This story is the first in a three-part series exploring Trader Joe’s brand identity and business practices. Check back tomorrow for the next installment digging into Trader Joe’s record number of food recalls.

In March, the internet’s most-hyped handbag was not a luxury offering from Chloé or a new viral Uniqlo shoulder bag. It was a $2.99 mini canvas tote made in Vietnam for Trader Joe’s. The humble tote got swooped up so fast, stores were forced to implement crowd-control tactics and cap the number they allowed shoppers to buy.

After seeing the bags on @traderjoeslist, an Instagram fan account with 1.9 million followers, content creator Thaddeus Yan ended up making more than a dozen trips to stores across Los Angeles on a quest to land just one. (He eventually succeeded at the eighth location.) Others, like TikTok user Elinor Kim, filmed free-for-alls that went viral, with footage of customers lunging after the totes like seagulls fighting for scraps of bread.

While the grocery chain’s loyal customers seemed eager to brave any hardship in their pursuit of the limited-edition bags, Trader Joe’s workers greeted the chaos with dread—an increasingly common employee reaction to the buying sprees that define the modern Trader Joe’s shopping experience. One worker in the Northeast told Fast Company that the crew at their store joked about quitting en masse but taking the mini totes as severance, to “list them on eBay for hundreds of dollars,” as shoppers do. This person asked to remain anonymous because they feared disciplinary reaction from the company, a concern that may be justified. In recent years, numerous workers have sued for wrongful termination or taken other legal action, saying Trader Joe’s fired them after they criticized COVID safety policies or in one case wrote the corporate office a letter expressing disagreement with the company’s Black Lives Matter stance.

Those weren’t the only problems facing the chain behind the scenes as Mini-Tote Mania seized the headlines. One day after the bags dropped, Trader Joe’s warned consumers that 30 tons of its popular steamed chicken soup dumplings could contain plastic—the 16th product recall in nine months, spanning everything from common pathogens (listeria, E. coli, salmonella) to rocks, glass shards, metal pieces, and insects in products. Weeks later, several makers of the kinds of quirky international snack foods you might find on the chain’s shelves accused Trader Joe’s of stealing their ideas. Just days after that, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration at the Department of Labor slapped Trader Joe’s with a record fine of nearly $217,000 for repeatedly violating federal workplace safety regulations. Finally, in the meantime, employees at stores around the country have mounted a drive to unionize—partly in response to some of these issues—and Trader Joe’s has responded by aggressively trying to thwart those efforts.

With a few exceptions noted throughout the text, Trader Joe’s declined to comment on most of the specific allegations we cover. In a statement to Fast Company, a spokesperson for the chain pointed to the company’s “widespread recognition as a great place to work,” citing its inclusion on several publications’ “best places to work” lists.

These articles are based on hundreds of conversations with current and former employees and industry experts, internal documents, and a trove of regulatory records and legal filings. The series will take readers inside Trader Joe’s secretive business operations, chronicle years of workplace safety issues and employee unrest, and examine the company’s marketing missteps and shaky record on product recalls—all while somehow remaining one of America’s most beloved and seemingly invincible brands.

The average Trader Joe’s shopper is a white married college graduate between 25 and 44 who earns $80,000 a year, “over-indexes” on social media use, and considers themselves to be early adopters of new trends. Arguably the key to Trader Joe’s success—and certainly its most envied by peers—is that the company has been so adept at encouraging these loyal fans to be its chief evangelizers and de facto marketing team.

The chain is privately owned and doesn’t release revenue data. But according to Progressive Grocer’s list of top North American grocery retailers, Trader Joe’s generates an estimated $17 billion in annual sales from 560 stores in 42 states and the District of Columbia—with a minimal digital footprint and no rewards programs of any kind. Its official marketing is all but nonexistent: little more than the Fearless Flyer newsletter, a popular podcast called Inside Trader Joe’s, and a modest social media presence, which consists of an Instagram with 3.2 million followers plus a LinkedIn company page and a YouTube channel that mostly cross-posts the podcast.

By comparison, Whole Foods is active on every major social platform and some of the smaller ones too. Walmart posts several TikToks per day and has 32 million Facebook followers. Kroger spends $1 billion a year on more traditional marketing.

Trader Joe’s, meanwhile, has succeeded by “purposely creating a culture that spawns affinity groups that will carry their news faster and more deeply than traditional PR,” says Nandi Welch, head of business strategy for the branding agency Rupture Studio (which has no business relationship with Trader Joe’s). These groups can be niche; Welch once belonged to a “Black women who love Trader Joe’s” Facebook group.

But they can also deliver large audiences: Besides @traderjoeslist, with 1.9 million followers, other popular Instagram fan accounts include @traderjoes5itemsorless (621,000 followers), @traderjoeskitchen (422,000 followers), @traderjoesobsessed (903,000 followers), and many more.

