What It Was Like To Shop At The First Whole Foods Market?

The first Whole Foods Market opened its doors in Austin, Texas, on 20 September 1980. It was co-founded by John Mackey and his then-girlfriend Renee Lawson, Mark Skiles, and Craig Weller. The quartet were part of a growing community of people in the United States who, during the 1970s, had become passionate about natural foods. The movement ran contrary to the post-World War II boom in processed, pre-packaged and frozen foods that had brought convenience to millions of households across the U.S.

Mackey and Lawson had tried to run their own natural food store from their Austin home but struggled to turn a profit and, when their landlord discovered what they were doing, he threw them out. The pair turned to Weller and Skiles, owners of Clarksville Natural Grocery, and suggested they join forces. They agreed, the store's name was changed, and the rest is retail history. Although the first Whole Foods Market store was empty as of summer 2024, the brand's flagship global headquarters, which opened in 2005, is located nearby on Bowie Street. Here's what the first Whole Foods Market was like.

The aim of the first Whole Foods Market store was to give consumers the same supermarket experience they found elsewhere. That meant expanding the product range beyond just natural foods and vegetarian items. "We served alcohol, we served caffeine, we had some sugar, white flour," John Mackey told Chase Jarvis.

That balance of commercial and organic products turned out to be perfect. Whole Foods Market remained true to its roots as a natural food store, while also catering to an eager public. "[It] became the highest volume natural food store in the United States within about six months of opening," Mackey said. That success came despite the fact prices at Whole Foods Market were often higher than other supermarkets.

Mackey and the team worked with local producers and suppliers, and set high bars for the quality of products on the shelves, banning artificial flavors, colors and preservatives in their first year of trading. In 1989, a "60 Minutes" documentary about a chemical used on apples prompted worried parents to flock the store in search of organic alternatives for their children. "Yes it costs more, we're willing to pay the price," one mom told the media at the time.

According to Walter Robb, co-CEO of Whole Foods Market, the natural food movement was a backlash against what he called the "over industrialization of food." He described how, after World War II, military pesticides began to be used in agriculture, while processed flour, sugar and a wide range of frozen foods were increasingly available in supermarkets.

In The Whole Story, he explained: "People said 'okay, we've got to go a different way, we're starting to affect the land and we're starting to affect people's health', so the natural foods 'revolution' was born." Small businesses and co-ops across the United States started to spring up during the 1970s, eventually leading to the first Whole Foods Market, whose four co-founders took the concept of a natural foods supermarket and ran with it.

Whole Foods Market offered a combination of loose products that customers could weigh out themselves, and fill their shopping carts with everyday items like breakfast cereals, bread, fruit, and vegetables. The difference, compared to their competitors, was the founders' commitment to selling natural, organic produce. That determination led to a series of ingredient standard milestones that stand to this day.

In 1980, shoppers faced an 8% hike in food costs, according to The New York Times. While photos from the first Whole Foods Market outlet provide few clues about their prices, it is possible to know how much Safeway customers paid, thanks to a 1980 receipt scrutinized by Table for 12. It listed large eggs at $0.74, beef hotdogs at $1.79 and Tropicana orange juice at $0.53. Today, those prices would be around $2.83, $6.86 and $2.03, respectively.

Even in its infancy, Whole Foods Market had a reputation of costing more than other conventional supermarkets. In 2016, MarketWatch compared Whole Foods Market' prices to popular outlets Trader Joe's, Safeway and Target. For eight out of 14 items, Whole Foods Market was the most expensive.

Three years later, an Amazon blog set out to explain why. "Behind the price tag of almost every product is a story about quality and the requirements that lead the industry and make many of our products different than other grocers." It went on to detail how its quality standards informed what customers could and would not find in Whole Foods Market: An ethos that can be traced right back to the very first store.

One of the reasons that Whole Foods Market succeeded was the range of products that it sold. Margaret Wittenberg — the first store's 25th employee who rose to become global VP of quality standards — knew it offered something many other natural food stores didn't. "You could get all your produce, your wine and beer which was very revolutionary for a natural food store at that time," she said in company video "30 Years Fresh."

Photos from around the period show John Mackey and a colleague standing in front of boxes of stock, with jars of sauces neatly arranged on shelves behind them. Another image has someone arranging piles of fresh vegetables and fruits, while a third showcases the range of fresh meat, a section that would become significantly bigger as the years went on.

Yet it could all have been gone overnight. On May 25, 1981, Memorial Day brought a 100-year-flood that almost wiped the business out. Luckily, everyone from investors to customers helped clean up and the doors were soon open again. From the ashes of that disaster, a second store emerged, as Mackey decided they needed a backup outlet, just in case Mother Nature struck again.

