Whole Foods, MAHA and the Battle Over Healthy Eating in America

The Whole Foods flagship in Austin is a shrine.

With its acres of organic and regenerative produce, a craft beer bar with cheese pairings, and seemingly endless shelves of specialty groceries sculpted to perfection by an attentive floor staff, it is a shrine to what fixed Whole Foods Market in the American imagination as a luxuryland of healthy, aspirational eating.

But with its world headquarters office tower looming overhead, self-service kiosks, harried Whole Foods workers loading carts for pickup customers and grab-and-go shoppers lugging armfuls of ready-to-heat dinners, it is also a physical manifestation of what the brand has become: a mainstream American supermarket.

Even so, the presiding presence of Whole Foods past, John Mackey, who founded the company in 1980 just blocks away and was its chief executive for 32 years, still makes regular pilgrimages to the salad bar, as if checking on his creation.

Since its founding in 1980, Whole Foods has changed the way Americans eat, helping to elevate the organic movement from niche lifestyle to booming product category. It scared Big Food, and shook up retail generally by transforming a dreary chore like grocery shopping into what it called a “sensory experience.”

Today the company has 529 locations in 44 states and Washington, D.C. Its business, which accounts for less than 2 percent of domestic grocery sales, is dwarfed by global giants like Kroger and Walmart. Its profit margins are significantly higher, though, and it continues to be the grocer others emulate when it comes to product offerings.

“I think we’re in a great spot in the industry,” said Jason Buechel, the chief executive since Mr. Mackey’s departure in 2022, citing “the standards we put into place and the consciousness we helped bring to consumers.”

Yet in the eight years since it was acquired by Amazon, Whole Foods has found itself searching for a place in the very landscape it redefined. As its prices have come down, its feeling of exclusivity has waned. Competitors caught on to the trends it pioneered. (Costco is now the largest U.S. seller of organic products.) Rival grocers have also built their own emotional attachments with shoppers, a relationship that would have seemed ludicrous before Whole Foods made it a core strategy.

And that was before the dramatic takeover of the nutrition debate by the “Make America Healthy Again” movement.

The MAHA version of the natural-food cause isn’t exactly political friends with the affluent, blue-state progressives who have long been the Whole Foods customer base. And in a moment when Americans are more concerned than ever about eating healthy, the world’s most visible health-conscious grocer has been uncharacteristically reticent.

The paradox is that Whole Foods, of all brands, should be ready to meet the zeitgeist. After all, John Mackey is a vehement capitalist, a libertarian and a zealot when it comes to eating well. Whole Foods has horseshoe politics in its DNA.

“They’re a straight-up dialectical contradiction,” said Errol Schweizer, a former vice president of the grocery division.

“There has always been a get-out-of-my-face, don’t-tell-me-what-to-do, anti-government, anti-corporation side to the healthy food movement,” said Corby Kummer, executive director of Food & Society at the Aspen Institute. “Whole Foods has always been for people who want to reject the mainstream.”

The MAHA Rorschach

Alex Clark loves Whole Foods. But she also resents it.

Ms. Clark hosts the highly rated podcast “Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark,” part of the Turning Point USA network founded by Charlie Kirk. During the pandemic, she was consuming a diet of ultraprocessed food — “I was at Chick-fil-A, like, four times a week” — when she underwent a conversion.

In a fit of disgust, she said, she “got rid of everything that had artificial dyes, seed oils and wasn’t organic. I mean, literally everything. I’m that type of person, all in or out. It was full throttle overnight.”

Today in Scottsdale, Ariz., where she lives, Whole Foods has become the “main place that I grocery shop,” she said. (According to her, Mr. Kirk was a frequent shopper there as well.) But it is with growing frustration. She feels that the grocer has been reluctant to embrace MAHA publicly.

“It has to be politically motivated,” she said, “Like: ‘We don’t want to be perceived as Trump supporters,’ which is just ridiculous.” She accused the company of shying away from signature MAHA causes, like opposition to seed oils, and betraying its mission to improve American health.

