Grocery Update Volume 2, #20: A Brief Dialogue on Antitrust.

Also: ICE Raids A Protein Bar Co-Packer In NY.

Sep 16, 2025

Discontents: 1. Tell Albertsons: Respect Their Workers' Right to Join a Union! 2. ICE Raids Protein Bar Co-Packer in New York. 3. A Brief Dialogue On Antitrust With Stacy Mitchell of ILSR. 4. Seen In The Wild.

A Quick Note:

We hope everyone is staying safe out there. Crazy times.

We have a lot in the pipeline. We are working on an analysis of the latest MAHA Strategy Report. No hot takes, we’d rather help our readership apply our learnings. We are also working on a really deep dive into the latest wave of grocery inflation, our thoughts on the recent wave of Big CPG Hangovers-the mergers/splits and acquisitions changing the landscape of packaged foods (not necessarily for the better) and a brief primer on how retailers can best execute the mind numbing variety of food certifications. So much fun is on the way. Stay tuned.

And don’t let the bastards grind you down.

1. Tell Albertsons: Respect Your Workers' Right to Join a Union!

Via UFCW in Texas: Just last week Albertsons workers across DFW stood up and demanded their company recognize their union.

But instead of respecting their workers' rights to join a union, Albertsons is interrogating and intimidating them. These workers need to know that they're not alone, and that their community won't stand by while they're mistreated.

They need to know that by taking the brave step to start a union at their store, they've just joined a strong, unstoppable Texas labor family.

Send an email to Albertsons leadership and give these workers the support they need to stand strong and secure their union victory:

Thank you!

2. ICE Raids Protein Bar Co-Packer in New York.

From Syracuse.com: ICE stormed a Cato, N.Y. protein bar factory, and workers there say they were sorted by skin color. White employees were told to leave and Latino workers were herded into a break room. Some had government-issued work permits — and were deported anyway. The search warrant ICE used wasn’t criminal, it was an administrative warrant, the kind usually reserved for health or safety checks. Lawyers say its use here may have violated the Constitution.

If you are in the grocery industry, and especially if you are “Making America Healthy Again”, please take a moment to advocate for these food production workers, many of whom have legally been on the job for 8-10 years at a family owned company in Upstate NY. This company co-packs protein and snack bars for many brands and their production capacity was gutted by the ICE raid. Over 70 workers were detained, many are still in custody and some have already been deported.

The grocery industry, especially the “small government” contingent, has been strangely silent on this gross violation of human rights and civil liberties, all funded by taxpayer dollars.

Please call NY Governor Kathy Hochul, 518-474-8390 to help locate workers and prevent any further deportations.

Call Senator Kirsten Gillibrand to inspect conditions at Oswego and Wellesley Island CBP stations: Syracuse office 315-448-0470, North Country 315-376-6118, NYC 212-688-6262.

Tell your family, your friends, call your representatives. Don’t stay silent.

Follow Workers Center of Central NY for more info and alerts on this urgent matter.

3. A Brief Dialogue On Antitrust With Stacy Mitchell of ILSR.

Reprinted with the permission of Stacy Mitchell, Institute for Local Self Reliance (ILSR).

Please check out ILSR’s awesome work here: https://ilsr.org/articles/stacy-mitchell-takes-her-groundbreaking-food-desert-analysis-on-the-road/ and https://ilsr.org/articles/ilsr-files-motion-to-unseal-ftc-antitrust-complaint-against-pepsico/

For Context/Reference: https://civileats.com/2025/08/20/op-ed-public-grocery-stores-already-exist-and-work-well-we-need-more/

Via email:

On Thu, Sep 4, 2025 at 3:39 PM Stacy Mitchell <smitchell@ilsr.org> wrote:

Hi Errol,

I was a little taken aback by this from your piece in Civil Eats: "The lack of grocery stores isn’t something that can be fixed by the Robinson-Patman Act, enacted during the New Deal to prevent price discrimination by large retail buyers at the expense of smaller competitors. New York already has one of the least concentrated grocery markets in the country, and trust-busting won’t make new grocery stores open in low-income neighborhoods."

