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Your friendly neighborhood store. Stocked with snacks and meals galore. Staff ask how
your day is going when you walk in the door and they even offer to help you find that
package of chocolate chip cookies you’ve been craving all day. You feel good when you
enter the store, and you feel even better when you walk out. At least that’s the image
and atmosphere that Trader Joe’s tries to curate in every one of their over 500 stores
spanning the United States. And this friendly vibe seems to be paying off. Trader Joe’s
has a cult following. In New York City, customers queue up on massive lines just to bask in
the Trader Joe’s energy. Well, it’s that, and the fact that Trader Joe’s has tightly
curated their labels and food options to seem like they are a cheap yet local, handcrafted,
and environmentally friendly choice. But I’ve always wondered, are they? Today, we’re
going to look behind the popularity of the Trader Joe’s brand to answer that simple
question: Is Trader Joe’s actually environmentally friendly?
Before we dive into that question, I want to be transparent. I worked at Trader Joe’s
two years ago to support myself while starting this channel. As a crew member, I saw the
company’s practices and ethical models firsthand. Obviously, the experience differs from store
to store, but they did give good benefits if you worked full time, they made the effort
to make sure you felt welcome among the crew, and some of the managers looked out for you.
But at the end of the day, Trader Joe’s is still a large supermarket chain. I worked
from 4pm to 12am, most of the time stocking shelves in the frozen foods section. It was
tiring and mind-numbing at times, but some people loved it. Others didn’t. And Trader
Joe’s friendly vibe can only extend so far as they scale up. Striking a balance between
running 500+ stores and seeming like a local community grocer is what Trader Joe’s does
best and what has led to their popularity. Because let’s face it, TJ’s is not your
local co-op market. It’s a large corporation ultimately looking out for its bottom line,
albeit in a unique, customer-first way. And this difficult balancing act seems to seep
into Trader Joe’s approach to the environment.
Trader Joe’s sustainable efforts, or lack-there-of, really boil down to four main categories:
packaging, waste, sourcing, and energy. So, let’s start with packaging, which until
recently ran rampant throughout the Trader Joe’s brand. If you want some Honeycrisp
apples, you’ll get a side of plastic. Fancy some organic peppers? Have some plastic wrap
with that. The problem got so bad that Greenpeace drafted a petition for Trader Joe’s to change
their packaging ways and over 100,000 people signed it. But here’s the good part. Trader
Joe’s seems to listen to its customers. In 2019, the company eliminated 6 million
pounds of plastic packaging from its stores. They’re replacing styrofoam trays with compostable
ones, doing away with excess like their mesh pouches for garlic, and seeking ways to, as
Matt Sloan from the Trader Joe’s podcast says, “choose packaging that can be realistically
recycled. It's one thing to say that something can be technically recycled, but what's actually
feasibly recycled is a pretty small number of materials.” To do this, Trader Joe’s
replaced virgin plastic with 100% Recycled PET, #1 plastic in 20 of their items in the
past year, which will remove over 500,000 lbs. of virgin plastic from their stores annually.
And in total, they recycled over 450 million pounds of materials including cardboard, plastic
wrap, plastic buckets, and damaged pallets in 2019. While this is a great start, it’s
less of a shift away from packaging, and more of a switch towards different materials. The
packaging is still there, it’s just a little easier to recycle or compost. If Trader Joe’s
is really interested in minimizing packaging waste, they would install solutions like bulk
bins that do away with the necessity of packaging altogether. Granted, bulk bins do present
several new food safety dilemmas that Trader Joe’s would have to tackle. But if Trader
Joe’s wants to truly address customer concerns about packaging, bulk bins are a necessary
step. Packaging is a complex area and it's hard to do away with everything all at once.
For many perishable items, for example, packaging extends their shelf-life, so addressing packaging
means running headfirst into Trader Joe’s second environmental area: food waste.
