Texas Monthly Talks
John Mackey
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Let’s talk specifically about the grocery business. What got you interested in it as opposed to something else? When I was growing up, my mother was totally fascinated by all of the labor-saving devices like TV dinners and stuff you could get in a can and open up and pour out and eat. For her it was a revolution, a release from the kind of cooking slavery that housewives had endured for a long time. But to me, when I came of age, when I became a young adult, it seemed like plastic food. It didn’t seem authentic. I was attracted to natural food because it was real. And then I became aware that what you ate affected your health and well-being and longevity and how you felt. And it was like, wow—food raised the way it had been raised for thousands of years. Not putting poisons on it. Not sticking a bunch of chemicals in it. Not sticking it in cans.
The first natural-food store I ever walked into was a little co-op in Austin. They had food in bulk bins. I’d never seen a whole thing of rice before. Or barrels of beans. It was really exciting. I joined the co-op and started to get interested in food, and then I moved into a vegetarian co-op. The honest truth is that I wasn’t a vegetarian, but I thought, “I bet there are some really cool people living in that co- op, and I bet there are some really cool women living in that co-op.” I was right on both counts. I learned how to cook, and I got to be around people who were interested in the same things I was beginning to get interested in, so I found peers. I was alienated from society, and I wanted there to be a deeper meaning to my life. Food is what I got into.
You talk about “natural food,” but some people think of Whole Foods as a health-food store. Explain the difference. People don’t like to create new categories. When we encounter something genuinely new, we try to force it into an existing category, whether or not it fits. There was a health-food industry that mostly sold vitamins and a kind of “su perfood,” food that had magical powers. The idea was that if you took pills and ate superfood, you’d be really healthy. The natural food movement, which is where my roots are, thought, “No, not superfood—real food, authentic food, whole food, food that’s not technologically altered.” When science meets the organic, it begins to manipulate it, and not always in good ways. If you are trying to get into the real emotional, spiritual, psychological, philosophical energy that’s behind the natural food movement, it’s basically wanting food to be as natural and real and as minimally engineered and processed as possible.
How involved are you these days in the minute details of the business? Not. Where I’m attached is the philosophy of the business. When I feel like someone is moving away from our mission, I dig my heels in and say no. If I feel like somebody is trying to undermine our culture, I say no.
Give me an example. One of the co-found ers of the company wanted us to sell cigarettes. And, in fact, one of our stores in Dallas sold them back in 1986.
Did you know it at the time? No. Whole Foods has a policy that it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission. Part of our culture is to be forgiving. Try experiments. If it doesn’t work, get rid of it.
So selling cigarettes didn’t work. Actually, it was working in terms of sales. They were selling American Spirits—natural tobacco. There are no artificial ingredients, no artificial flavorings, no added chemicals. The argument was, “Hey, we sell beer and wine. We sell ice cream. We sell things that aren’t good for people. Why shouldn’t we be able to sell this? We’re not saying we should sell Marlboros, because they’ve got a bunch of chemicals in them. But these are natural cigarettes.” There’s a certain logic to that point of view. But, of course, the other point of view is that it completely contradicts the Whole Foods image. We had so many angry customers. They were mad because they had an image of Whole Foods in their minds. And now we weren’t conforming to it anymore.
I wonder if the size of the new store will contradict that image as well. I mean, who needs an 80,000-square-foot supermarket? Why is the existing 35,000-square-foot store not good enough? When you see the new store, you’ll know why. We’re going to have every kind of prepared food you can imagine. We’re going to have a much better salad bar than we have now. We’ll have a pizza oven. We’ll have Chinese food, Indian food, Middle Eastern food, Mexican food. We’ll have a chocolate-enrobing station.
A chocolate-enrobing station? This is a great example of how Whole Foods innovations occur. You know how, on Valentine’s Day, people dip strawberries in chocolate? A local person at Whole Foods said, “Why don’t we do it all year?” So they started a little entrepreneurial chocolate-dipping thing in one of our stores, and it was hugely successful. Then we did it in our Columbus Circle store, in New York, and we made a big deal out of it there.
Just strawberries? No, anything. Even special orders.
What if I want asparagus dipped in chocolate? No request too weird? No. Somebody asked for salmon to be enrobed, so they got chocolate-enrobed salmon.
How many of these decisions have been made based on what your customers want versus what the competition is doing? Our most important stakeholder is the customer, so we’re always trying to figure out how to give the customer a better experience.
Do you use focus groups? That’s sort of top-down. The way our culture works is, we’ve got 166 stores, and every one of them is innovating and experimenting. The team leader at every store can spend up to $100,000 a year without asking for permission. We want them to try different things, and the things that are successful we’ll study and copy and improve on. Most businesses have these command-and-control models. McDonald’s is the best example of that. They’re cookie cutters. They have a formula that works. Don’t surprise the customers. Give them exactly what they expect. Make it consistent. It’s the mass-mar ket football model of executing the game plan—don’t fumble the ball, don’t make any mistakes. Whole Foods is more like a fast-breaking basketball team. We’re driving down the court, but we don’t exactly know how the play is going to evolve.
So you don’t care at all about the competition? You don’t care that the flagship Central Market, in Austin, just massively retooled in a way that seems to have your new store in its sights? I never said I don’t care about the competition. I’m a very competitive person. There are times when my wife won’t play games with me, for example. A lot of people don’t want to be my partner in card games because I’m very intense and I want to win. But I like it when competitors do things that are innovative. If we get an idea from them, we can spread it around to our whole company. If we steal something from Central Market in Austin and it shows up in our Chicago stores, we’re better off as a result, and so are our customers.
Do you ever shop at Central Market? Of course not.
Why not? It’s a matter of principle. Can you see how it would play in the newspapers?
Wait a minute. What if you were an executive at an airline that doesn’t fly everywhere? Are you not going to travel to those places? Or are you going to suck it up and hop on another airline? There is nothing I eat that I can’t get at Whole Foods.
Have you ever had a disappointing experi ence shopping at one of your own stores? Of course.
Tell me a specific story. Maybe the cashier is talking to the bagger instead of paying attention to the customer. That is completely against the philosophy of the business.
Do you ever say anything? Not directly to them, which would be inappropriate. What I would do instead is talk to the shift manager or the store team leader—not to be a tattletale but to indicate that this was going on in their store, so that they would pay more attention to it. I’ve been doing this for 27 years. I can go into a store and tell you within five minutes if that store is well managed or not, if the morale is good or not, if the store is clean or not. They may have known I was coming, but it won’t make any difference. I can feel it; I can see it. But I’m very aware that what the team members mostly want from me is my approval. I am a father figure. I’m a daddy. There’s no other way to put it. So when I go into our stores, I really try to focus on what we’re doing right. It’s not my job to focus on what we’re doing wrong.
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