Michael Olson hosts Scott Moses, Partner, Solomon Partners Head of Grocery, Pharmacy and Restaurnts, for a conversation about the consolidation of the nation’s grocery stores.

Should Kroger and Albertsons be allowed to merge?

For the moment, you and I live in the small town of Anywhere, USA. There are two grocers in town, Deluxe Food on North Main and Star Market on South Main. Deluxe and Star have been competing for our grocery dollars by offering their best prices on food. Sometimes Deluxe has the best prices and wins our dollars, other times Star wins.

All goes well, in our small town world, until one day a big box store pops up in the neighboring small town of Somewhere with really cheap prices! Deluxe and Star are now unable to compete for our grocery dollars with their prices. To survive, Deluxe and Star must do something. But what can they do?

We see this small town dilemma being played out on a national scale with the proposed $20 billion merger of two of the nation’s largest supermarket chains, Kroger and Albertsons.

With about 5,000 stores between them, Kroger and Albertsons would seem to be big enough to compete for the nation’s grocery dollars. And they were big enough, until others with different business models appeared on the scene and grew to be much larger. You know the names: Walmart, Costco, Amazon.

Kroger and Albertsons, though with many stores between them, now find themselves becoming the little fish in the sea, and their business is gradually being eaten up by bigger fish.

What can Kroger and Albertsons do to survive?

Contact: www.metrofarm.com

Radio Host: www.santacruzvoice.com

Michael Olson hosts Robert Wolcott & Kaihan Krippendorff, Co-Authors, Proximity: How Coming Breakthroughs in Just-In-Time Transform Business, Society and Daily Life.

It is said that food now travels an average of 1200 miles from where it was grown to where it is eaten.

If one were to look forward a hundred years into the future, from a hundred years in the past – when people lived on farms and ate food they grew those farms – one would think that 1200-mile food chain of the future to be an impossibility. And yet, here we are, eating food that traveled 1200 miles to get to our dinner plate.

This 1200-mile food is very convenient for us city people: Just open the plastic container and eat. No spending hours out in the fields and gardens with shovels, rakes and hoes. Just open and eat, and move on to the more important things we conjure up to do with our time.

But wait! According to Michael Olson’s Second Law of the Food Chain, “The farther we go from the source of our food, the less control we have over what’s in our food.”

It is a fact: those of us who eat 1200-mile food have very little control over what is, or is not, in that food. We can only trust the businesses that grow, process, package, ship, store and sell that food to deliver us real nutrition. However, we also know that the businesses that sell the least amount of essential nutritients for the highest price are the businesses that tend to stay in business. And so we wonder:

Can the technology and innovation that delivers 1200-mile food, deliver 1-mile food?

Contact: www.metrofarm.com

Radio Host: www.santacruzvoice.om

Michael Olson hosts Nicole Virgil, Gardener and Practitioner of Christian Science, for a conversation about winning the right to garden.

Topics include how municipal governments prohibit residents from establishing gardens in their yards, why Nicole Virgil refused to accept that prohibition; and how Nicole’s fight for the right to garden resulted in Illinois becoming the second state in the U.S. to guarantee residents the right to garden.

One thing we learned from the Covid years is that our food chain has some very weak links, and that is a cause for concern for all of us who eat food for a living.

Consequent to that concern, many of the hungry have turned to growing their own food. Only a very few can grow all of their own food, but many can grow some of their own food in a garden.

Those who do garden enjoy the physical benefits of eating food they have grown, but also the spiritual benefits of growing the food.

But wait! What if City Hall prohibits the growing of food within its City limits? Sounds perfectly crazy, don’t you think. Not so, say most cities. In fact, only six states in the United States have passed legislation guaranteeing citizens the right to garden within the limits of cities.

Florida was the first state to grant such a right in 2019. Illinois became the second state in 2021. Those that won the right to garden in the city, lead us to ask…

How can one fight City Hall and win?

Contact: www.metrofarm.com

Radio Host: www.santacruzvoice.com