How a New Approach to Store Brands Helped Natural and Organic Foods Go Mainstream

When Denis Ring ’84 met with John Mackey, then the CEO of Whole Foods, for the first time in 1996, the expanding grocery chain wanted to develop a new private label called “365.” Private labels are product lines that retailers offer under their own brand name: Think Costco’s Kirkland Signature, Target’s Market Pantry, and most items at Trader Joe’s. Whole Foods had started exploring the idea and commissioned some possible logo designs, but leaders hadn’t yet figured out how to make a value-oriented project happen. Ring told Mackey that this move would be critical to Whole Foods’ survival.

“There’s a reason they call it Whole Paycheck,” Ring recalls saying. “Trader Joe’s is going to outcompete you in every market until you come up with an affordable private label.”

Mackey agreed. He put Ring, who had worked for several years in the food industry, in charge of developing 365. Ring recruited a friend and former Trader Joe’s buyer, Bob Johnson, to help him launch the incipient brand. They would manage vendors, graphics, delivery logistics, and customer and team education. And they would be held entirely accountable.

Was Ring scared? “Are you kidding me?” he says. “Absolutely.”

Ultimately, his big bet paid off. The 365 line was rolled out in sections ranging from dairy to body care, offering “natural” products free from ingredients such as artificial flavors or dyes, and eventually organic items as well. The brand became an enduring success, credited with drawing customers from conventional grocery stores and enabling them to buy high-quality products that, when created by smaller organic brands, are often financially out of reach. At one point, Ring recalls, the Texas division president said that the 365 label was the only reason he was seeing sales growth that quarter.

Ring went on to found the product development company Bode International, and his team created private labels for supermarkets such as H-E-B, Woolworths, and Safeway, where he developed an exclusively organic product line. Across these projects, his emphasis on forming relationships with suppliers, streamlining decision-making, and cultivating whimsy helped him create products that simultaneously garnered mass appeal and made an impact.

“What motivation does a consumer have to go for a generic brand that’s bland, boring, and predictable?” he says. “It’s okay to try and infuse joy, community, playfulness.”

From mushy vegetables to Whole Foods

Ring took a circuitous route to his work on private labels. He started out studying business at Santa Clara University, a Jesuit school in California, then joined the Jesuit order as a brother with the intent of becoming a priest. After working at organizations such as a hospital and an orphanage, he pursued a master’s degree in humanities. To explore how ethical issues played out in business, he then entered Yale SOM’s MBA program, where he honed his skills in financial analysis. He also dabbled in food, baking bread and pastries with a friend who had lived in Paris and auctioning off the items at fundraisers.

Ring eventually decided to leave the Jesuits and—after a brief stint in corporate strategy for a telecommunications company—realized that he felt drawn to the world of food. He hadn’t grown up in a foodie family; his Irish Catholic background, he recalls, meant a lot of “overcooked vegetables and nasty meatloaf.” But throughout his life, and particularly during his time with the Jesuits, “nothing was more emotionally, spiritually, and physiologically nourishing to me as being at table with people I cared about, having a good meal.”

Ring broke into the food space by helping local grocery stores in California with strategy. While doing that work, he met Walter Robb, who would later become co-CEO of Whole Foods. The pair decided to start an independent natural food store. Ring wrote a business plan and then, he says, “we both chickened out.” But Robb showed the business plan to John Mackey—who had co-founded Whole Foods in Texas about a decade earlier—and joined the company as a store team leader.

By the time Robb set up the 1996 meeting with Mackey, Ring had worked for Grocery Outlet and Daymon, a firm that acted as an in-house broker for Costco and created private labels. Ring told Mackey that he could develop Whole Foods’ new private label, but he had a few conditions. He didn’t want to work directly for the supermarket chain; he thought the company’s group decision-making process would result in good ideas getting vetoed. Mackey agreed and set up a subsidiary called 365 Everyday Value, giving Ring’s team 48% ownership in the brand.

Ring also stipulated that he had to receive “absolute, unquestioned support,” and that every store needed to carry the products. Otherwise, if his team developed, say, a cranberry-raspberry cocktail and ran it past 10 buyers, “5 are going to say, ‘Oh my god, this needs way more cranberry.’ The other 5 would say, ‘Oh my god, this is way too much cranberry,’” Ring says. “You have to trust that I can get this done.”

Style and substance

When Ring started working on 365, store brands were generally considered lower-quality and uninteresting. Ring had a different vision; he wanted 365 items to be bright and inviting, and “unapologetic on the shelf.” If a customer pulled a can of 365 diced tomatoes out of their cupboard, he says, “I wanted people to feel good about having that in their hands and in their kitchen.” If they bought 365 Italian sparkling mineral water, they should be able to “put it on a table with a beautiful label that doesn’t scream that we dumbed down the product.”

