INTERVIEW BY KARINA GORDIN, MSc
In This Article
For close to thirty years, Well Being Journal has had the privilege of reaching readers through Whole Foods Market—the nation’s first and only USDA certified organic grocer, committed to setting new standards in environmentally-responsible retail.
Today, we are honored to feature insights from the company’s pioneering founder, John Mackey. In this exclusive interview, Mackey reflects on his latest book, The Whole Story, and the guiding principles that continue to shape his work and inspire a global pursuit of well being.
Whole Foods Awakening
Karina Gordin (KG): Mr. Mackey, thank you for joining us today—and for your continued support in bringing Well Being Journal to the Whole Foods community. To start us off, can you share your food awakening and what first inspired you to establish Whole Foods Market?
John Mackey (JM): Please, call me John. I’m familiar with Well Being Journal and glad to have this opportunity to connect with you and your readers.
My food awakening began when I was about twenty-two or twenty-three years old. I moved into a vegetarian housing co-op called Prana House in Austin, Texas. I wasn’t vegetarian at the time; I was just drawn to all-things counterculture and thought it would be a fun way to meet interesting people (and women). And it was! I met some fascinating folks who completely changed the way I thought about food.
Before that, I ate the standard American diet—mostly junk food. I didn’t eat vegetables at all aside from potatoes or the occasional pickle on a hamburger. I saw food purely as fuel to keep me going—like filling up a car at a gas station. As long as it tasted good and left me full, that was enough. I had no idea that food could actually nourish the trillions of cells in our bodies or help prevent obesity, diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and other lifestyle-related chronic conditions. That was a whole new concept for me.
Living at Prana House, however, I began trying the “green stuff”—and to my surprise, I really came to enjoy it.
At first, it was more like, “I can’t stand that,” and then “I don’t like it, but I can eat it,” and before long “it’s really not that bad,” to finally saying, “I love this stuff—I can’t wait to eat broccoli again!”
KG: It’s encouraging how quickly our taste preferences can shift—especially with foods we never thought we’d enjoy!
JM: Well, our taste buds regenerate roughly every two weeks, which means our taste preferences are far more adaptable than we realize. Dr. Joel Fuhrman, a strong advocate for plant-based nutrition, first opened my eyes to that fact, and I’ve found it to be true in my own experience. With a little persistence—say, trying a new food around ten times—you can actually learn to enjoy just about anything.
A Spark of Idealism—and the Birth of a Movement
Living in a community where I was constantly trying new foods—and taking an interest in cookbooks and cooking—made a big difference, too. Over time, my passion for food grew so much that I became the food buyer for the co-op. That was probably the pivotal chapter in my food awakening—nourishing my community with whole, unprocessed foods. I was on fire!
I asked my girlfriend, Renee Lawson—whom I’d met at the co-op and would later cofound Whole Foods Market with—if she’d be interested in opening a store with me.
She replied, “Oh, Macko, man, that would be so cool. Let’s do it!”
(If she’d thought my idea was stupid and pointed out that I’d only been a food buyer a few months and knew nothing about the business—I would’ve dropped the idea. Luckily, she agreed!)
All told, we raised $45,000 from family and friends to open Safer Way, a natural foods market in Austin. We were driven by idealism, so Safer Way didn’t sell meat, alcohol, sugar, white flour, or coffee. The business was very pure—and, as you can probably guess, it had a fairly short run.
Still, we had our share of memorable customers and fun moments along the way—and it ultimately launched the adventure that led to Whole Foods Market just a couple of years later.
KG: Are you still driven by that idealism today—and how has it shaped both your personal and professional philosophy around meat, alcohol, sugar, and coffee over the years?
JM: Professionally, I’d say my idealism met the realities of the marketplace. When we opened the first Whole Foods Market, we still held onto our ideals, in the sense that we didn’t sell highly processed foods, and we avoided artificial colors, flavorings, and preservatives.
We featured a lot of local, seasonal, and organic produce, and a larger selection of bulk foods and supplements. But we also began offering higher animal welfare meat, beer and wine, coffee, sugar, baked goods, and desserts—and sales took off! In many ways, we found that sweet spot between our values and what the market wanted at that time.
As for my personal values, they’ve definitely evolved over time—I’ve been an ethical vegan since 2003. Back when we started Safer Way, I was a lacto-ovo vegetarian, still eating eggs and dairy, and I drank alcohol in moderation.
