Why Austin Frerick Is Taking On The Grocery Barons

Austin Frerick is the author of Barons: Money, Power and the Corruption of America’s Food Industry. He is a 7th generation Iowan and is a Fellow at the Thurman Arnold Project at Yale University. In 2022, he worked with the U.S. Department of Agriculture to organize a conference at Yale Law School entitled “Reforming America’s Food Retail Markets,” which explored competition issues in the nation’s grocery industry. 

Errol Schweizer: Why don't you tell us about your motivation and inspiration for this book? 

Austin Frerick: I grew up in Iowa, went to Grinnell, went to Wisconsin, and now this antitrust center at Yale. And I've spent the last two years studying this intersection of food and monopolies. 

So this whole book started with two frustrations I had for a while. One, so much of the food and agriculture news we read is just geared towards the 1%. Here's a new $300 restaurant. Here's a new buzzword of the moment. And I just didn't feel like a lot of stuff was really grappling with what you see every day at the grocery store. But then also, part of it is, what the heck happened to Iowa? 

My book is about seven different robber barons in the food system. But in my head, each baron is really telling a different concept, a different structure. So for example, I have a grain baron, Cargill. Cargill is really the story of the Farm Bill and what happened to it. Cargill is the largest private company in America. They're all about from the second grain is picked, to when it's put on your plate. They want to own that process and they don't have consumer facing brands. A lot of people don't know who they are. They're almost like the 19th century British Empire because they're so global. We've never had companies like this before. 

ES: The one that I found the most interesting was Driscoll's. 

AF: This was a wild one to put together. They sell berries, but they don't grow a single berry. 

ES: They're like the AirBnB of fresh fruit. 

AF: When I really started researching and reporting the story, I mostly focused on water. I was just noticing how water intensive berries are, all that kind of stuff. But that's when the labor stuff really started creeping in. A lot of berry production has shifted offshore. Driscoll's has contract shrubberies on every continent now except Antarctica. You know, Morocco, Argentina, Chile, Baja California. But then you start realizing when you start researching these spaces, these are just modern day plantations. It's really, really hard to report on this stuff. We see stories about what goes on in these plantations, how children are picking berries, the labor conditions, what have you. You're only just seeing a fraction of it because it's so hard to get there. Journalists are putting their personal safety at risk. 

Their brilliance comes from realizing the creation of WalmartWMT. Walmart wants one company to do berries year round. So it's like they had first mover advantage. They saw the trend lines and they made a really smart business play into it. Taking a production model borrowed from the South. This model of production shouldn't be allowed. 

ES: It also shows that consolidation begets consolidation. It's a self-fulfilling, self-replicating system.

Tell us how you landed on Walmart, because it's a really compelling and frightening read for anybody in the grocery industry. 

AF: It's a frightening read. Walmart is a grocery store. Period. Fundamentally, the numbers are insane, 60% of their sales are grocery. Their market share is the same as the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh combined nationwide. Stacy Mitchell did an excellent report on how they just carved up the middle of America. They have like a 70 or 80% market share in some truly big cities like Wichita. 

It's not just grocery. Walmart's move into health care is truly scary and incredible because all the red states that didn't expand Medicaid, they're adding health care clinics so people can come in for cash, get health care services. Then they have the pharmaceuticals. They’re basically banks. They're testing out veterinary clinics. Their whole goal is to capture every dollar of America's underclass. 

ES: It's really neoliberalism in a nutshell, moving away from public provided services and everything is privatized. But here it's done in this low cost model, that, like you say, caters directly to the working poor. 

AF: There's a ruthlessness. What (Sam Walton) built is truly phenomenal. He didn't come up with the Walmart Supercenter, it is not his invention. He just stole an idea from the French. Sam's Club, they just stole from Costco. So it's like this weird appreciation for what he built. But then you quickly realize they also just benefited from deregulation. And you had this whole framework of market protections under the Robinson Patman Act. They were just competition protections because the second someone gets more powerful, that bargaining position in retail, that power compounds itself. And you had all these safeguards in place to stop that. And now once you're the biggest, you set the table. You always have the best price breaks. Which just reinforces your power.

And we have the richest family, not in America, but in the world, just having this amount of power we've never seen before. And people don't realize what the (Walton) family is today. They own Walmart, they own more than 50% of the company. And that is an insane amount of power. 

ES: What are a couple of the takeaways that you're hoping come out of people reading this book? 

AF: People don't realize what this means is one, the collapse in taste. The system makes bad tasting food. I mean, I notice it in bacon. You're eating the muscle of another animal. A pig that runs around tastes way better than a pig that stands in a shed all day and eats corn. You take a Driscoll’s berry, that doesn't have any flavor, that's engineered for transportation, versus a strawberry in your backyard. It's way better. 

I view places like Iowa as extraction colonies. They remind me of West Virginia in the 19th century and the coal companies, or the way the British Empire would run colonies in Africa.

But what this really means is we're not doing anything about climate change in the food system. I mean, all of our solutions for addressing climate change in the food system are a joke. 

This book is intellectually two things. First this is what neoliberalism did to the food system. But also, where do we go from here? I mean, it's easy to complain, but what should a post-neo-liberal food system look like? And that to me is where the hope is. What does a multicultural democratic system look like?

The focus needs to be on labor. So many more people work in the food system when you include people like my parents. I'm also of the opinion that we need to abolish the Farm Bill. I think the system is to just too corrupted. It's designed for Wall Street. It picks winners and losers. It's incredibly expensive. So I’d rather take all the money in the Farm Bill, and I'm not talking about the food assistance programs, but just actual farm programs and just put it into conservation. Go from there. And then, to me, a silver lining, especially for rural America, is putting animals back on the land. 

One of the beautiful things of writing a book like this is I just spent a lot of time with different people doing it right. And what you quickly realize is throughout the food system, there's a lot of people trying to do the right thing, trying to implement reforms to get us to a better, healthier, more sustainable, inclusive, multicultural food system. We just have a few greedy people holding us back.