Walmart’s ‘Regenerative Foodscape’
Walmart’s efforts to redefine itself as a regenerative company are at odds with its low-cost model, and combined with the Walton family’s vast investments in regenerative agriculture, have the potential to remake the marketplace.
November 1, 2023 | Source: Civil Eats | by Lisa Held
Flat, sprawling farm fields fill the screen. A fisherman tosses a net into pristine waters. Then, Rob Walton, eldest son of Walmart founder Sam Walton, enters the frame in an outdoorsy vest over a dress shirt, tree branches blurred behind him. As he begins to talk, family photos appear one by one. First, just a few kids with their parents on a couch, then those kids with their kids outside on lawn chairs. There’s Sam Walton and his wife Helen in front of a waterfall, then paddling a canoe with a smiling little boy in the bow.
“That environmental focus that our generation has latched onto,” says their grandson Tom Walton, picking up the narration from his uncle in the marketing video posted by the Walton Family Foundation in 2018, “Sam and Helen taught us at an early age.”
After years of philanthropic support for fisheries, water, and education, members of his generation (along with some of their elders) are not only accelerating that environmental focus, they’re applying it to food and agriculture in new ways.