The Ledger, every show

“I count four different coup attempts that occurred over the history of the company that I was able to beat back.”

“What they would do is they'd dumb it down so that a lot of stuff that you think is red now would all of a sudden be green. And the, It's like, because most of the food that we're selling in supermarkets is not good for people. And if you start telling the trut…”

“Socialism has been tried 41 times in the last hundred years, and there are 41 failures.”

“Because if progressivism is allowed to continue without being checked, it will destroy, it'll destroy modernism.”

“That the accusations that the animal rights people had made about what we were doing were fundamentally correct.”

“Yeah, but venture capitalists didn't want us to go public. They wanted us to do another round of venture financing, but I was determined not to do another round of venture financing because that would have given them control of the company, and I just didn't t…”

“Whole Foods flew under the radar. The supermarkets never took us seriously for decades. It wasn't until we opened up in Columbus Circle in New York City.”

“We had, you know, 20, 20 to 25 years where nobody paid any attention to us, and that allowed us to scale and compound, and they just dismissed us.”

“The founding investors still had a majority of the stock. The VCs on 34%. But if we'd done another round, they would have gotten control of the business, and they had different agendas.”

“So many of our team members became millionaires through our stock option program. If you're on a winning team that grows, you can make a lot of money, even if you're not the most senior executives. We gave stock options to everybody that worked there.”

“We didn't even have a store that failed for like the first 20 years of the history of the company. Every store we opened was a success.”

“We may route around in education, because there's lots of innovations on the margin. I know of people starting new schools, for example, and, ah, we know that, that technology also allows us, through virtual learning, there's ways that the monopolies may be br…”

“The world has never been better than it is right now by every historical measurement.”

“74% of Americans are overweight, and 43% are obese, and that has not peaked. It is still going up.”

“But I didn't compete directly with anybody else in stores ever. I didn't, I never did it. I didn't go to Portland for that reason, because Nature's was there. I didn't go to Boulder until Alfalfa's and Wild Oats had sort of partnered up.”

“250 years ago, 94% of everyone alive. 94% lived on less than two dollars a day. 94%, and that's in today's dollars. 88% of the people alive were illiterate. 88%. The average lifespan was 30.”

“In fact, within six months, it became the highest volume natural food store in the entire United States, based on everything I know about the world back then.”

“The problem in that instance is that about half of one percent of Americans are vegan, and two percent are vegetarian.”

“We got less than one percent of the grocery business, and they sort of made up this category that we were the, we had a monopoly of premium natural and organic food supermarkets, but my point is, of course, we weren't a monopoly of anything”

“We had, at the time, the activist investors invested in Whole Foods. We had the highest sales per square foot of any public food retailer. We'd had the same store sales growth of eight percent over a thirty-plus year period.”

“Warren Buffett's like the best example, and we actually contacted Warren and asked him if he'd be interested, and he has a good sense of humor, and he said that ah, you know, I own Dairy Queen. I don't think Holfe is a good brand fit for me. And so, nothing ca…”

“They came down just three days later, and six weeks after that first meeting, we had signed an agreement to get married, to merge”

“Times, I had the, I bought the Amory on, I pushed the dude dot com, we can't let the internet opportunity escape us. A hundred million dollars we lost.”

“Our very first store was over 20% of our sales were in the bulk foods department, and we didn't have any candy back then. So it was just whole grains, whole, whole grain flour, beans, nuts, seeds, things like that, whole foods. And today it's under one percent…”

“Within six months, we believe, based on our own research, we were the highest volume natural food store in the United States.”

“And Walmart was on the march, and all the supermarket companies were, and there were lots of independents back then before the chains, sort of, that changed too over, over time, but they were all terrified of Walmart, and so they, and they wanted to compete wi…”

“We were, had protests all around the country, and 350,000 people, and within a couple of weeks signed a Facebook petition to boycott Whole Foods Market. Hundreds of letters were sent to our board of directors demanding that I be fired.”

“And it, in the first two years of that merger, Amazon let us drop our prices significantly four times.”

“Six weeks after that first meeting in Seattle, we'd signed a deal. It was like a whirlwind romance.”

“In other ways, I held it back, and once I was gone, then they could move in the directions that it needed to evolve in. In some cases, that's maybe a little tighter a little closer to Amazon. They're a little more integrated into Amazon. I held them back from …”

“Over 70% of adult Americans are overweight, 42 and a half percent are obese, and the trend, and the average adult American has gained 27 pounds since COVID.”

“80% of what we spend on health care in America are for chronic diseases, Joe. Diseases that tie directly back into our diet and lifestyle.”

“I mean, we didn't do it by ourselves, obviously, but because you have farmers, but we created much of the demand for natural and organic in the United States.”

“When Whole Foods started, there were only, like, three or four other natural food supermarkets in the United States. There was, like, Bread and Circus in Boston. There was Mrs. Gooch's in L.A. There was Frazier Farms in San Diego.”

“He said, John, the bank turned the loan down. The only reason you got that money was Mark Monroe personally guaranteed that loan.”

“Amazon was able to step up and invest literally hundreds of millions of dollars in delivery in order to enable Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh to be able to deliver when the demand went from virtually zero to a huge percentage of your business.”

“Anytime Whole Foods went into a new market for the first 10 to 15 years we existed, it was a slow growth. Because people just had never heard of us before.”

“And eventually Whole Foods ended up, all those entrepreneurs all ultimately sold out to us. So Natural Foods Network ended up being this great vehicle of relationship building that allowed those entrepreneurs to all cash out and make, become millionaires and m…”

“When we were going up there to talk about maybe Amazon buying Whole Foods you know, we were meeting at Jeff's Boathouse, which was next to his mansion on Lake Washington, and, but when we, they wouldn't tell us who the meeting place was until we landed, and th…”

“We had EBITDA was very high. I think we were making about 1.3 billion dollars in EBITDA when Jana bought us.”

“Renee's family and friends, my family and friends, and yes, my dad, I didn't have any money, my dad loaned me 10,000 dollars for my share of the investment at five percent interest. So, so that's how we got started. We needed 50, but we only had, we only were …”

“I mean, the hardest barrier Whole Foods for us scaling was convincing people that this wasn't just, ah, that there was a market for it. I was told, you guys are a bunch of hippies selling food to other hippies, and we don't think that's a very big market. I he…”

“The ones in, we did go out to Sand Hill Road and I met with some, and actually one of those did invest in us Oak. Oak Investments, which their retail partner, Jerry Gallagher, was very interested in it.”

“And that first Whole Foods market was, it quickly became the highest volume natural food store in the United States.”

“The first Whole Foods we had was, we sold 20% of bulk foods, 30% produce, for example. Maybe 10% were animal foods, and the processed foods were relatively small. And yet that's what grew and grew and grew and grew until bulk now went from 20% of our sales to …”

“One of the Craig's and Mark's conditions is we have to make this a real store. We have to sell meat, and we have to sell beer and wine, and we have to sell coffee. We can't just be completely a vegetarian idealistic store.”

“There was a benefit held for the store, and the team members, they worked for free. Our bank loaned us money, On my signature, which was worthless. And the investors decided to kick in more cash. So we were able to reopen 30 days later.”

“That store was too close to our original store and cannibalized it significantly. And together, we started to lose money.”