Ring used a variety of tactics to put that philosophy into practice. When he arrived at Whole Foods, designer Nancy Frame had already created a cheerful logo with green, yellow, blue, and red panels representing the four seasons. Now, Ring’s team added playful touches such as little cows walking across the tops of milk cartons. They worked with the National Audubon Society to create a narrative about egrets’ migratory route that was displayed on the backs of cereal boxes. And on that Italian mineral water—one of Ring’s favorite products—his team imprinted “365” on the molded glass bottle and surrounded the logo with floating bubbles.

But he knew that style wouldn’t count for anything if the products didn’t have substance, or if customers felt that Whole Foods was taking shortcuts to achieve lower prices. Shoppers can tell when stores cut corners, whether by skimping on the raisins in a box of cereal or being stingy with cheese and toppings on a frozen pizza, Ring says. He wanted to leave consumers “with a sense of ‘Wow, this was actually pretty good.’’’

To do that, he reached out to trusted contacts, such as an Italian company he knew he could count on for high-quality pasta, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar. At the same time, he needed to get the pricing right. In his negotiations with manufacturing partners, Ring strove to be transparent about the upcharges that would be added, the price an item would be sold for in stores, and his target profit margin. “I always acted with a sense of dignity and respect for the person on the other side of the table,” he says.

Bypassing the bureaucracy

After Mackey bought out his subsidiary in 2002, Ring left Whole Foods and founded Bode International, a private-label development firm. He worked with the Texas supermarket chain H-E-B to create a couple of store brands; then a friend who was in charge of Safeway’s private label program asked him to meet. The friend scribbled the letter “O” with the word “organic” under it on a napkin—Safeway’s organic line would eventually be named O Organics—and asked Ring if he could come up with 150 products in 10 months. Ring said yes. Then, he says, “I went into complete spasms of panic.”

With both supermarkets, Ring benefited from a streamlined decision-making process, which allowed him to get creative and meet tight deadlines. At supermarkets, the buyers who decide which products to offer in the store are often unwilling to take risks, because their bonuses are driven by profitability. Creativity, Ring says, “runs into this buzzsaw of ‘How will I know that it’s going to be successful?’”

At H-E-B, Ring worked with a small group of buyers comprised of chefs and foodies who were open to his experimental style. Under the accelerated timeline for O Organics, Ring ran each product by just four buyers. If his team came up with a plan for, say, a frozen burrito, “in one afternoon, that product could get final approval and move into design,” he says.

He also came up with new products that went beyond familiar flavors. For H-E-B’s private label, he asked an Italian manufacturer to provide a variety of citrus sodas: lemon, tangerine, red grapefruit, and so on. When the buyers asked what other flavors he had, Ring thought of blood oranges, which he and his wife were using at home. He asked the manufacturer if he could create a soda with that flavor, and by the following week the buyers were testing it—and approving.

At the time, Ring says, he didn’t know of any retailers selling blood orange soda in the United States. Now it’s a common sight in grocery stores. “That was one of the examples where a private label product led the way in the marketplace,” he says. “It was creative and delicious, and big brands followed.”

A creative culture

Eventually, Ring decided to try his hand at developing his own brand. At Whole Foods, he’d noticed that natural and organic versions of iconic products had become popular—for instance, kettle chips, raisin bran, and juices. “Well, somebody’s going to do an organic Snickers,” he remembers thinking. But, he says, “nobody did it.”

Ring filled the gap by founding Ocho Candy, a company that made organic chocolate bars. The firm manufactured its products at a factory in West Oakland, California and sold the candy to retailers ranging from Albertsons to Target. The brand had the same whimsical feel as the 365 label, with a logo in bright primary colors. In contrast to other chocolate brands with dark purple or black designs, Ring says, “I just wanted it to be a joyful, easy-to-buy product.”

He sold Ocho in 2020 to another company, which turned out to be over-leveraged and ultimately shut down the brand. Though now largely retired, he’s still overflowing with ideas. His advice to private label developers is to “dream,” he says. “Just dream.” Companies should embrace creativity and introduce three to five new products per quarter, he says. And employees should be able to take risks without being penalized if their ideas fail. A creative culture is good for company morale, and “that good positive energy radiates throughout the whole organization.”

Despite the varied directions that Ring’s career has taken him, food and community remain central themes. At Ocho in West Oakland, his team sometimes closed the parking lot on Fridays and turned up the music while employees shared foods from their cultures: Guatemalan, Ethiopian, Thai. He now meets regularly with other men from his parish at gatherings called Bourbon, Beef, and Benediction, where they talk about big questions over good meals.

“I really do feel that bringing people together comfortably, joyfully, over food, whether at Yale or in West Oakland or in Texas, anywhere, can only make all of our lives more beautiful,” he says.