No More Throwaway Days
In 2022, I actually stopped drinking alcohol altogether—something I wish I had done sooner! In my family, alcohol was normalized so I learned to enjoy it from a fairly young age. But a few years ago, I decided to cut it out completely, in large part because of my sleep tracker. It became a really useful tool for improving my habits.
As I started studying my sleep, I grew curious about why some nights I had plenty of deep sleep while other nights I had almost none. Through this self experimentation, I discovered three valuable insights. First, the amount of exercise I got during the day strongly correlated with sleep quality—when I moved more, I slept better.
Second, I discovered that if I ate close to bedtime, I didn’t sleep all that well. So, I started eating earlier and kept the meals lighter toward the evening. My deep sleep improved with that as well.
My third discovery—which was most surprising and unwelcome—was how alcohol affected my sleep. Even a glass of red wine or a single beer would completely wipe out my deep sleep (it would go to zero) and shorten my total sleep by about an hour.
Again, this was not a welcome discovery—I tested it over and over and over again hoping for different results. But, after several months of testing, I came to the reluctant conclusion that it was time to cut alcohol out, completely.
The biggest takeaway from this experience wasn’t just that my sleep improved—it was how much better I felt the next day. When you drink alcohol, you may feel fine enough to get through the next day, but it’s still a little bit of a struggle. Part of you is thinking, I can’t wait to get home so I can just rest. I started calling those “throwaway days”—a day to throw away to get to the next day. Since giving up alcohol, I haven’t had a single throwaway day!
Do I miss it? Sure. I’ll be the first to admit—I loved red wine, and many of my friends and colleagues still love their red wine. But what I try to share with them and now with Well Being Journal readers—is that you won’t miss it nearly as much as you’ll love how you feel without it.
KG: As your alcohol intake, diet, and overall lifestyle have evolved, how important has it been to stay aligned in these areas within your relationship? And more broadly, to what extent do you think food compatibility contributes to a lasting, fulfilling partnership?
JM: I have a story about that, which I recount in my latest book The Whole Story.
Back in 1990, I went to pick up a blind date—who’s now my wife, Deborah—and the first thing I blurted out when she opened the door was, “Do you mind if I, um, look in your refrigerator?”
In hindsight, I think I was a bit stunned and at a loss for words—she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen in my life! That can happen to men—we get bedazzled. But also, being in the natural foods business, I’ve always thought you can tell a lot about a person by what they keep in their fridge.
Deborah, luckily, had a good sense of humor. She laughed and said, “That’s pretty weird,” and I said, “Yeah, I know.”
But she played along and graciously invited me to take a look. I was relieved to see it was packed with fresh fruit and vegetables—and I even noticed some of the food came from Whole Foods Market.
Deborah was still finishing up getting ready so I also snuck a glance at her bookshelf—which, you might say, is a more socially acceptable way to size up a potential partner.
She passed the test: the shelves were filled with books on spirituality and philosophy. I, on the other hand, basically failed the first-impression test. We laugh about it now, but yeah… it wasn’t exactly the most appropriate move for a first date.
KG: Clearly, you got a second date!
JM: I almost didn’t! The rest of the date didn’t go much better, but I stayed up all night writing her a letter—and thankfully it earned me another chance.
The next day she called and said, “I decided that anyone who could write that good of a letter deserves a second date. Let’s try one more time.”
Shared Support, and The Total Health Immersion Initiative
KG: Such a great story—and the best part is, now you get to stock the fridge together with wholesome, plant-based foods!
If we step back for a moment, food compatibility doesn’t always come naturally in relationships, which raises a broader question: how important is shared support—from a romantic partner or the broader community—when it comes to maintaining healthy eating habits, or even just taking that first step?
JM: Good question—I think it matters a lot. There’s a reason why AA has been more effective than most other therapies for addiction—because you have a community of support.
At Whole Foods Market, we launched a program about fifteen years ago called Total Health Immersion—an intensive weeklong, on-site retreat designed to help our team members make lasting diet and lifestyle changes. It is free to team members—we cover all their costs. Increasingly, though, we also started paying for their spouses to join because without the spouse on board, meaningful change wouldn’t occur.
Within just one week of eating whole foods, participants’ biomarkers—cholesterol, blood pressure, weight—noticeably improved. And many of the team members who stuck with the program lost over a hundred pounds in a year or less.