For one, the lopsided buyer power that favors big chains and disadvantages independent grocers in the industry is a function of concentration in the national market, not the local market. Second, there are lots of examples of local grocery stores closing, creating food deserts, because they couldn't buy at competitive prices. Third, the reason that chains don't open in these neighborhoods is not that it's impossible to make a profit, but rather that, absent competition from locally owned stores, they have no reason to make the investment. They can reliably count on people to travel to their other locations.

I could see saying that RPA alone won't be enough on its own to alleviate this problem, especially in the immediate term. That makes sense. But I think the evidence is pretty strong that abandonment of RPA is the primary causal factor for the rise of food deserts. (And public stores will struggle with the same tilted playing field in the supply chain, absent RPA.)

On Thu, Sep 4, 2025 at 8:27 PM Errol Schweizer <errolschweizer@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Stacy,

Great to hear from you. I am a huge fan and frequently cite your work in my Forbes and Grocery Update work. I also highlighted the private litigation regarding Pepsico and FTC. https://grocerynerd.substack.com/p/grocery-update-volume-2-18-every -Very exciting, I am very interested in seeing what cost and consumption data you can get a hold of.

Regarding your concerns, I have written and podcasted extensively about the need for RPA enforcement, frequently citing your research, including the NYT Op Ed linked below. I have also helped make antitrust a priority for IPES-Food, as our work in food sovereignty won't matter unless we address concentration of ownership and power.

I do however think that the antitrust sector tends to wield RPA as a fix-all and we need a broader set of tool to address the inequities in our food system, including living wage guarantees, values based purchasing and public sector options.

No other big metro area in the US has NYC's combination of high rent, occupancy and labor costs, broad and diverse ownership, and intense competition, combined with income inequality, food apartheid by income and geography, and food insecurity. NYC is also flush with indies, wholesale and retail cooperatives, moreso than any other metro market and does not have the market concentration you see in OK, Arkansas, Florida, LA, Seattle Chicago, Denver, Atlanta, Boston, SF, Houston, DFW. or especially Austin-where HEB and WM are literally 75% market share. In everyone one of these cities the top 2-3-4 chains are majority share.

Regarding your point on lopsided buyer power- how would breaking up Walmart or Kroger, who don't operate locally, help NYC grocers? I don't understand that math. Will this enforcement lower packaged food wholesale costs significantly enough for grocers to pass lower prices onto shoppers? Will local wholesalers receive better markups, payment terms and inventory stock levels in a noticeable way that benefits their retail customers? Is there a model that has been calculated to prove that the waterbed effect-which I believe in-could be reversed nationally to the benefit of New Yorkers- who pay among the highest prices for groceries in the US? I have not seen it, and btw, when I have asked around for folks in the industry to model this out with me- Crickets.

IMHO. NYC is already a test case for what a marketplace could look like with RPA enforcement at the local level, (something that states like Rhode Island are actively considering). So while I am glad that Wakefern, Bogopa, Key Foods, Allegiance, Asssociated, Gristedes, and thousands of other greengrocers, bodegas and indies etc, mostly hold their own in NYC in terms of wholesale costs, assortment, quality, promotional pricing and supplier prioritization -up against the likes of Costco, Trader Joes, Whole Foods/Amz, Ahold and Target, they can't solve for the food access and affordability issues. Key Foods until recently had the second largest UNFI contract nationally (after Whole Foods, even bigger than National Coop Grocers), with a $10 billion volume forecast and a wholesale markup as low as UNFI gave to anyone and favorable payment terms comparable to anything at Kroger or Walmart. Key Foods could open more stores in food deserts in NYC, yet they don't. And their prices are still their prices-pretty high relative to other metros.