The founders of Whole Foods Market were not just excited about selling natural foods: They were passionate about what went into their products, too. The standard the first store set for colors, flavors and preservatives was the first step in what would become a retail revolution.

"You realize that the way that it's grown, the way that it's processed, the way that it's handled has so much to do with the quality of the food that you ultimately have to eat," said A.C. Gallo, president and COO in company video The Whole Story. Between 1987 and 2020, Whole Foods Market eliminated a slew of ingredients and chemicals from its produce, including aspartame, sulfites and high-fructose corn syrup.

The company also focused sharply on animal welfare, working with a wide range of suppliers to develop standards that were groundbreaking in their day. In 1990, Whole Foods Market became the first certified organic national retailer in the United States. In 2008, the company launched a non-profit organization tasked with developing more standards to improve the retail industry. Today, the Global Animal Partnership is among North America's biggest animal welfare food labeling programs.

The first Whole Foods Market was located at 10th Street and North Lamar Boulevard in Austin, Texas. John Mackey told John Papola the building — a former nightclub — had been damaged in a fire and was warned it was sitting in a 100-year flood zone. "I thought to myself, 'every 100 years? Okay! I like those odds'."

The store was 10,500 square feet, bigger than other natural food stores at the time. In a 2007 article for The New York Times, Marian Burros wrote: "They were decorated with pastoral scenes of the local farmers who sold to them; signage explained why local and organic are better for the environment." Product Habits said information was written on chalkboards, while farmers would sometimes deliver their crops in person. "Everything about the store was designed to be a genuine alternative to the mainstream supermarkets that Whole Foods Market's laid-back customers avoided."

It worked. John Mackey told Chase Jarvis: "People would come into our store for the first time. You'd look at their faces and they'd be like: 'Wow! I've never been in a place like this before.'" He explained that, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, conventional supermarkets competing with Walmart cut costs, making their stores less inviting, especially for middle class women. "They liked coming into Whole Foods. They didn't understand what we were doing but they knew our stores were beautiful and our produce was very fresh," Mackey said.

Although the interior of the first Whole Foods Store was a world away from the sterile surroundings of traditional supermarkets, the same couldn't be said of the outside. Photos from the period show a one-story, slightly beaten-up building, while the initial sign bearing the store's name didn't have the iconic leaf design on the 'O' in Whole.

The exteriors have come a long way from those relatively humble beginnings. From Washington D.C. to California, and Montana to Virginia, Whole Foods Market stores are gleaming brick and glass constructions. Some tap into local history with their architectural designs, as Catherine Douglas Moran noted in Grocery Dive: "The grocer's One Wall Street location pays homage to the Art Deco history of the building housing the store."

The company experimented with other store formats, too. In 2022, a Whole Foods Market in Washington, D.C., was the first to offer parent company Amazon's Just Walk Out technology. Two years later, the doors opened on New York's Whole Foods Market Daily Shop, a smaller store primarily aimed at convenience shoppers.

Some supermarkets have relied on mascots to attract shoppers: Who remembers Price Chopper's Produce Monster, JOJO from Jewel-Osco or Plato the Publixaurus, from Publix? Whole Foods Market never really went down the same route, though co-founder John Mackey did become something of an iconic company figure.

Many of the people who helped run the first Whole Foods Market shared his counterculture ideals, and Mackey maintained them throughout his tenure at the company. Writing in 2017 for The Seattle Times, Stephen Gandel described the pay structure at Whole Foods Market as "one of the most reasonable executive compensation schemes in America."

Mackey's opinions about what senior company members should be paid were detailed in the book "Conscious Capitalism," co-written with Raj Sisodia, but he was also prepared to put his money where his mouth was — or not, as it turned out. In 2006, Mackey told his fellow shareholders that he was wealthy enough to stop being paid. From 2008, he pocketed just $1 a year in salary.

True to the hippie spirit of the first Whole Foods Market, the original staff members wore their own clothes to work. According to Margaret Wittenberg in "30 Years Fresh: "Everybody did everything, there were no teams. Everybody was a cashier, and we were the cleaning crew at night, and everything was done in that manner."

The branded green and red caps and aprons that are so familiar to customers shopping at Whole Foods Market today were introduced some time in the early 1980s, and everyone wore them, even John Mackey. He told Chase Jarvis: "Even though these people had tattoos and piercings and colored hair, they still were very nice to them, 'cause people at Whole Foods were very service-oriented."

For many years, as well as the signature caps and aprons, staff working in stores either wore their own clothing or shirts supplied by vendors. If a customer asked about the logos, staff could explain about products on sale and where they came from. More recently, some stores have become more strict about what staff are permitted to wear. One Redditor commented: "The new dress code isn't just limited to t-shirts. It limits facial piercings to one, and, in no uncertain terms, prohibits septum jewelry."