But here’s the challenge: without a support system, recidivism tends to be high. Change doesn’t come easily—most people need some handholding—so having a supportive spouse or a community of support (such as fellow team members) can be a major factor in whether positive changes stick.
KG: The Total Health Immersion initiative sounds like a gamechanger! It brings to mind a community-based health initiative in Frome, England, that recently made headlines for its impressive public health outcomes.
The town focused on strengthening social support networks to improve patient care, and the results were remarkable: while emergency hospital admissions rose by twenty-nine percent across the rest of the county, Frome saw a seventeen percent decline. Rather than focusing solely on diet or lifestyle, the program aimed to improve overall health by building community and social support.
Now I’d love to turn back to some of the other initiatives you’ve launched at Whole Foods Market over the years—including your animal welfare programs—and how they reflect the kind of idealism that first inspired Safer Way.
The 5-Step Animal Welfare Rating System
JM: I am very proud of our animal welfare programs. As I write in The Whole Story, I’d come to accept that Whole Foods Market would carry foods I personally chose not to eat, like meat. But we were intentional about sourcing animal products from producers with reputations for high welfare standards—and we worked closely with them to raise those standards even higher.
One of the initiatives we launched to further that mission is the 5-Step Animal Welfare Rating System, which evaluates the treatment of farm animals and encourages producers to adopt higher welfare practices—such as raising animals on pasture and allowing them to express their natural behaviors.
It’s really an important system because under the conventional model, animals are virtually guaranteed that they had a terrible life—living in confined, crowded, unsanitary conditions. We have all sorts of laws that protect companion animals like cats, dogs, and horses, but we have no legal protections for pigs, chickens, and cows.
People create that separation in their minds between the well being of pets and livestock, but if you ask me, there shouldn’t be that kind of moral disconnect.
So, that inspired me to bring together all the key stakeholders—the animal activists, farmers and ranchers, scientists, and the Whole Foods Market leadership—to collaborate on a solution. We sat down in one room and asked a simple question: how can we raise animal welfare standards across the supply chain?
Out of those conversations, we hit upon the third-party audited rating system where we can assign a rating to suppliers and give consumers transparency about how their food was produced.
KG: The 5-Step Animal Welfare Rating system is a real breakthrough—not just for animal welfare, but for human health, too. Compared to factory-farmed meat, regeneratively raised is significantly higher in phytonutrients, omega-3s, vitamins, and minerals. Plus, it’s free from synthetic hormones, routine antibiotics, feedlot byproducts like expired candy, and drugs like ractopamine—which is still used in about eighty percent of pigs, cattle, and turkeys to speed up weight gain.
It’s alarming to think just how toxic some of these practices can be—both for animals and the farmers handling them. A safety guideline for ractopamine warns that “contaminated work clothing must not be allowed out of the workplace.”
Thankfully, food safety groups and animal rights activists have filed a lawsuit against the FDA, calling for a formal reevaluation of the drug—especially since it’s already banned or restricted in over 100 countries!
Regenerative Agriculture: Picking Up Where Organic Left Off
JM: That’s one of the reasons I pushed so strongly for Whole Foods to support the organic food movement back in the 1980s and ‘90s—not just as a marketing label, but a return to sound farming.
And I’ll add this: what many people don’t realize is that the original vision behind “organic” was very similar to what we now call regenerative agriculture.
The pioneers of the organic movement envisioned farming practices that would regenerate the soil and maximize nutrient density. But over time, that broader vision faded as the movement became more institutionalized and fixed around specific standards—and they didn’t continue to evolve.
In many ways, regenerative agriculture has now picked up where that early organic vision left off. It’s the natural heir to what organic was originally meant to be. And I fully support regenerative practices—I believe they represent the future of agriculture, especially when it comes to restoring soil health, increasing biodiversity, and creating a truly sustainable food system.
KG: I imagine most shoppers would prefer to buy regenerative, Step 5-certified meat and pesticide-free vegetables. Do you see affordability as one of the main barriers to making ethically sourced food more accessible?
JM: The reality is, factory-farmed isn’t necessarily more affordable in the long run if you consider the hidden, or deferred, costs. For every dollar we spend on food, there’s another two dollars in external costs to society: healthcare expenses, loss of biodiversity, environmental degradation, and social consequences. So, we end up paying a much steeper price—for our health, for animals, and for the planet than what shows up at the checkout counter.
