Health Foods

Today’s world is hugely and increasingly preoccupied with the issue of the availability of healthy foods on a day to day basis in regards to a wide array of considerations, ranging from the adherence to standards of good health to the high premium placed on the maintenance of high standards in personal appearance and levels of athletic fitness as markers of social status and personal worth. Whatever the substance and merit of a reason for being interested in the best healthy food that one can eat for maintaining both aesthetic and physical standards, the commercial demand for and availability of the sources of healthy foods is a major component in the landscape of food in today’s America. In such outlets as exist for providing what is usually deemed, though possibly more as a marketing label and less in adherence to consistent standards and measurable results, healthy food, there are few more important players in the American market as Whole Foods, the nationally based supermarket chain. A range of issues and controversies have swirled around this company and its philosophy behind delivering what it identifies as healthy foods since it burst into prominence on the national scene. In understanding the kinds of services that are offered by Whole Foods, one useful aspect of the company’s evolution to consider for the interested consumer or healthy food services professional is the figure of Whole Foods’ co-founder and CEO, John Mackey. Looking at this man’s business philosophy and approach and his understanding of what it means to provide healthy foods can help lead to an understanding of what this store’s success means for the entire concept of healthy foods and the place that is able to fulfill in the contemporary landscape of America.

During the nineteen-seventies, Mackey’s social life led him to gravitate toward a period in a vegetarian cooperative, where for the first time he began to pay attention to the idea of healthy foods and question the traditional supermarket model of frozen foods which he had been raised with. After working for a while as a cashier at a healthy food oriented store, he began to start such a business of his own and solicited start-up funds from family and friends to create a simple establishment in the same vein all of his own. The main idea with which he approached his creation of the store was to deviate from the then accepted model for stores that offered healthy foods, which at that point was quite austere in providing only a limited range of goods, all felt to fall strictly within the countercultural conception of healthy food as then commonly held in alternative social circles. Mackey and his business associates stocked the store with alcohol and meat products of a kind that were frowned on by conventional healthy food providers. With the success of this first store, Mackey began to open new chains of the Whole Foods business across the country, leading to a revolution in the industry of healthy foods stores.