Whole Foods Market stood out from the crowd right from the start, and not just because it sold natural produce and spearheaded the organic food movement in the United States. The hippie ideals which brought the co-founders together and were tested by the 1981 flood, threw into sharp relief what really mattered for entrepreneur John Mackey.

He said in The Whole Story: "I was quite aware that there were these different parts of the business that cared about us. All of them did and, in a sense, that helped me realize that I cared about them and that we cared about them and we had responsibilities to try to do the right thing by them."

Alongside being a cheerleader for food standards and local suppliers, and creating improvements in animal welfare, Whole Foods Market also threw its weight behind a growing range of ethical brands and sustainability initiatives. In 2017, the year Amazon acquired Whole Foods Market, the company was named for the 20th consecutive year on Fortune's 100 Best Companies To Work For. It has not appeared in the list since.

Whole Foods Market has long been a draw for lots of famous faces, so the chances of running into a Hollywood celebrity or music star at your local store was pretty high, and remains so. In a collection posted by E!News, Aaron Eckhart, Zoe Saldana, Kylie Jenner, and Oscar-winner Reese Witherspoon have all been snapped exiting a Whole Foods Market.

One Reddit poster reeled off a galaxy of star names that frequented a Whole Foods Market, that was rumored to be in Nashville, writing: "Robert Plant, Reba McEntire, Nicole Kidman, Keith Urban, Laura Prepon, Tommy Lee, Hayley Williams, Kacey Musgraves... to name a few."

Celebrity fans aren't above sharing their fondness for the natural food store either. Rashida Jones took to X (formerly Twitter) after she spotted an unusual section, writing: "Whole Foods really does carry EVERYTHING." Singer Adam Lambert gushed: "I wouldn't survive traveling the world without Whole Foods Market! Thank u salad bar and brown rice sushi. Thank u flax seeds and buckwheat." Even superstar Rhianna couldn't help but share the love, posting to Instagram: "My fav section in whole foods."

The Whole Foods Market brand is famous across the United States — but it wasn't the first business John Mackey had owned. In the late 1970s, he and his then-girlfriend Renee Lawson ran a vegetarian store called Safer Way out of the first floor of their Victorian, three-story home.

"Safer Way was capitalized with $45,000, we lost half of it in the first 12 months we were open," Mackey said in The Whole Story. He said food would be delivered to the house and he would load up the Safer Way van to stock up the store, until the pair were evicted by their landlord. However, a visit to a Bread & Circus natural food store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, gave Mackey the inspiration not only to keep going, but to expand his dream further.

"It was just too small, we didn't have a big enough store to put in a full selection of grocery products," Mackey explained. He persuaded Mark Skiles and Craig Weller, who ran Clarksville Natural Grocery, to merge with Safer Way. "They didn't want to be called Safer Way and we didn't want to be called Clarksville, so we changed the name to Whole Foods Market," he said.

Customers who shopped at the first Whole Food Market were not just pleased with the homely decor or the variety of produce. They were given an alternative to traditional supermarkets that stocked endless aisles of canned or prepackaged items. For the first time, too, people knew more about the foods on sale, as well as details of what they did not contain and why.

The friendly atmosphere at Whole Foods Market also contrasted with the sterile environment offered by other supermarkets at the time. However, as the years passed, the high prices began to tarnish the company's reputation. Always more expensive than its competitors, it eventually earned the nickname 'Whole Paycheck' despite co-founder John Mackey's 2008 decision to cut his salary to $1.

In 2016, the company launched 365 by Whole Foods Market, smaller stores aimed at shoppers with lower budgets, and planned to open more than 22,300 branches. By February 2019, the expansion was ditched and the 365 stores became run-of-the-mill Whole Foods Market outlets.

John Mackey and the team who opened the first Whole Foods Market knew they were onto something special, almost from the first day. But even they could not have imagined having an international footprint. There are currently more than 500 stores in the United States, alongside 24 in Canada and seven in the U.K.

Alongside the growing number of stores, Whole Foods Market operates on a much bigger scale than the Austin outlet could ever hope to achieve. The vast meat and deli sections alone are eye-popping, and if people come for the fresh produce, they stay for the demonstrations and the wide range of samples. The company's commitment to animal welfare, ethical, and sustainability standards also helped radically shift the retail landscape: Consumers are more informed than ever about what they are buying and eating.

However, the Amazon takeover in 2017 has seen another shift, potentially one that moves away from what made Whole Foods Market so successful in the first place. One Redditor commented: "Imagine what it's like to walk into a store you've been at for over 15 years and think about how great it once was. Whole Foods is a shell of itself."