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The following post is written by By Christina Agnew
I ‘m really looking forward to having lunch with the founder of Planet Organic. It’s taking place in Notting Hill, at the original and largest one of what has now become a chain (a very small one, and deserving of a much friendlier sounding noun) of upmarket health food stores in London. Elliott refers to the business as “Planet”, but in many respects “Organic” is the more important component. It soon becomes apparent that Elliott is a bit of a visionary, a bit of a crusader, and a big dreamer – by which I mean that she’s not afraid to dream big. Planet was born out of her dream of creating an organic planet and for over a decade she’s been pushing hard to make that a reality for everyone who wants it.
Eat organic = happy person?
The staff behind the deli counter clearly know who they are serving (one of us, at least – I wonder if I’ll get the same face-stretching smile next time I order an organic carrot and ginger juice?) but Elliott is resolutely polite and grateful. She will later comment on the importance that she attaches to excellent customer service, one of the features that she believes will distinguish Planet from the supermarkets that continually encroach upon its patch. Back at our table, she’s disarmingly chatty and open. Her husband (and business partner), mistaking me for a friend of his wife’s, kisses me hello, plops down on a chair beside us and strikes up a random conversation about children. He only pauses for breath when I reach forward to turn off my dictaphone. Elliott is unfazed. As soon as he’s gone, a friend does exactly the same (really, exactly), swiftly to be followed by a young sales assistant who has been asked to order in a special herbal remedy for Elliott’s new baby. It’s feeling like one big, happy family.
Sell organic = happy business woman?
Elliott says that she didn’t start Planet to make money. Rather, she wanted to do something for the rest of her life that she loved. Actually, in that inoffensively self-confident way that she shares with many intelligent Americans (she moved to the UK to catch a man, and hasn’t let go of him since), she tells me that she knew she wanted to be her own boss, recognised leadership qualities in herself, and just needed to figure out what shape her business would take. She didn’t so much have a eureka moment as reach her happy conclusion by a process of osmosis, having spent every lunch break during a leadership course back in the US at the local health food store.
Elliott came back to the UK and worked in health food stores for the next two years to gain experience (indicative of the good sense, foresight and sense of responsibility towards others – in this case, her potential customers – which mark her character). Then, in 1997, at the age of 30, she founded Planet. Almost immediately, it started to do very well, thanks in large part to some savvy PR making the most of a gaggle of celebrity patrons.
Buy organic = happy customer?
So Elliott speaks brightly about having achieved her aim: she has loved the Planet experience and does still. But that’s not to say that she hasn’t faced or does not now face considerable challenges, not least financial ones. It is certainly not the case, as mainstream media might have you believe, that selling relatively costly organic produce to well-heeled Londoners is a money-making no-brainer. Ask any organic farmer and he or she will give you a handful of reasons why organic produce is more expensive than conventional produce. One of these, by the way, says Elliott, is that conventional food prices are actually artificially low because of unsustainable food subsidies. The Government could do much more to make organic produce widely affordable, a subject about which Elliott is (not surprisingly) far better informed than most.
The organic movement in the UK might well have been a double edged sword for Planet, and Elliott has done well to keep it from being wounded too deeply. When she set up the business very little was known about the organic lifestyle. It wasn’t on the political agenda or in newspapers or on TV. It definitely wasn’t mainstream. She did a lot of press and PR, raising awareness. In 1999, she became a trustee of the Soil Association, the UK’s number one certifier of organic products and also its only charity (and has been re-elected every three years since then) and in this role became a leading proponent of all things organic. This was just after the BSE crisis had begun to force the integrity of beef production in the UK into public consciousness. It was also around the time when Friends of the Earth launched its high profile Frankenstein Foods campaign urging the major supermarkets to listen to their customers and remove genetically modified ingredients from their own-brand food items. “America never knew that GM entered the food chain, whereas everyone made lots of noise about it in the UK”, she says. And as it turned out, the Soil Association, Friends of the Earth and the many other organisations supporting the organic cause, with its connected themes of health, biodiversity and the environment, were more successful than they could have imagined. The supermarkets started offering organic food in earnest. And they had the buying power to force organic farmers to drop their prices to below the level that Planet, for one, could command.
I remark to Elliott that she must have felt some conflict between being a protagonist in the push to make organic mainstream and knowing that in seeing it bear fruit she might also witness serious – perhaps fatal – damage done to her business. She must have known that if the market exploded, as it did, Planet would no longer be the only place to get a decent range of organic produce? Her response is characteristically candid: “I was probably a bit naïve, with hindsight, but at the time I wasn’t worried about other people selling organic, I just wanted to see as much of it as possible on shelves all over the country”. And she still does: “the supermarkets certainly keep us on our toes, but I strongly believe that there will always be room for a specialist in any market if you are doing a good job”. Elliott also believes that customers will choose Planet on principle: “the supermarkets do sell organic products but they also sell a lot of rubbish, so if people care about the underlying values they should shop somewhere like Planet”. She adds that while “the supermarkets don’t sell organic because they care about the whole organic lifestyle, but because they make money from it”, Planet has the highest product standard. For Elliott, it’s not about being able to buy an organic equivalent of a Mars bar. Real organic principles have an unbreakable connection with health: healthy soil means healthy plant means healthy animal means healthy human.
Grow organic = happy planet?
The healthy animal link in the attractively simple progression just mentioned will be a sticking point for some. I mention to Elliott that Lifescape is a vegetarian magazine. She explains that she is a vegetarian herself, as a matter of personal choice, but is of course aware that most people are not. Before she opened the first Planet store she thought hard about whether to stock meat all at. “I concluded that since the vast majority of our customers would want to buy meat somewhere, and since I am passionately opposed to non organic meat consumption, I would rather give them an opportunity to buy organic meat from Planet, where I am confident about the supply chain.”
Still, Elliott will only sell British meat at Planet. When I ask about fruit and vegetables she replies that buying British is again her preference, and local if possible, but often she will have to look further afield to find the range that consumers now demand. Also, she has a strongly held view that organic “isn’t only about what’s happening in our backyard – if we ban fertilisers and other chemicals used in conventional agriculture the manufacturers don’t stop making them, they just sell them to developing countries instead”. She has looked at the issue of food miles from various perspectives – including with her Soil Association hat on – and found it to be very complicated. Her pragmatic conclusion is that “we need to support organic farming around the world; the bottom line is that there is world trade and we have a responsibility to promote and support organic farming in other countries, we can’t just focus on ourselves”.
On that philosophical note, Elliott has to get back to her new baby. But first, she might just nip past the organic baby food section….
