John Mackey, Whole Foods Market
About this episode
From the show’s notesJohn Mackey is the co-founder of Whole Foods Market, where he also served as the company's CEO for 44 years (1980–2022). More recently, Mackey is the co-founder of Love.Life, a wellness company focused on a holistic approach to health. He is an entrepreneur, author and advocate for conscious capitalism who spent over four decades building the natural foods industry.
Under his leadership, Whole Foods grew from a single store in Austin, Texas, in 1980 to the world's largest natural and organic foods retailer, with over 500 stores across North America and the United Kingdom before its acquisition by Amazon in 2017 for $13.7 billion.
Read the show’s notes in full
After dropping out of the University of Texas at Austin, Mackey opened SaferWay Natural Foods in 1978 with Renee Lawson Hardy. He merged SaferWay with Clarksville Natural Grocery in 1980 to create Whole Foods Market. He became known for pioneering high-quality natural foods retail, championing stakeholder-oriented business philosophy and popularizing the concept of conscious capitalism.
His accomplishments include building Whole Foods into a Fortune 500 company, co-founding the Conscious Capitalism movement with Raj Sisodia, serving as CEO of Whole Foods for 44 years until his retirement in 2022, co-authoring "Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business" in 2013 and "The Whole Foods Diet" in 2017 and launching Love.Life in 2023 to focus on longevity and integrative medicine.
Episode show notes: davidsenra.com/episode/john-mac…
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