That’s Whole Foods. All of it. Or at least that was all of Whole Foods in 1980, when it looked like this:
The store, originally a members-only co-op, stood at Adams and Cohn Streets in uptown New Orleans. From the time I moved to the city in the mid-late-70s, it’s where I wanted to work and, in 1980, I was hired to work the produce department, which I eventually came to manage.
By that time, the character of the business was already changing. New Orleans wasn’t the best place to maintain a co-op. More than one had failed, not from lack of interest but from a lack of year-round commitment on the part of members. Too many of the folks who wanted natural food options were also the types who could afford to spend the gruesome summer months elsewhere.
So Whole Foods (actually “The Whole Food Company,” mocked by a smaller, competing store in the Ninth Ward named “The Half Food Company”) changed it’s model from a straight co-op (requiring work) to a regular retail operation which offered a discount to existing co-op members. And, despite the “niche” perception of natural foods at the time, the operation was quite successful.
As original co-owners dropped out and sold their interests, the business came largely under the control of store manager Peter Roy, who opened two new locations, one by the Fair Grounds Race Course (home of the New Orleans Jazz Fest) and one in the Riverwalk mall downtown.
A good deal of the company’s stock was shipped from a distributor in Austin, Texas called Texas Health, run by John Mackey. Mackey admired Roy and his anomalous success in what was then a small field in a very small city. He even lifted the name of the New Orleans stores for his own Austin retail stores, the Whole Foods Market, founded as SaferWay. The two companies maintained a healthy, symbiotic relationship that, in other times, might have gone on for decades.
But these were changing times, times of mergers, acquisitions, Reagan and Gordon Gecko. That ethos was about to change the natural foods retailing world, and one man saw it clearly.
Doug Greene had founded the Natural Foods Merchandiser, a trade mag that kept its members abreast of changes in the industry, and Greene saw big changes on the horizon. The sleepy, backwater industry that was health food retailing wasn’t immune to the Darwin Capitalism spirit of the times and Greene knew that, before very long at all, someone was going to become the FedEx of supplements and sprouts. Knowing most of the serious players in the game, he saw that none of the existing companies had the strength to corner the market, but a combination of two of them might.
Advised by Greene, Roy and Mackey merged their two companies in 1988 (Whole Foods’ website describes this as Mackey acquiring the New Orleans chain; it was, in truth, not quite that one-sided). Roy brought a solid understanding of the changing face of natural foods retailing while Mackey’s company’s experience in dependable distribution allowed for an open-ended expansion model.
And expand they did. By the turn of the century, the company had opened stores around the country, in Canada and the UK, going public in 1992. Since that time, the company’s stock has had an impressive history, though it has softened in recent years as the company has reached market saturation. Now, it’s hard to find an American metro area without a “Whole Paycheck.”
Greene was quite prescient in his assessment of the industry in 1980. Despite new competition like Trader Joes and impressive organic sections in stores like CostCo, WalMart and your local grocery chain, Whole Foods is the 800 lb. gorilla every other natural food retailer would like to be. Its rise eliminated thousands of single, mom-and-pop “vitamin shops,” to the point where, today, you’d be hard pressed to find a true, independent health food store in many American cities and towns.
It would be easy to vilify Mackey, Roy and Greene for “destroying” traditional health food retailing, but they didn’t, really. They just saw where American business was headed and realized their industry, however small and quaint, was not immune.
And that’s something to keep in mind as we watch changes, sometimes unfortunate ones, in other institutions and systems. The changes will come. There will be winners and losers and, all too often, the winners aren’t the best players, just the ones who got off the line fastest.
This was one I got to watch from the inside.
Addendum: I posted the photo of the old store on FB and have gotten a lot of reminiscences from alumni. www.facebook.com/...