The Food Connection: How Our Grocery System Impacts Everything

The $800 billion Americans spend annually on groceries isn't just about filling our plates—it's a force that shapes our healthcare system, environmental future, and even the balance of power in our society. At Commonwealth Grocers, we believe understanding these connections is the first step toward building a better food system.

Food: The Hidden Healthcare Crisis

When we talk about America's healthcare crisis, we rarely begin the conversation in our grocery aisles. Yet the evidence is clear: our food system is perhaps the single most significant contributor to our nation's health problems.

The Preventable Disease Epidemic

The statistics tell a devastating story:

• Six in ten Americans live with at least one chronic disease, with four in ten managing multiple conditions
• Chronic diseases are the leading drivers of the nation's $3.8 trillion in annual healthcare costs
• Poor diet is linked to increased risk of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and certain cancers
• Diet-related diseases cause approximately 678,000 deaths annually in the U.S.

Yet critically, many of these conditions are preventable through dietary changes. Nutrition, it turns out, is perhaps our most powerful but underutilized preventative medicine.

The Profit-Driven Nutritional Race to the Bottom

Our current grocery system operates on a perverse incentive structure that actively works against public health:

This system creates a brutal feedback loop: Food companies maximize profits by using cheap ingredients (refined flours, sugars, industrial oils) and extensive processing. Grocery chains maximize profits by prioritizing these products on their shelves. Consumers are steered toward these options through placement, price, and marketing—then suffer the health consequences.

The Affordability-Health Double Bind

As food prices rise, this problem intensifies. A 2023 study in the Journal of Nutrition found that higher-quality diets cost approximately $1.50 more per day than lower-quality diets. For a family of four, that's nearly $2,200 per year.

This creates a painful irony: Those who can least afford healthcare are often forced into dietary choices that increase their likelihood of needing medical intervention. With 40% of Americans struggling to pay a surprise $400 expense, the long-term health investment of better food often loses out to immediate financial pressures.

Rising food costs don't just make grocery shopping harder—they make healthcare less accessible by forcing trade-offs between quality nutrition and other necessities.

Food and Climate: The Environmental Imperative

The environmental impact of our food system extends far beyond what's on our plates. From farm to grocery store to table, our current approach creates an outsized ecological footprint.

Project Drawdown's Food Solutions

According to Project Drawdown, a leading resource for climate solutions, food-related interventions represent some of our most powerful tools for reducing greenhouse gas emissions:

• Reducing food waste could prevent 87.4-94.6 gigatons of CO₂ equivalent emissions. Yet our current grocery system wastes approximately 30-40% of all food produced, with supermarkets being major contributors through overstocking, cosmetic standards, and inefficient inventory management.
• Plant-rich diets could reduce emissions by 65.9-91.7 gigatons by decreasing reliance on resource-intensive meat and dairy production. Yet grocery stores disproportionately promote and display animal products, dedicating prime shelf space and marketing dollars to these high-margin items.
• Local food systems can reduce transportation emissions and food waste while supporting regional biodiversity. The average American meal travels 1,500-2,500 miles from farm to plate, creating unnecessary carbon emissions that could be avoided through more localized systems.

The Energy-Intensive Grocery Store

Traditional supermarkets are environmental liabilities in their own right:

• Grocery stores use about 50 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity per square foot annually—approximately three times more than a typical office building
• A single supermarket's refrigeration system can leak refrigerants with global warming potential thousands of times greater than CO₂
• The average supermarket consumes 1.5 million gallons of water annually
• Excessive packaging, often used to extend shelf life and create marketing opportunities, generates mountains of waste

The irony is striking: Many consumers who want to make environmentally conscious choices are forced to participate in a system that undermines those very values. Shopping for organic produce in a massive, energy-intensive retail space surrounded by excess packaging creates an unnecessary environmental contradiction.

Food and Power: Who Controls What We Eat?

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of our current food system is how it concentrates power in the hands of a few corporations while disempowering communities and individuals.

The Rise of Food Oligarchy

The consolidation of our food system is staggering:

• Just four corporations control approximately 80% of beef processing
• Four companies control 66% of the pork market
• The top four grain companies control nearly 90% of the global grain trade
• Four retailers account for more than 60% of U.S. grocery sales

This concentration creates profound vulnerabilities and imbalances:

Food Security as Control

"Who controls your food controls you" isn't just a saying—it's the reality of power dynamics in our society. When communities cannot feed themselves:

• Food deserts expand: Corporate grocers abandon less profitable neighborhoods, creating nutritional wastelands in low-income areas
• Price manipulation occurs: Without competition, dominant players can set prices that extract maximum profit
• Food becomes leverage: During crises (like the COVID-19 pandemic), communities without local food resilience face heightened vulnerability
• Cultural food traditions erode: Standardized industrial food replaces regional varieties and heritage foods

This power imbalance affects everything from public policy to land use. Agricultural subsidies flow primarily to large industrial operations. Zoning laws favor big-box retail over community food infrastructure. Environmental regulations bend to accommodate powerful industry players.

