The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket

by Benjamin Lorr

At this point, Julie’s sole conduit to actual food is her co-packer. She uses Golding Farms, which is housed in a cavernous cement building off the side of I-40 that is not the least bit farm but is run by a Mr. Tony Golding. Tony bought a small canning operation in 1972 and used it to begin churning out his own line of salad dressings and steak sauces. The Golding brand is a modest local success. I see the full lineup at a nearby Piggly Wiggly when I visit, looking a little dusty in metaphor if not fact, two shelves below all the national brands. But over the years Tony has expanded his facilities considerably. He has always been methodical about modernizing his operations, and with each upgrade, the ever-longer strides of technology meant that soon he was capable of producing far more output than he could ever need. And so slowly Tony’s business evolved from manufacturing his own product to selling time on his line and manufacturing the products of others. The day I walk into his plant, the whole place is stinking of fermented soy, and I see an unending stream of tiny unlabeled bottles of black liquid chattering forth on the conveyors below us. They are destined to become a variety of Kikkoman soy sauce once the labeler hits them, that ubiquitous national brand found in sushi restaurants everywhere. Most national manufacturers contract out work like this. They optimize their own in-house facility for a single item—that core brand-defining mayonnaise or classic marinara—n...

Co-packing is essentially outsourcing all aspects of a fledgling business’s food production. It allows Julie to focus exclusively on marketing and growing her brand, without the insanity of trying to run her own factory. In terms of line time, Julie might be a riskier proposition for Golding Farms, but she isn’t going to nickel-and-dime them—she isn’t capable—and if they bet properly, as her needs grow, she will take over more of their capacity at that great rate. At the same time, using a co-packer allows dreamers like Julie to move their baby at national scale without knowing a lick about what it takes to actually make her product at national scale.

Golding Farms can fill just about any bottle with just about any substance—liquid, food, paste. In an industry where production is often optimized for volume, this flexibility is its own advantage, allowing them to match, say, a Slawsa run with their own Golding Farms–brand coleslaw run with a private label run that also requires bulk bell peppers. Even though Julie might only require a single eight-hour shift every six months—an eight hours that disgorges more than ninety thousand jars of Slawsa that she will then have to place in stores—the convergence of ingredients combined with the minimal adjustments to their production facility allow them to offer her a competitive price.

“It’s a big chess game,” Kent explains. “I can make a certain amount of money off each of these different pieces. Some match each other perfectly, some offer reliability. You only have so many hours in the day. So who do you spend your time on? “People might come to us and say, ‘We want Clorox in a bottle,’” he continues. “Now, could we do that? Of course. Would we? It would have to stand on its own merits. We’d have to price it all out, the cleaning and shutdown of the line, nothing we are currently producing is even close to that . . . Or right now coconut oil has been so popular, all the national retailers are saying hey, can you private label this for us? We can do it, but does it fit?” These pressures are a structural reason for all those waves and fads you see in food. There is enormous manufacturing incentive to conform. “Listen, if we are trying to work out a co-packing deal and I have to get cocoa powder from Cairo for your product, that’s not so easy. It’s probably not something I’m using for any of my other products,” Kent says. But once an ingredient breaks into the supply chain, placing it into other food becomes significantly easier. “That is definitely something we think about. Okay, I’m sourcing this, well now it’s worth it to put in everything else.” And suddenly avocado oil gets worked into everything from popcorn to crackers to mayonnaise.