This article is taken from the April 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
I first became aware of Erewhon — not the 1848 Samuel Butler satire whose title is an anagram of “Nowhere”, but the cultish Los Angeles supermarket chain frequented by celebrities — on Instagram. In one typical reel, I watched as the winsomely humorous nutritionist Marianna Moore, known for demonstrating “healthy food for lazy bitches” to more than a million followers, filmed herself eating her way through an Erewhon “mukbang” (massive spread).
She displayed, bit into and narrated such apparent classics as buffalo cauliflower, BBQ tofu sticks and kelp noodle salad, generating thousands of likes as she did so. I began to notice that Erewhon was the very opposite of its namesake: everywhere, part ideal, part joke, a media genre in itself and clearly a hypersonic commercial success.
Many call it a cult. Before he lost his marbles, during Covid Kanye West coined the viral term “Erewhon drip” to denote the correct pandemic-era wardrobe befitting a stroll to the shop: just one sandal, tracksuit bottoms, general pyjama-esque vibes. The look is casual billionaire.
“Someone has seen past what we say we want — to whatever it is we will actually buy,” observed New York magazine’s The Cut, in a deep dive on the supermarket chain. It’s “a process of discovery that began with Japanese utopians and progressed to $40 jars of sea-moss gel”.
“Less a supermarket than a sanctum,” opined Forbes, “it operates on the principle that purity — of ingredients, of body, of mind — is the highest virtue. To enter an Erewhon is to move through a space where every purchase signals a kind of moral choice.” Maybe so, but to many in the roving, trend-oriented globalised middle class, including me, that space looks irresistible. And the allure speaks for itself. Erewhon has become a classic business school case study. Despite having only 11 highly localised outlets (LA only), and with no attempt at “accessibility”, it rakes in close to $200m per year, which is a lot for a business of that size.
Erewhon’s success snugly fits within a broader wellness frenzy; the global wellness industry is due to hit £10 trillion by 2030, and it already represents around 6 per cent of global GDP. “Health has now become the ultimate must-have status symbol,” Dugal Bain-Kim, LA-based CEO of Lifeforce — one of the country’s top longevity businesses — told me. Erewhon is the softer delivery end of the wider movement, but it also shapes it.
The business’s backstory is quite odd, beginning more than 75 years ago in war-scorched Japan. In 1951, a young Japanese woman, who went by the name of Aveline, came to America to meet a man called Michio Kushi, with whom she had only corresponded. Both were disciples of George Ohsawa, the guru of a Zen Buddhist-inspired diet cult.
Aveline, who had been given permission to go abroad by Ohsawa, was to spread the wisdom of the guru’s Unique Principle, a manifesto for world peace that revolved around what he called a “macrobiotic diet”: more grains, absolutely no sugar, vegetables, never any meat. People, the movement insisted, must balance yin and yang foods or else face terrible outcomes.
Finally united on the East Coast, Aveline and Kushi started work on building a community of acolytes in Cambridge, MA, who lived in “study houses” and hung out, or worked, in their wholesale shop, which sold grains and seeds in bins. This was the original Erewhon, named after Butler’s book about a land where each individual is responsible for their own health. No wonder it was a favourite of Ohsawa.
In the 1970s, Aveline went to LA to seek specialised medical care for her son (Japanese bone massage therapy for an intractable knee injury). She opened an Erewhon in Beverly Hills, finding the West Coast very sympatico to the movement’s extreme doctrine, and was soon serving film stars and other acolytes. By 1978, Erewhon was turning over $10m in sales a year. It was hippyish, but not in the socialist sense: rather amusingly, Aveline was disgusted when workers unionised, telling them they ought to eat better instead.
Despite a committed fan base, Erewhon’s dubious messaging, erratic operational practices and hopeless finances meant it had almost withered away by the end of the noughties. Then, in 2011, the food distribution tycoon Tony Antoci and his wife Josephine, bought its one remaining outpost. From there, thanks to the highly distinctive design choices of the stores, plus all the on-trend graphics and marketing, the celebrity tie-ins, relentless and intuitive symbiosis with influencers, as well as the outlandish smoothies and tonics, beautiful produce and gorgeous prepared food, it’s been up, up, up.
