Pi-Consulting

Plano, Texas, is a well-heeled suburb of Dallas, and thus not the sort of place you’d go looking for miracles. Yet it was in Plano last Spring that Wal-Mart, of all no-nonsense retailers, opened a new store built as a “laboratory” for selling organic produce. Get your all-natural chicken, your organic kiwi-fruit and your spinach-flavored organic baby food — at Wal-Mart! Or choose from their 97 other natural/organic items of produce! The way was pointed by Austin’s Whole Foods Market, whose share price has blossomed — organically, of course — by a factor of ten in as many years. Now others are following the Path More Principled. The US market for organic fare is no longer a cottage industry based on local produce, since it has already topped $14 billion a year in sales. If that only represents 3% of American food sales overall, organics can still claim to be the fastest-growing sector of the market. Who needs chemical fertilizers? This stuff just grows and grows, it seems. (Source: The Economist, Pi)