The $800 billion Americans spend on groceries isn't just purchasing food—it's financing a system that concentrates decision-making power over one of our most fundamental needs in the hands of distant corporations with priorities that often conflict with community wellbeing.

The Political Economy of Food

Food system power translates directly into political power:

• The food and agriculture sector spent over $175 million on lobbying in 2022 alone
• These lobbying efforts have successfully shaped farm bills, nutrition guidelines, labeling requirements, and much more
• Corporate influence has steered agricultural subsidies toward commodity crops that serve as inputs for processed foods rather than supporting diverse, nutritious farming
• Food corporations actively combat local food sovereignty initiatives that might reduce dependence on their products

The result is a self-reinforcing cycle: Economic power generates political influence, which creates policies that further consolidate economic power, all while consumers continue to fund this system with their grocery dollars.

The Commonwealth Solution: Rebuilding the Food System from the Ground Up

At Commonwealth Grocers, we recognize that these interconnected problems—healthcare costs, environmental damage, and power imbalances—cannot be solved in isolation. They require a fundamental reimagining of how our food system works.

Healthcare Through Food Access

Our model addresses the healthcare crisis by:

• Making nutritious food more affordable: By eliminating retail markup and inefficiencies, healthy options become accessible to more people
• Prioritizing quality over marketing: Without slotting fees and paid product placement, foods compete on their merits, not their marketing budgets
• Creating direct consumer-producer relationships: Producers can focus on nutrition and quality rather than shelf-stability and packaging
• Reducing the price gap between processed and whole foods: Our efficient system narrows the artificial price advantage of unhealthy options

When preventative healthcare through nutrition becomes affordable, we reduce the downstream costs—both financial and human—of diet-related disease.

Environmental Stewardship Through Efficiency

Our approach directly addresses the environmental challenges of our food system:

• Near-zero food waste: By ordering only what members have already committed to purchase, we eliminate the structural waste of the retail model
• Efficient fulfillment centers: Our operations use 70-80% less energy than traditional supermarkets by eliminating the "grocery theater" of displays and aisles
• Optimized logistics: Consolidated deliveries to fulfillment centers reduce transportation emissions compared to multiple supplier-to-store shipments
• Local food ecosystems: Our regional approach shortens supply chains and reduces food miles
• Minimal packaging: Without the need for marketing-driven packaging on retail shelves, we can minimize excess materials

These efficiencies aren't just cost-saving measures—they're essential environmental interventions that align with the highest-impact climate solutions identified by experts.

Democratizing Food Power Through Ownership

Most fundamentally, Commonwealth Grocers redistributes power within the food system:

• Community ownership: Every member owns a piece of the system, ensuring decisions reflect community needs
• Producer partnership: Direct relationships with farmers and producers give them greater negotiating power and stability
• Wealth circulation: Profits stay within the community rather than flowing to distant shareholders
• Food sovereignty: Communities gain control over their food supply, reducing vulnerability to corporate decisions
• Transparent operations: Member-owners have visibility into all aspects of the system

When people own the system that feeds them, the incentives align with their wellbeing rather than with extracting maximum profit.

Everything Comes Back to Food

The $800 billion grocery market isn't just an economic sector—it's a lynchpin that influences virtually every aspect of our society:

• Public health outcomes are directly tied to food accessibility and quality. Diet-related diseases cost our healthcare system hundreds of billions annually.
• Economic opportunity is shaped by who controls food production and distribution. The concentration of the food industry has decimated small farms and local businesses.
• Environmental sustainability depends significantly on how we produce, distribute, and consume food. Our current system is a leading contributor to climate change, biodiversity loss, and resource depletion.
• Community resilience is impossible without food security. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the fragility of global supply chains and the vulnerability of communities dependent on them.
• Cultural identity is preserved and expressed through food traditions. Corporate standardization threatens culinary diversity and the knowledge systems it represents.
• Democratic participation is undermined when basic necessities like food are controlled by powerful interests that can leverage access for influence.

By transforming how we organize our food system—shifting from a model of extraction and concentration to one of regeneration and distribution—we can address multiple interconnected crises simultaneously.

Commonwealth Grocers isn't just offering a more convenient or affordable way to shop. We're building infrastructure for a more healthy, sustainable, and democratic society—one grocery order at a time.

Join the Food Revolution

The path to transforming our food system starts with a simple choice: where and how you spend your grocery dollars. By joining Commonwealth Grocers:

• You withdraw support from a broken system and invest in a better alternative
• You become an owner rather than just a consumer
• You help build local food resilience in your community
• You contribute to a healthier, more sustainable food future

Every meal matters. Every dollar spent on food either reinforces the current system or helps build something better. At Commonwealth Grocers, we believe that the $800 billion Americans spend on groceries each year can become the funding stream for a fundamental transformation of how we feed ourselves and our communities.

Food connects everything. It's time our food system connected us to health, sustainability, and shared prosperity rather than disease, environmental degradation, and concentrated power.

The revolution starts at your table.