Veronica DelVillano is of one of those crossover customers.
She has lived and worked in the Fairmount area all of her life. When the rest of her family moved to the suburbs and to New Jersey, she stayed on as a child-care worker in the neighborhood she loves.
The opening of Fresh Fields marked the 30-something single's first time in a natural-foods market.
``I think I'll be changing my diet,'' she announced, gushing over the foods and visual appeal of the store she says is ``very much needed here.''
And why not, when 9 out of 10 consumers surveyed say they would choose organic foods over conventional if the prices were comparable. For many shoppers in areas like Fairmount, where the competition is mostly small family-owned groceries, even the higher prices of organic foods are often comparable.
As the nation's largest natural-foods retailer, the Whole Foods Market chain is in the vanguard of an industry-wide expansion that helped push natural-food sales to more than $9 billion in 1995.
Organic foods account for $2.8 billion of that total.
Just since 1995, Whole Foods has grown from 41 stores to 70, an expansion that included the merger with Fresh Fields in June, putting the stores in 17 states, plus the District of Columbia. The Fresh Fields name is being retained in the mid-Atlantic area.
With this expansion, Whole Foods and other natural-foods stores are targeting the 60 million or so Americans who are increasingly concerned with health and nutrition, many of whom are trying to change their diet.
That, plus the fact that the typical health-food shopper is a college graduate with an income of more than $50,000 a year, makes it a market suppliers want to reach. To that end, food companies are adding new products geared to the natural-foods market.
