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

by Benjamin Lorr

He simply demands a payment from the young entrepreneurs who come to his office in exchange for putting their items on his shelf. The entrepreneurs are desperate. They are probably already leveraged, and so what is a little more debt to them? They also have no hope of a return if their item is not on a shelf. And if every buyer in the industry begins to do the same thing, they really have no choice. “It’s crack,” Errol Schweizer, the former head of grocery for Whole Foods, tells me. “Every buyer is addicted. You charge a fee and it gets added to the budget. Every year, you are expected to bring in more. This is serious money. It can bail you out if you are in a mess. Often there is no return for the supplier. It is essentially extractive.” The euphemism is “trade spend” and it is an area of the industry nobody wants to talk about too loudly because it is so murky and backward. The idea that the best products are on the shelf—rather than, say, the producers who ponied up the biggest bucks—benefits the supplier and the store. And what the customer doesn’t know can’t hurt them.