A Journey from “Food for People” to Food for Impact
KG: In your 2014 book Conscious Capitalism, you explore how business and the free market can improve lives and create value for all stakeholders—shoppers, employees, investors, communities, and the environment. How do you see that business model reshaping our food system—and when did you first become interested in market-based solutions?
JM: Before founding Safer Way and eventually Whole Foods Market, I was part of three different co-ops and firmly believed in the idea of “food for people, not for profit.” You could say I was deeply skeptical of capitalism at that time. I was indoctrinated, like most of my generation, by very socialistic professors in academia.
But once I started a business, my thinking began to shift. I realized that, frankly, co-ops weren’t very successful. Many of them carried a kind of guilt about making money at all. And within those circles, especially back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, there was a strong anti-capitalist sentiment. People were more focused on whom to boycott than on how to build something meaningful.
As I began learning the ins and outs of running a business and reading books on the topic, I came across the writings of free-market economists like Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises. Their work really opened my eyes. One of the first lessons I learned was that business isn’t inherently exploitative; it’s about creating goods and services that people want and engaging in voluntary trade.
This was back in the late ‘70s—around the time Star Wars was hitting theaters. Funny enough, some of my co-op friends started calling me “Darth Vader”—as if I had crossed over to the dark side by becoming a capitalist. But in truth, if you really want to change the world for the better and transform the food system, business and competition are among the most effective ways to make that happen.
KG: As we start wrapping up, John, what advice would you share with younger generations as they begin exploring their purpose and path in life?
JM: Read more books—whichever interest you—and let curiosity be your guide. Books changed my life. People like Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger, for example, read all the time and that’s part of what keeps their minds sharp and engaged.
In my late teens and twenties, I used to spend entire days at the library. I’d bring a lunch and read for ten to twelve hours straight, just following whatever interested me. It was lifechanging! I remember reading all eleven volumes of Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization. I was disappointed when it ended with the Napoleonic era—he skipped nearly a hundred years of history—but hey, the guy got old.
Books also played a big role in the early days of starting Safer Way—and later Whole Foods Market. I never took a single business class, but once I became interested in business, I read hundreds of books on the subject: everything from accounting and finance to business biographies, advertising, and free-market economics.
The take-home message is this: the more you read, the more you understand yourself and the world around you—and that clarity can help guide your purpose and direction in life.
KG: What are some of the books youloved growing up that you’d recommend to younger readers today?
JM: Kids are sometimes surprised to learn that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is just the first in a series of fourteen books—so I always recommend the full collection by L Frank Baum. I also highly recommend all three volumes of The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien, which I’ve read and reread over the years, and The Chronicles of Narnia series by CS Lewis.
During my time at the Prana House, I also started reading cookbooks for the first time. They were, of course, helpful in teaching me how to cook—but more importantly, they introduced me to new ingredients I wouldn’t’ve thought to try otherwise. So, as part of the reading list, I also recommend cookbooks—and, by extension, home cooking—as a way to build new habits around eating, and develop a deeper appreciation for whole foods.
Cooking puts you back in control: of your ingredients, your portions, your health, and your values. It doesn’t have to be complicated or time-consuming to be nourishing. In fact, some of the most satisfying meals are simple, fast, and made with love—like these delicious plant-based recipes.
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John Mackey is an entrepreneur and the co-founder and visionary of Whole Foods Market. A pioneer of natural and organic foods and a passionate advocate for capitalism as a force for good, Mackey has focused on building a more conscious way of doing business.
His vision inspired the Whole Planet Foundation to help end poverty in developing nations, the Local Producer Loan Program to help local food producers expand their businesses, the Global Animal Partnership’s rating scale for humane farm animal treatment, and the Total Health Immersion program to promote health and wellness with Whole Foods Market Team Members.
Mackey is deeply passionate about the connection between food and health. He is co-author of “The Whole Foods Diet: The Lifesaving Plan for Health and Longevity” (Grand Central Life & Style 2017), and “The Whole Foods Cookbook: 120 Delicious and Healthy Plant-Centered Recipes” (Grand Central Life & Style 2018). His new book, “The Whole Story: Adventures in Love, Life, and Capitalism” (BenBella Books, 2024) is available now.
For a complete list of references, click here.
