Whole Foods Market announced Wednesday that by April of 2016 they will no longer sell food made by prison labor.
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Whole Foods Markets, responding to a protest at a Houston store over the weekend, has made a decision to stop selling food products produced by prison inmates as part of a rehabilitation program in Colorado.
Company spokesman Michael Silverman echoed that mission statement, telling the Associated Press that the objective of partnering with CCI was to “help people get back on their feet and eventually become contributing members of society”.
Whole Foods worked with a company called Colorado Correctional Industries to source local products and ingredients. CCI’s base rate is 60 cents per day, though they say the monthly average pay comes to $300 to $400, “with incentives”. Inmates, who work for CCI, milk the herd of 1,300 goats there, and the milk is shipped to Haystack’s processing facilities in Longmont for processing and packaging.
And there are also questions about the justness of prison-work programs.
In its 2014 annual report, CCI estimated that more than 80 percent of inmates with at least six months of work experience remain out of jail a year after release, compared with the national average of 62 percent. The CCI website notes that the labor program is created to equip inmates with on the job training, skills development, and a sound work ethic.
“Are companies doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, or because it’s cheap labor?”
“They say they care about the community, but they’re enhancing their profit off of poor people”, Allen said.
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John Scaggs, director of sales and marketing for Haystack Mountain, said the 26-year-old dairy stopped maintaining its herd of goats at its farm in Niwot in 2007 when founder James Schott retired and sold the farm.
