's top of mind for me is despite me running my mouth, top of mind is always making sure that I can pay the bills. I'm not as concerned as I was in my thirties about, long term. I'm very much focused on the day-to-day out of necessity fighting with health insurance companies, just, trying to keep up with everything. I do have a comfortable life. Lucky that I own my own home. We own our home, and we have more than enough food in the house. We always do. That's sort of my thing is I always make sure I've got plenty of food. I'm an avid hiker when I can. I lift weights and run almost every day. I'm very careful about what I eat. No drugs, no caffeine, no alcohol. I don't smoke. I don't have any fun. But I also, yeah, no, I, I, I just gave it all up. I do love extremely spicy foods, which is why, you know, I'm a big George Milton fan, big Yellowbird fan. And so for me, you know, having throughout my life always been surrounded by, you know, I think, you know, stress and trauma to be fair, like, you know, my upbringing and where I came from, what I've grown up around. You know, some of the stuff that, we've dealt with in my family in the last few years. I just live every day like it's my last, and I don't do it in a way of like, I'm gonna party until I bleed and blow my brains out with cocaine or, you know, have, a, raw, unprotected sex with as many people? No, actually no. I'm gonna live my life in a way that I could feel like if I go tomorrow, I won't have any regrets about what I contribute. For me, that's mostly, to be as positive. That means not fighting on the internet with people, but also doing my best to support folks to have as good a life as they can too. Like I know that a lot of what I write about is because a lot of folks don't have what I have. And I've worked really hard. You know, I came from almost, nothing. I came from a working class family. I was lucky to go to college. But I know a lot of people have less. I know that we have a economic system that takes from people, it takes their time, their energy, their life force, and I'm just doing what I can to give back is the way I see it. And in doing it as in a way that's as positive as possible. And I know that it could be kind of critical. But I try to be critical about institutions. I try to be critical about structure. I try to punch up. I don't argue with people about BS culture war stuff. Just wash your hands. That's my take on that issue, right? That think you can be whoever you want to be, as long as you're not hurting anybody else. Like when it comes to like interpersonal stuff, I'm a total anarchist. You know what? Do what thou will, and that's how I am. I'm very much about individual liberty and freedom. However, I look at myself in my life and the amount of restrictions I have around individual liberty are mostly due to economic, social issues I think of through my life. If I wanted to invest in businesses now, I couldn't. I mean, I could borrow money from somebody. I know enough people, but it wouldn't be my money'cause I have to put all that money into medical or just making sure we have enough good food or, I think there, there's so many things about our lives and our privileges that we take for granted. And so a lot of my writing's very motivated by that. And it's about, for me, especially as a white presenting Ashkenazi Jew. You know, from New York, grew up working class, like how do I platform? I grew up working class, but I moved up. That's the thing. Like my boss at Whole Foods, really interesting guy. I loved working for him. He was like a libertarian Mormon. We had very different backgrounds, but he was like, look, you, you are a bootstrap fantasy. Like what you did, you came off the street and you were in this executive suite by the time you're like 40. Yeah, that's a good way to look at it. But, you know, I just feel that if I have any privilege, let me platform folks who didn't have the opportunity, their impetus or, whatever it was that I had. And so, that's a lot of the writing and interviewing I do I talk to clerks and cashier, I talk to organizers, I talk to folks who are struggling. And for me it's very fulfilling and also. It allows them a platform to reach other people. And then when I wanna, apply my critical faculty stuff, I always try to look at it a big picture. You know, I was raised with the secular Jewish notion of ola repair the world. That the world is broken and that we need to do what we can. the struggle never ends. There's a saying in the Talmud, it's okay to take a rest once in a while, but you can't give up.

Speaker 3: 1:09:06

You gotta keep going.

George Milton: 1:09:08

Yeah, I did. Hey, Errol, I never see you give up. I never see you giving up. I think the first time. I met you was probably 2016 or 2017. saw you speak at a, business school thing here. It was put together by, I don't remember what it was.

Speaker 3: 1:09:23

Was that over at ut

George Milton: 1:09:24

there was somebody there from Vital

Speaker 3: 1:09:25

Yeah, it was

George Milton: 1:09:26

Do you remember what I was talking about?

Speaker 3: 1:09:28

on Riverside.

George Milton: 1:09:28

It

Speaker 4: 1:09:29

I remember that. Yeah. It was a random, it was, what's his name? I used to call him Star Lord. He was a guy, he looked like Chris Pratt. He used to work for STE Foods. Yeah. he invited me to be on a panel about it. Yeah.

George Milton: 1:09:41

So that I met you then it was 2016 or 2017, you were preaching it then

Speaker 3: 1:09:46

Oh, cool.

George Milton: 1:09:47

you giving up, anytime soon. Also, I think you just gave me the title of the episode, repair the World.

Speaker 3: 1:09:53

Yeah, the two.

George Milton: 1:09:54

guys, can

Speaker 4: 1:09:55

Please subscribe, especially if you could be a paid subscriber to my newsletter. writing is hard work, but I love doing it. It's called the Checkout Grocery Update. We are on Substack, which is a wonderful platform. Substack has an amazing ecosystem of writers. it's the checkout grocery update. In addition, I am also a frequent contributor to Forbes Online. So if you go on Forbes, I've got over at this point, over 50 different articles on Forbes. I tend to write, 20 pieces a year on Forbes, primarily around political economy of food, interviews with food workers. There's a lot of crossover with what I do with Forbes and the checkout grocery update. But I also spend a lot of time on the grocery update talking about retailers and being in retailers and working with retailers. So those are the two main places. I've got a consulting business, ROL Schweitzer, LLC, always looking for clients. I do expert witness for, court cases, litigation around food safety, supply chain. I was a member of the Austin Travis Food Policy Board for a while. I'm currently based, in a number of places due to personal issues, so I'm hard to find in person. but I'm always available online or by phone. So, obviously a big fan of Yellowbird and a big fan of George Milton. I really appreciate you making the time to, to talk today

Speaker 3: 1:11:08

as well.

George Milton: 1:11:09

Thank you, man. I'm so glad to have you. we've been talking with Errol Schweizer. I'm gonna post a bunch of these links along with, whatever reading list. shares with me here. you guys can always check out new episodes of gross to net. we're also on substack at gross to net. And you can find us, Mondays, everywhere that podcasts are released. Until then, go out and repair the world everybody. Bye-bye.