Most of these influencers clearly note that Trader Joe’s does not pay them; in this ecosystem, the spoils simply go to whomever can upstage the others’ weekly grocery hauls. “That is the shopper behavior Trader Joe’s has trained everyone on,” says Welch, whose clients have included Nike, Spotify, Moët Hennessy, and Dove. “It goes to how much people can be distracted. You can overcome huge obstacles as a brand if you provide everyday positive reinforcement for people.”

All this goodwill online is a powerful safeguard against bad PR. Even amid the barrage of negative press this year, the grocery chain’s public image remained strong. It ranked No. 5 on Forbes’s new Best Brands for Customer Service list, and took top marks under the discount supermarket category in a Newsweek/Statista ranking released this summer. In June, it surprise-dropped a new product: a $3.99 mini insulated cooler tote. The crowds descended again. Many stores once again sold out in minutes, drawing a new round of positive buzz.

And the original canvas totes that flew off shelves in March were back by popular demand in October, commanding a fresh round of favorable coverage. “Selling like hot cakes,” noted CNN, while Axios informed readers that they had arrived “just in time for beach season.”

Trader Joe’s was founded by a Los Angeles entrepreneur named Joe Coulombe in 1967 to combat what he called the “homogenization” of the American diet. In his 2021 memoir, Becoming Trader Joe, Coulombe wrote that most Americans’ diets had been “reduced to a common (low) denominator of Swanson TV Dinners, Minute Maid Orange Juice, Best Foods Mayonnaise, and Folgers coffee.” His core idea: Trader Joe’s would cater to “health food nuts” and differentiate itself by concentrating control on the supply side via private-labeling arrangements, where it could purchase high-quality items in bulk.

The brand found its groove by cultivating an image as a thoughtful West Coast neighborhood grocer that sold idiosyncratic products, prioritized employee happiness and honest ingredients, and even back then, cared about solving “the problem of the environment.”

Coulombe also spied untapped potential in the expanding culinary horizons of Americans in that era. He wanted the stores to appeal to aspiring international travelers (even if that “travel” was mostly limited to their own kitchens). The branding and ever-present nautical theme was intended to reinforce this. “Trader” Coulombe was so enamored with the midcentury cocktail fad that had swept the U.S. that he picked a business name that directly referenced Trader Vic’s. As a company mascot, Trader Joe would stand for the sophisticated traveler who, like its tiki-lounge bartender namesake, gathered “exotic” bounties abroad and brought them back home to share. In recent years, of course, the tiki identity has attracted criticism and widespread coverage for reducing Polynesian culture to simplistic stereotypes and ripping off the concepts these people invented without compensating them.

To appeal to his target consumer, Coulombe believed that Trader Joe’s branded products needed to carry “individualized labels aimed at the overeducated.” This led to some tortured Eurocentric wordplay: Sir Isaac Newtons, Trader Darwin’s vitamins, Heisenberg’s Uncertain Blend coffee, Gainsborough’s Blue Boy blueberry syrup, and Disraeli & Gladstone English muffins.

But for every type of Mexican food, the label said Trader José’s; for the Japanese items, it was Trader Joe San. By the 2010s, this “playful” name genericizing could be found on most foreign products: Arabian Joe’s “Middle Eastern Flatbread,” Armenian Joe’s eggplant wraps, Trader Ming’s as a catchall Asian label for the Chinese orange chicken as well as the pad thai.

In 2020, an online petition calling these names racist sparked a PR debacle. Trader Joe’s responded by promising “changes [would] be made” if those products stopped “resonating well,” and today the exoticized names have largely vanished. What is striking in hindsight is how many consumers couldn’t have cared less, even as the vocal minority successfully demanded change. In the immediate aftermath of the 2020 petition, nearly 80% of respondents to a Los Angeles Times poll said the controversy “would not change their feelings about Trader Joe’s or its products.”

In April this year, a group of food entrepreneurs who’d drawn followings for their own international snacks—products that could easily be mistaken for Trader Joe’s own—accused the company of intellectual property theft. Stories about this being a pattern have circulated for years in isolation, but the food magazine Taste ran an exposé where half a dozen producers claimed the brand used shadowy tactics to discuss partnering with them, oftentimes for long enough to solicit samples or get them to say which ingredients could be substituted to bring down the price point—only to then bail and release a cheaper Trader Joe’s-branded dupe.

“Trader Joe’s is like the food version of Zara or Shein,” popular chili crisp maker Fly by Jing’s founder Jing Gao told Taste after her encounter with the company. “With food, just like with fashion, whenever something is cheap, somewhere along the line, someone is being taken advantage of.”