“The consumer has gotten very smart, and they do notice,” Ms. Clark said. “They do notice Whole Foods’ lack of voice in this movement and wondering where their leadership is in this. We’re starting to look at other stores like Sprouts or Rainbow Blossom or Natural Grocers or just the local mom-and-pop like health food stores that are now popping up.”

She’d like to tell Whole Foods: “This is the moment that you guys have allegedly fought for your entire existence. Why are you slowing down when you should be ramping up?”

Not everyone sees Whole Foods as distancing itself from the new health movement, however. Indeed, some wish the company would distance itself more.

“MAHA is clobbering public health right now,” said Jessica Steier, a public health scientist and a founder of “The Unbiased Science Podcast,” and companies are “jumping on the bandwagon.” She cited Whole Foods as “a place that is feeding into all of the logical fallacies that seed oils are bad, that food colorings are bad, supplements and all the other things that make us in the science space really cringe.”

That people on both sides of the debate draw such different conclusions about Whole Foods’ stance suggests how murky the company’s messaging has been, just as some other businesses are seizing the opportunity of the MAHA moment.

When asked directly about its stance on the movement, the company responded with a written statement: “We welcome the growing recognition that health is closely tied to the food we eat. Whole Foods Market has always been a haven for customers that are seeking more holistic approaches to their wellness, and we plan to stay the course.”

It’s hard to imagine John Mackey being so cautious.

Rise of the Passion Player

During the 2000s and 2010s, the grocer became a symbol of lefty coastal elitism, used as a gag on “Portlandia” and “Modern Family,” and mocked on “South Park” as a cargo cult for conscientious consumers.

But Mr. Mackey, who declined to be interviewed for this article, was not a progressive himself. He opposed labor unions and campaigned against President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul. Although such views would hardly be out of place in many boardrooms, they were often at odds with the prevailing politics of the Whole Foods customer base. (At the time of the 2008 presidential election, 89 percent of Whole Foods stores were in counties won by Mr. Obama.)

“It worked,” said Mike Schall, a veteran of Unilever and Wise Foods who came to Whole Foods to work for Mr. Mackey in 2011. “It blows my mind just to think how extraordinary it was.”

Mr. Schall spent eight years in Mr. Mackey’s inner circle, engaged in what he described as utopian experiments, like empowering small producers and creating a work force devoted to slinging groceries.

“Whole Foods was a passion player,” Mr. Schall said. “You would walk in the store and feel it. It smelled differently. And the quality, of course, was impeccable.”

Dawn Judd, a Bay Area lawyer, started going to the Mill Valley branch of Whole Foods in 1992. According to Ms. Judd, her husband, Mark, was the first customer through the branch’s doors, as employees applauded. She described the store as a kind of fantasy brand, with a “special feeling” because of its dizzying array of products and how “how clean and attractive” it was.

“Fantastic produce, mostly organic, great breads, fantastic juice and coffee bar, delicious prepared food,” she said. Whole Foods’ very existence seemed to shake up the grocery industry, as “suddenly everything was available in healthier versions, organic, lower sugar and so on.”

Not all the contradictions reflected well on the company. While promoting sustainability, Whole Foods priced groceries at levels many Americans could not afford, earning it the nickname “Whole Paycheck.” It also became known as a health food hegemon, bulldozing lesser rivals even as it preached the virtues of small and local.

Nevertheless, a mystique developed, an aura of invincibility, of the ability to make almost anything work. In one audacious experiment, for instance, the company set out to build a network of local farmers in Hawaii to supply native staples like taro and papaya, which could be bought more cheaply in California and Mexico.

At the time, the company was on a breakneck expansion, opening grand new stores in expensive locations, like its flagship operation in Columbus Circle, then the largest supermarket in Manhattan. As a public company, Whole Foods might have focused on generating profits as it grew, but instead it doubled down on Mr. Mackey’s vision, using its market position to challenge the status quo through risky, labor-intensive initiatives like the local supply chain in Hawaii.

