Living Inside the Shop That Became Whole Foods

John Mackey was 23 and studying at the University of Texas in Austin when he moved into a vegetarian co-op. There he met Renee, who would become his co-founder. He had taken no business classes and, by his own account, did not think of himself as an entrepreneur. He suggested that the two of them open a store of their own, and they did.

The shop was called Safer Way, and it opened with 45,000 dollars in capital. In the first year it lost 23,000 dollars, about half of that money. With so little to spare, Mackey and Renee could not afford a separate home, and they lived in the store itself. They folded out a futon in the third-floor office to sleep on. He has joked that the building was not zoned for anyone to live in, and that they showered using the commercial dishwasher, which he said broke health codes.

The business survived and grew. Mackey served as co-founder and chief executive of Whole Foods Market from 1980 to 2022. In 1988, when he went looking for venture capital, the company had roughly 50 million dollars in annual sales and about a million dollars in yearly profit. Investors offered about 4.5 million dollars for a 34 percent stake, and one of them turned the idea down, calling the founders a bunch of hippies selling food to hippies.

After the Great Recession, Whole Foods' share price fell by 90 percent, but it later recovered and kept rising. Mackey led the company through its 2017 sale to Amazon. Speaking on a podcast in 2023, he described his early years as a time when he simply did not follow business plans.