How To Be A Whole Foods Brand In Five Steps

Whole Foods: the legendary land of unnecessary, overhyped organic food brands that only people in their 20s have any interest in purchasing. If you think you’ve got what it takes to join them in the Halls of Healthy, then you’ve come to the right place. Here’s what you need to do:

Step 1: Take a normal product and make it fancy.

Have you ever looked at your bottled water and said, “This is too cheap and unoriginal”? No? Well, your target audience has. They want their water to come from a sacred aquifer on a distant fairytale island or from a waterfall at the base of a rainbow. You’ve got to be hip, you’ve got to be trendy, and most of all, you’ve got to be amazed at how much people are willing to pay for what amounts to “flavored water.” Besides, nobody has the time to be original these days! Think about it: Whole Foods is a fancy supermarket. Amazon is a fancy bookstore. Capitalism is a fancy way of committing highway robbery. Nobody makes money by being creative anymore! (See: the roster of Disney live-action remakes.)

Step 2: Come up with a vague, inspirational name.

Why would you want to buy “Almond Flour”? It’s probably several times more expensive than regular flour and tastes like sawdust. Instead, take a word that people occasionally use to describe something related to your product, write it in all-caps, and slap it on your product. If that doesn’t work, you can also translate the name to a very foreign language, like Gujarati or Lithuanian, and change the spelling slightly. Why? Because your clients will only be interested in your product if it comes from Brooklyn or from a secretive cult of almond-growers in Arabia. Or India. Also, misspelling your product’s name is a great overall rule of thumb. One graphic designer consultation later, and MIGGDOU Almond Flour will be selling out in Tribeca!

Step 3: Make it a rebellion.

We’ve established that nobody likes normal products anymore, but you can’t just produce VAPEUR medicinal tea without giving it a dramatic backstory involving some kind of rebellion against society. Whether you’re going back to mankind’s roots or bringing the future to today, you’ve got to do something unique. Maybe you’ll donate 0.1 percent of all profits to charity, because “by buying our product, you’ve chosen to stop being a puppet of the mainstream and to become a woke influencer.” Maybe you’ll mix a special “secret panacea mushroom” into your tea that “doctors don’t want you to know about.” Whatever it is, throw in a few buzz-words and people will buy far too much of it.

Step 4: Once you have a successful product, produce a lot of junky variants.

If you’ve got the podcast-binging, tea-chugging, streak-addicted millennials hooked on your “lifestyle brand,” there’s no reason not to branch out. After all, while some millennials will be happy to buy KHURN whole-milk cow butter, there are others who only like goat butter, or sheep butter, or even reindeer butter. So instead of going back to the drawing board and coming up with a new product, just pump out a whole line of variants! Somewhere, there’s got to be a portion of the population that only eats garbanzo-flour toast with giraffe-milk butter for breakfast. If you can cater to them, they’ll snap up your product like crazy.

Step 5. Sell out to Amazon.

At this point, a 365 parody of your product line is probably in the making, and once it gets released, you’re going to lose a lot of money. So before this happens, offer to sell your super-fancy egg line to the Egghead himself, Jeff Bezos. After all, the ostrich-egg and lizard-egg buyers will be just as happy to get their eggs from the Whole Foods house brand, and Bezos might grant you clemency the next time you try to get a product from the Whole Foods aisles. This is, in fact, your final step: rinse and repeat, in order to keep the profits coming in. After all, when you can sell people a carton of eggs for $20, you can make money no matter how bad the actual product is!