Back in London, the social media algorithm was feeding me more and more content selling the Erewhon way of life. Truth be told, I have dabbled a bit in the heavily mediated, woo-woo-ish world of “adaptogens” and powders containing things like “holy basil” and lion’s mane mushroom, packaged in pretty jars with labels reading, amongst those I have in my kitchen: Mind, Rose, Butterfly Pea and Golden Milk.
But their (largely placebo) calming effects only go so far in the grey streets of North West London. I wanted to experience the feeling of an Erewhon unmediated by influencers, to clutch one of those smoothies myself, to interact with the staff making them. I wanted to sip a famous Jing City tonic, with deer antler, ghee and crushed ant, whilst meditating on how, whilst much of America seems to be in painful chaos, this corner of it is more affluent, glittering and shameless than ever.
And so I set off from a dreary London to Los Angeles. I arrived in Santa Monica in a storm. Waking at 3am the next day with wind and rain swirling about my windows, I hunkered down in bed, drinking espresso and eating a minibar snack of peanut butter-stuffed dates. Four hours till Erewhon opened.
At 20-to, I headed out into the cold — a solitary pedestrian — and strolled through the doors of the Santa Monica shop at 7.05. It was already busy. A skeletal woman in Alo workout gear queued at the till with a basket containing fermented English muffins and one of the chain’s famous kale salads. Crumpled tall men wearing baseball caps lined up at the tonic bar to order coffee and smoothies, and a middle-aged woman with a cross in ash on her forehead, clearly fresh from an Eastern morning ritual, ordered an almond milk latte with honey (Erewhon makes its own nut milks).
I did the rounds and enjoyed, as I expected, the imaginative range of products: the uber-supplements, gummies for everything from sleeping to beauty, drops for toddler constipation, and the interesting packaging of products both chi-chi (hyper-oxygenated water) and banal (plain yoghurt) plus the beautiful prepared food. It really is ticklish to load a shopping basket with spirulina popcorn cooked in coconut oil, “addictive wellness chocolate”, watermelon electrolytes in a jar labelled “hydration, brain” and a couple of carrots, whilst sipping your “activated smoothie” with MCT oil, mesquite and dandelion.
But I was surprised too by how familiar the prices and the products felt. If once Erewhon was the outer stratosphere, wildly out of reach for ordinary mortals, the inroads it has made through the fast-moving fusion of grocery with wellness have been sharp and deep. The presence of micro-, macro- and pre-biotic drinks on the UK high street, of protein powders and the gut-boosting, fibrous supplements sold everywhere from Waitrose to Holland & Barrett, had prepared me for some of what I saw.
And the inflated prices of life here in Blighty too made Erewhon prices seem high, but not shockingly so. I was prepared to pay $30 for one of those legendary smoothies. Instead, I paid $19 for the famous Strawberry Glaze, a kind of facial that you drink, with “grass-fed vanilla collagen, Erewhon sea moss, hyaluronic acid”. It was so big I couldn’t finish it (it was also too sweet, and cold). I did get my hands too on a Jing City with antler and ghee — the nastiest drink I’ve had in years — which was $9. If you could stomach it, it wasn’t bad value, as it was very full and overwhelming. I bought a luxury candle for $30, and a jar of artichoke hearts on sale for $4 — less than at Waitrose.
America, California, Los Angeles: These remain at the epicentre of all global culture, not just wellness and woo-woo. Erewhon shocks and shills and sets trends in motion that will wind up in the smoothies of M&S’s drinks aisle.
Some of it is snake oil, some of it is not; nobody cares. What is clear is that the gap between Erewhon’s “let them eat sea moss gel” world and that of high streets the world over is narrowing as those who can spend more and more of their money on trying to beat the ravages of biology and time. Whether Erewhon can help in that is not something that can be answered — nor, perhaps, is it an answer any of its customers really want to hear.