Food waste is where Trader Joe’s shines. The harsh truth of a grocery store is that
many items just won’t make it off the shelves before they reach their expiration date. Instead
of throwing away food that is perfectly edible, but is not suitable for the storefront, Trader
Joe’s donates it to local food banks and community non-profits. In 2019, they donated
384 million dollars of food and beverages, which according to Trader Joe’s is about
78 million pounds of food or 65 million meals served to those in need. As a crew member,
I saw this firsthand. Every day we pulled bread off the shelves because it was about
to reach its expiration date or pulled apples off the stands that had some soft spots. Those
items would then go directly into donation bags. At the end of the night, a volunteer
from the local food pantry would pull up with a van and we would pile the bags into the
trunk, and all that food would make it those in need. But even before the food makes it
onto shelves, Trader Joe’s does an excellent job of efficiently tracking and managing the
flow of food into its stores. According to the Trader Joe’s website, in 2019 “approximately
0.5% percent of Trader Joe’s products were unable to be sold to customers, donated to
[their] food recovery partners, or composted. To put that in perspective, the USDA has reported
that 10% of food in America is lost at the retail level.” This is in part due to the
company’s efficient distribution process. Every day a truck arrives with goods needed
to restock the shelves. In most cases that food goes straight onto the shelves, rather
than collecting dust in a back room somewhere. Category Manager for produce Jack Salamon
hints at this efficiency mindset when he talks about the size of the stores: “Trader Joe's
either by accident or in their wisdom makes their back rooms really small. Makes their
coolers really small. Yeah, we just don’t have room to hold anything.” Essentially,
Trader Joe’s has streamlined the trail from farm to shelf so that food is rarely sitting
in the backroom for a long time. As a result, they’ve drastically decreased the amount
of time products sit on the selves, which means they’ve reduced how much food goes
to waste.
In order to create that efficient relationship between their supply and distribution efforts,
Trader Joe’s needs to have firm control over where their food comes from. And that’s
where the third element of their sustainability efforts come in: sourcing. Unlike food waste,
Trader Joe’s is light on the details on how and where they source their food. In part,
this is out of necessity. Their popularity relies on the allure of the Trader Joe’s
label--there are very few brand names in sight when you walk into a TJ’s--but this secrecy
means that it’s very hard to figure out exactly where the food is coming from. An
article from Eater unearthed the brands behind some of Trader Joe’s labels through FDA
recall documents. They assert that while many Trader Joe’s items come from small-scale
suppliers, some don’t. At some point Naked Juice, a PepsiCo subsidiary, provided Trader
Joe’s with some of their smoothies, Wonderful Pistachios supplied the company with pistachios,
and Stacy’s Pita Chips made the Trader Joe’s pita chips. This makes finding ethical and
environmentally responsible products extremely difficult. That Trader Joe’s private labeled
item could very well be a PepsiCo product in disguise. While not all products are sourced
from big food conglomerates, for some items the Trader Joe’s private label is merely
a form of greenwashing, replacing brand names with Trader Joe’s own brand to reach customers
that might otherwise not want to buy that brand’s product for ethical or health-based
reasons. Transparency is essential when it comes to shopping for food, and Trader Joe’s
just doesn’t supply it. Because we have no idea who makes the food that Trader Joe’s
sells, we just have to blindly trust that it is made ethically.
And finally, energy and emissions. Much like Trader Joe’s sourcing strategy, the company
is pretty tight-lipped on this. In my research, I couldn’t find any reference to a zero-carbon
plan or any emissions targets goals. As a corporation with over 500 stores, this is
a huge strike against Trader Joe’s. Companies that large need to have a public, transparent,
and aggressive plan in place to address the emissions they generate, and Trader Joe’s
just hasn't done that. Whether that means they haven’t set targets or just haven’t
released them to the public, it doesn’t matter. Even Amazon has a publicly accessible
climate action plan. For a store that leans into a local, quirky, community-driven aesthetic,
this is a noticeable absence, because caring about customers also means caring about the
environments that surround them.
In short, Trader Joe’s is a mixed bag when it comes to the environment. They excel at
things like food waste, but are noticeably lacking on the emissions front. But I think
what makes Trader Joe’s a promising company in terms of sustainability is its willingness
to react to its customer's demands quickly and drastically as in the case of packaging.
Indeed, that’s part of why the store is so popular. That being said, Trader Joe’s
should be leading the charge on climate action, and not be pulled along by its customers.
If Trader Joe’s truly wants to be that neighborhood store, then it has to care about its community
both locally and globally, and that means addressing climate change with emissions targets
and transparently pushing suppliers to be more sustainable in their practices. So, at
the end of the day Trader Joe’s has garnered such loyal supporters and popularity because
it's found the perfect middle ground between providing the value of a store like Walmart,
while exuding the handmade, local aesthetic of a local co-op grocer. But make no mistake,
Trader Joe’s is driven by customer demands not ethical choices. Mark Gardiner, author
of Build a Brand Like Trader Joe’s, sums up this reality best on his blog. He writes,
“Trader Joe’s is definitely not a company like Patagonia, that strives for complete
ethical transparency, but it’s not worse than most other $8 billion companies. On issues
like farm-workers’ rights or the sustainability of fisheries, Trader Joe’s does what it’s
pushed to do and usually acts when it’s been shamed in the media.”
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Hey everyone! Charlie here. I hope you are all doing well. This video was also made possible
by my Patreon supporters. Every month, they pledge a certain amount of money that gives
me the needed consistency and foundation to make videos like these. So thank you to my
supporters and thank you for watching. I’ll see you in two weeks.