Glendale – Sherri McCutchen’s third-grade class spent Tuesday morning sipping smoothies and making trail mix as part of a field trip to their neighborhood Wild Oats Market. Their guide – Wild Oats employee Adria Fogel – taught them the basics of organic farming and the importance of eating whole grains.
The store hosts about two student groups a week. Nationally, the Boulder-based natural-foods grocer hosts about 700 student and other youth groups every year.
The trips are organized by a small privately owned Chicago company, Field Trip Factory Inc. While teachers hail the trips as a way for cash-strapped schools to teach real-life lessons, Field Trip Factory also has been criticized by some consumer groups for delivering the next generation of consumers directly to retailers’ doorsteps.
Field Trip Factory organized 224 trips in Colorado this year.
“We script our field trips so they are solidly educational,” said Susan Singer, president of Field Trip Factory. “They are not selling anything other than nutrition and welfare.”
Locally, Wild Oats and Englewood-based Sports Authority have signed on with Field Trip Factory. Others in Field Trip Factory’s lineup include Petco, Albertsons and Saturn.
“It’s a good way for us to be able to reach out to the community by offering a free educational field trip that meets teaching curriculum at a time when funding for field trips is dwindling,” Wild Oats spokeswoman Kristi Estes said.
While she said kids might find products they like or want to come back to visit the staffers they meet, the biggest benefit is the boost to the company’s image, she said.
Shoppers could be drawn to stores that they perceive as supporting education, said Donald Lichtenstein, a professor of marketing at the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business. Also, kids already receive so many marketing messages that the field trips aren’t problematic as long as they’re not overtly marketing-oriented, he added.
Field Trip Factory advertises and schedules the trips, writes scripts and trains store staffers to lead the outings. Stores pay a fee – which Singer declined to reveal – to the company.
As evidence that the trips are well-received and educational, the company has a 98 percent repeat rate among teachers, Singer said.
Tuesday’s trip to Wild Oats was the third for McCutchen, a teacher at Most Precious Blood Catholic School in Denver. She learned about the Field Trip Factory from an postcard they mailed her three years ago.
“I teach a section on nutrition, and I thought it was a great connection,” McCutchen said. On Tuesday’s tour, each kid carried a clipboard with hand-drawn food “pyramids,” and McCutchen frequently reminded them how the products they saw correlated.
“It’s a great way for them to apply the lessons they’ve learned,” she said.
Although the school year ends this week, McCutchen is already planning to schedule a field trip to Petco to coordinate with a lesson on animal life cycles she’ll teach next year.
While the students eagerly answered questions about vitamins and good health, it was clear that the lessons weren’t necessarily their favorite part of the trip.
That honor went to the samples, which included dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets, goat cheese, cheese pizza and soy milk.
“I like it,” student Paige O’Hagan said of her store tour. “I liked the soy milk best.”
Staff writer Kristi Arellano can be reached at 303-820-1902 or karellano@denverpost.com.