I also say this from my experience growing up there and shopping at Key Foods on Boston Post Road with my dad every Saturday, but also working as a food justice and environmental justice organizer in the 90s-early 2000s and then as a retail professional who worked in NYC with Whole Foods and Fairway. And when I worked in Hunts Point 25+ years ago, we tried to get more grocers to open up on the avenue and their main issue was the poverty and lack of income in the neighborhood that could not sustain enough business, let alone make it profitable. That is where a public option could come in.

So while we agree we need RPA enforcement for all the reasons you mention below, I have yet to be convinced it is the right tool, alone, for NYC.

Great to hear from you, please continue to reach out and stay in touch. Happy to collaborate as the opportunities arise.

Take care.

Errol

On Fri, Sep 5, 2025 at 6:55 AM Stacy Mitchell <smitchell@ilsr.org> wrote:

Hi Errol,

Thanks for the in-depth reply back! I know you like our work and cite it often. And I'm a big fan of yours too — I read your newsletter avidly and with joy because it shares so much of my views on everything in this sector, puts workers and eaters at the center, and is filled with operational insights and expertise. That's why I was taken aback at a sentence that seemed to diverge in a significant way from my perspective.

I don't think our views are actually that far apart and maybe not at all. If you'd added the word "alone" — RPA alone won't solve — I wouldn't have thought twice about it. When people ask me about this problem, or about public grocery stores, my response is that a level playing field on supplier pricing is key, but it's not the only thing. We also need to think about the high cost of real estate, the debt burden that comes with financing a new store development, and so on. There's a complex set of things that need addressing and a crucialhuge role for government, including potentially owning stores.

On your questions: Will this enforcement lower packaged food wholesale costs significantly enough for grocers to pass lower prices onto shoppers? — Yes. That's the idea, not breaking up Walmart but giving competing grocers access to the same supplier prices that Walmartit gets. The difference in prices is vast. UNFI is large, but it's not getting anything like what Walmart is getting. Part of the reason NYC has higher grocery prices than anywhere else is because it's more heavily served by retailers on the losing end of the price ladder.

Will local wholesalers receive better markups, payment terms and inventory stock levels in a noticeable way that benefits their retail customers? — Yes, on the first two, at least that's what the law calls for. On stock levels, RPA doesn't address that, but over time I think it would have a positive effect in the sense that it would gradually lead to a more diversified and competitive mix of suppliers and distributors, which would have two broad benefits. It would inhibit Pepsi, General Mills, etc from inflating their prices and margins, and also give independent grocers more choices for distribution so they're not stuck with bad service. (I don't want to write too long of an email so I won't unpack this.)

Poor people spend quite a bit on food and so the issue is not so much revenue, but margin. Right now, independents and small chains can succeed in better off neighborhoods where they can charge higher prices to get the margin they need. But not so in neighborhoods that can only afford rock-bottom prices. Lowering supplier costs is a way to add margin without raising customer prices. So to me it seems like a key part of the equation.

But not the only thing. I know what you mean about anti-monopolists often seeming to suggest that antitrust is a magic bullet for a host of problems. But ILSR doesn't share that view and is trying to tackle things from multiple angles, including helping cities build grocery stores and a range of other publicly owned services like municipal broadband. Things have gotten so bad it's going to take a lot of torque to get them moving in a better direction.

My best,

Stacy

On Fri, Sep 5, 2025 at 9:19 AM Errol Schweizer <errolschweizer@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for the thoughtful response. If we had written "alone" we'd have not had this great exchange! I hope you are correct on all points above. For me, they are still speculative, even if they make legal sense or sound correct.

Because my work is operational in nature, I base my analysis on data sets I can unpack. Like with price inflation, I don't do predictions or consumer surveys, I use syndicated data or BLS stats (RIP). Maybe that Pepsi case will bear such fruit.

My colleagues in grocery aren't sharing, but I'll keep asking them to as well. Everyone is so scared of retribution and blacklisting. Sad.

Keep up the amazing work.

Thanks and be well.

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