Wal-Mart plans to make organic food items affordable to more customers

Wal-Mart plans to leverage its massive size to drive down the price of organic food items from tomato paste to chicken broth in a bid extend its affordability to its low-income customers, AP reports.

The world's largest retailer has roped in the world's largestoperator of natural foods stores and farmers markets in North America, Wild Oats, to offer a new line of organic foods, starting this month, that was at least 25 per cent cheaper than the national organic brands Walmart retailed and in line with the prices of its branded non-organic alternatives.

Wild Oats which pioneered the organic food trend in the late 1980s had largely disappeared from store shelves since 2007.

The company's 6-ounce can of tomato paste, for example, retails for 58 cents, as against 98 cents for a national-brand organic version. And a 32-ounce can of chicken broth under Wild Oats is priced at $1.98, as against $3.47 for a national-brand alternative, as per the discounter's survey of 26 nationally branded organic products available at Walmart.com.

Wal-Mart Stores Inc would unveil nearly 100 pantry items under the Wild Oats label in the next several months, adding to the 1,600 organic food items it already had on shelves.

The retailer was adopting a cautious approach, with plans to have them in about half of its 4,000 domestic namesake stores to make sure it could satisfy demand.

Meanwhile according to an SFGate.com report, organic processed foods which would become more plentiful and much cheaper at Walmart stores could change the landscape of California agriculture.

The push by the country's largest grocer showed that organics was not just a passing fancy for the rich, according to experts, who predict that mainstream demand would induce largest farm state in the US to ramp up its organic production.

Among the 100 staples that the Colorado company owned by the Los Angeles investment would be items from olive oil and spices to spaghetti sauce and canned vegetables.

According to California farmers and food processors, they had seen the organic market grow to a $29 billion business in the US nearly quadrupling in the past decade, but there was no question that the Walmart deal would further fuel demand.