“Whole Foods tried to have a soul,” said Mr. Schweizer, the former head of the grocery division. “The way they paid people, the way they encouraged risk-taking. It was more than just decentralization. There was so much education. That took budgeting, that took resources. It was a unique organization and ecosystem to be a part of — and, you know, the best years of my life.”

‘Shotgun Wedding’

The stock market, though, didn’t find the focus on sustainability quite so sustainable.

After the 2008 recession, as the appetite for emu eggs and saffron threads cooled, the company’s stock price stagnated. Investors grew disenchanted with Mr. Mackey’s freewheeling leadership style. He found himself increasingly on the defensive, fighting off the “sharks,” he called the investors publicly, who wanted Whole Foods to focus less on serving a “higher purpose” in order to compete with Kroger and Walmart.

“The regional model was really hard to manage,” said Mr. Schweizer, particularly the high labor costs. In the 2010s, Whole Foods submitted to pressure with centralization in Austin and layoffs of between 3,000 and 5,000 store-level employees, Mr. Schweizer said.

Ambitious initiatives like the Hawaiian supply network were abandoned, as “every operational element of the business was being scrutinized to be stripped down as,” Mr. Schall said.

In 2017, Mr. Mackey made a desperate move, reaching out to Amazon. The $13.7 billion acquisition was concluded within weeks. “It was a shotgun wedding,” Mr. Schall said.

The deal gave Amazon a foothold it had long coveted in the brick-and-mortar grocery world, and allowed Mr. Mackey to preserve some of his business model. But not all.

To reach the scale Amazon was after, Whole Foods would have to appeal more broadly across socioeconomic, political and geographic lines.

Whole Foods had built a culture around healthy eating. When Americans on a health kick like Ms. Clark made a decision to change their diet, it was often the first place they turned. The way Whole Foods decided what to offer them — which products satisfied the brand’s definition of healthy, while also having sales potential — was highly dependent on that culture.

“There was this competitive dynamic of not only achieving great performance, but of discovery, of foraging,” Mr. Schall said.

According to him and others, Amazon was less interested in that approach.

What’s Not in the Bag

Whole Foods under Amazon is clearly trying to be more things to more people.

For a long time “they really saw their competition in a very limited way,” said Phil Lempert, a food industry analyst and the editor of SupermarketGuru. “I think that today they see everybody who sells food as their competition.”

Prices have come down, and the business is going well.

“They’ve broadened their approach, and that’s the smart thing to do,” Mr. Lempert said. “Those die-hard Whole Foods people from generations before, they went to Erewhon. They went to Sprouts. They don’t exist anymore.” Under Amazon, he added, the company is “going after Gen Z, millennials and new generations of shoppers.”

“They’re playing with the big boys now,” Mr. Schweizer said.

So far, Amazon seems happy with Mr. Buechel’s tenure: This summer it consolidated its entire grocery business, including Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go, under his leadership.

“I have definitely seen it become not bad, just less good,” said Ms. Judd, the Bay Area shopper. She added that as higher quality food has become available elsewhere, “Whole Foods has been less rare and special feeling.”

She added, “I don’t really want to put my grocery shopping dollars in the pocket of Bezos,” referring to Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos.

Another change is that as Whole Foods has become less visible publicly, others have stepped into the pulpit where it used to lead the healthy food movement.

“Originally the movement was liberal,” said Sonalie Figueiras, editor of the progressive food website Green Queen Media. “Now it’s right-wing. Where is Whole Foods in the story? They moved the needle on food culture. They mainstreamed a lot of these things.”

“The left led the way on health and wellness for a long time,” Ms. Clark said. “I don’t know why, but they handed the baton to the right.”

But there may be signs that the company is still looking to read the cultural winds.

Recently, it introduced a new design for its shopping bags, covering them with the slogan “It’s What’s Not in the Bag,” and a list of all 562 ingredients the company bans from its shelves.

“When I saw those bags, I thought the message they’re sending is ‘Everyone’s talking about this now, but we’ve been in the trenches,’” said Helena Bottemiller Evich, a former Politico reporter who runs the influential blog Food Fix. “Of course they did it without touching MAHA as a topic. It was very subtle, and also not subtle.”

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