https://www.nytimes.com/1971/12/09/archives/store-owner-citing-98c-bread-calls-health-food-overpriced.html
Store Owner, Citing 98c Bread, Calls ‘Health Food’ Overpriced
By Grace Lichtenstein
Dec. 9, 1971 p37 NY Times
“Health foods” are often excessively high priced, identical to cheaper supermarket foods and distributed by companies that refuse to show proof of their products’ purity, witnesses from within the health‐food world told the Department of Consumer Affairs yesterday.
Appearing at the second day of hearings on health‐food abuses, one store owner said that when he has asked distributors to justify high prices they have told him “it’s none of your business” and “get lost”.
The merchant, Gary Null of Creative Health Food Stores, said many, foods were no more “organic” than lower‐priced supermarket items.
He pulled a loaf of the popular Mease’s Holgrain Flourless bread at 93 cents out of a hopping bag, read the label aloud and noted that the ingredients were not significantly different from those of a 45‐cent Pepperidga Farm wheat germ bread.
Item‐by‐Item Comparison
“I can’t sell a loaf of bread for a buck—I consider that a ripoff,” he said.
Mr. Null then pulled two jars of grape jelly out of the bag. One was a supermarket’s White Rose, at 33 cents. The other was from Sherman Arcadia, a company he said had a “virtual monopoly” on health food jams, at 60 cents.
“There’s a lot of writing on the label but unfortunately it doesn’t mean anything,” Mr. Null said of the “health food” brand This brought some rejoinders from Iisteners in the audience in the hearing room at 80‐Lafayette Street who said that the Arcadia jelly, might be superior because it was made with honey rather than sugar.
Mr. Null added that while manufacturers of some items, such as Crunchy Granola cereal and various honeys, had maintained “price and quality control,” others have “taken advantage of the health food boom.
Tigers Milk cookies, produced by one of the leading health food companies, have gone up in price from 69 cents two years ago to $1.19, he said.
Mr. Null’s arguments were supported by both a small manufacturer of health food bread, Allen Engel, and a volunteer comparison shopper for the Consumer Affairs Department, Marilyn Funt.
Control by Distributors
Mr. Engel charged that big distributors had a “life-and‐death hold” on honest health food stores that had to rely on them for the majority of their goods.
To break that hold, he said, 18 stores in the metropolitan area have formed a retailers association. It hopes to drive prices down through cooperative distributing, he said, and will be willing to spend part of grown” foods for purity.
Mrs. Funt testified that at least 13 popular items found in health food stores could now be bought much cheaper in supermarkets.
Among the examples she offered were the following:
Elam’s 12‐ounce jar of peanut butter, 95 cents vs, 89 cent Good Shepherd traditional cereal, 98 cents vs. 85 cents; Niblack raw wheat germ, 76 cents vs. 69 cents, and EI Mali brown rice, $1.49 for two ounces vs. $1.38