Whole Foods to stop selling products made by inmates

Despite confirming that “a pretty big chunk” of Haystack Mountain Goat Dairy’s goat cheese had gone to Whole Foods customers, an official for the Longmont-based producer said Thursday that Whole Foods’ decision to stop selling products made using a Colorado-based prison labor program wouldn’t adversely affect the dairy’s relationships either with the natural-foods grocer or with Colorado Correctional Industries.

Michael Allen, founder of End Mass Incarceration Houston, organized the protest.

Prison work programs are great in theory, if they’re not treated as plain servitude, and if users can learn a skill that’ll decrease their likelihood of recidivism after release.

Whole Foods now sells goat cheese, trout and tilapia made by inmates in Colorado.

The spokesman added: ‘We felt that supporting suppliers who found a way to be part of paid, rehabilitative work being done by inmates would help people get back on their feet and eventually become contributing members of society’.

A Whole Foods store in New York’s Union Square is pictured.

“One of our core values as a company is supporting our communities”, a Whole Foods spokesperson said. One of its marketing campaigns states, “We want to have the information to make meaningful choices about what we decide to buy and support”.

Protesters have called the practice exploitative and noted that most of the prisoners doing the labor are African-Americans. They hope to expand the prison labor program over the next decade.

By a few accounts, though, they’re progressive.

But Scaggs says he’s still a supporter of the prison labor program that CCI has created in Colorado. Four shifts of prisoners work 24 hours a day protecting the goats from predators, Scaggs said. Distributors then ship it to retailers – which had included Whole Foods.