A point of pride among some of Trader Joe’s most committed fans is the idea that patronizing the stores is good for the environment. Coulombe claimed in his book that Trader Joe’s embodied his “commitment to environmentalism,” citing the company’s embrace of energy-efficient diesel trucks and a store concept (which never came to fruition) known as the Trader Joe’s Biosphere. In 1977, Trader Joe’s became the first major grocer to offer reusable bags.

Yet more recently, Trader Joe’s has repeatedly run afoul of federal and state climate regulations while refusing consumers’ and advocacy groups’ entreaties to be more transparent.

Pressure from the public and industry watchdog groups over the past five years has been relentless. In 2019, the company was placed in the bottommost tier of the Center for Biological Diversity’s widely cited report grading grocery industry food waste. That same year, more than 100,000 people signed a viral petition titled simply “Reduce Plastic Packaging!” In 2020, the brand received a -7.62 on the Humane Society’s animal welfare ranking scorecard after a yearlong audit, got a D on Friends of the Earth’s Bee-Friendly Retailer Scorecard, and came in second to last on Green America’s Chocolate Scorecard ranking how well companies address child labor in the cocoa industry and commit to reducing deforestation.

Since then, it has received a 0 out of 1,700 on every Cornucopia Institute Organic Egg Scorecard, an F in antibiotics use in 2022 from a respected coalition of public health advocates (Consumer Reports, the Center for Food Safety, National Resources Defense Council, and U.S. Public Interest Research Groups), and the lowest scores possible on two different benchmarks in 2024—four 0s out of 100 on Toxic-Free Future’s safe packaging report, and two 0s out of 100 on the Climate-Friendly Supermarkets Scorecard ranking HFCs in refrigerant use, the industry’s biggest source of emissions.

Trader Joe’s has a long history with worrisome refrigerant emissions. From 2007 to 2016, the company battled with the EPA on the use of dangerous HCFCs, a class of coolants even more harmful than HFCs. The agency declared that 453 of Trader Joe’s 461 stores—98%—were violating the Clean Air Act, which led the Justice Department to bring charges. Trader Joe’s did not admit to any wrongdoing, but in 2016 it agreed to spend $2 million on corrective actions that included fixing its coolant leaks and opening a preset number of “Advanced Refrigeration Stores” by 2019 that replaced the old chemicals with less harmful refrigerants like CO2.

In 2020, Trader Joe’s was negotiating another settlement, this time over hazardous waste that 27 district attorneys and the city attorneys of Los Angeles and San Diego said it had disposed of improperly in California. This group, representing almost half the state, accused it of dumping toxic waste in the trash—at stores as well as its half-million-square-foot distribution centers—and submitting incomplete records to regulators. Trader Joe’s paid $595,000 in penalties and fees, and consented to five years of outside audits of its waste-management practices.

Neither legal drama made headlines. What did, in several national outlets, was a new “sustainability plan” that Trader Joe’s announced on the heels of the popular 2019 plastic reduction petition, drawing applause from longtime critics like Greenpeace for stating it would remove a million pounds of plastic within the year.

One million pounds of plastic per year sounds like a lot. In practice, it meant that each of Trader Joe’s 500-plus locations was committing to eliminate the amount of plastic waste produced annually by two to three U.S. households. The company didn’t lay out the specific steps it was taking to achieve this goal, just like it never publishes corporate social responsibility reports—a routine practice among all major competitors—for the sake of transparency. But a special episode of the Inside Trader Joe’s podcast announced that the company planned to eliminate the styrofoam that held pieces of fresh produce, plastic film lining the brand’s greeting cards, and wrappers used to enclose individual tea bags. The company also shared “really cool” news that it was switching to less harmful CO2-based refrigerator coolants. (There was no mention on the podcast that the switch was initially court ordered.)

On sustainability claims, most grocers worry about being accused of massaging their numbers to appear more sustainable. Trader Joe’s isn’t in much danger of that. By many metrics, it could hardly perform worse. Not only do environmental scorecards routinely rank it among the worst of its peers—it reflexively shields the data that could refute those awful scores. Trader Joe’s eco-friendly image emerges like a greenwashed Mandela effect, where a piece of misinformation somehow gets repeated as fact by enough people that everybody starts accepting it as true.

“There remains a vague sense—vibes mostly—that Trader Joe’s is on the right side of things,” says Jennifer Molidor, coauthor of the Center for Biological Diversity’s report. “Perhaps it is the low prices.” But once you put the vibes aside, the truth is more complicated.

In our next two stories—which will be published over the next two days—we’ll take a close look at what’s behind Trader Joe’s record number of food recalls and examine a spate of allegations of sexual harassment and safety violations.

© Fast Company