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

by Benjamin Lorr

“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.