Whole Foods has always been known to provide quality and organic food to the public and recently, an uprising came across the company when a protest happened outside its Houston store. It was due to their recent announcement that they will stop selling the products made my prisoners.
Grub Street reported that this controversy is what led the people in the town to voice their thoughts about it. It is also due to the fact of the fallout of the sales of some brands of cheese and fish since 2011 and critics said that they weren't made for fair wages (this is actually a real issue for the company), since they are part of a program involving prisoners in the Colorado Department of Corrections. One can picture this scene from the TV series, Orange is the New Black.
Quixotic Farming, one of Whole Foods' vendors, raise local tilapias and place them in store shelves made of tanks created by the prisoners themselves. That place only profits 85 cents for a pound of fish, while the store actually get $11.99 per pound. Haystack Mountain Goat Dairy is another vendor that has inmates responsible for their products. The prisoners only make around $4 a day for labor.
Whole Foods' made a statement on their Facebook page saying they realized that prison-reform advocates do make sense when they labeled this practice as something hypocritical. They have finally decided that those companies mentioned above will no longer be part of their business starting April of next year. They said that while they thought this kind of program could help prisoners get back on their feet, lots of their customers are complaining that they should just stop with it. The company just basically answered the complaints of their customers.
