AUSTIN, Texas — The Whole Foods flagship in Austin is a shrine.
With its acres of organic and regenerative produce, a craft beer bar with cheese pairings, and seemingly endless shelves of specialty groceries sculpted to perfection by an attentive floor staff, it is a shrine to what fixed Whole Foods Market in the American imagination as a luxuryland of healthy, aspirational eating.
But with its world headquarters office tower looming overhead, self-service kiosks, harried Whole Foods workers loading carts for pickup customers and grab-and-go shoppers lugging armfuls of ready-to-heat dinners, it is also a physical manifestation of what the brand has become: a mainstream American supermarket.
Even so, the presiding presence of Whole Foods past, John Mackey, who founded the company in 1980 just blocks away and was its CEO for 42 years, still makes regular pilgrimages to the salad bar, as if checking on his creation.
He’s not the only one. Tourists also drop by to take photos in front of the store, a testament to the power of the brand.
The Whole Foods Market flagship store in Austin, Texas, on Oct. 16, 2025. As diet and wellness become increasingly politicized, one of the most recognizable grocery brands is navigating the debate. (Katherine Squier/The New York Times)
Since its founding in 1980, Whole Foods has changed the way Americans eat, helping to elevate the organic movement from niche lifestyle to booming product category. It scared Big Food, and shook up retail generally by transforming a dreary chore such as grocery shopping into what it called a “sensory experience.”
Today the company has 529 locations in 44 states and Washington, D.C. Its business, which accounts for less than 2% of domestic grocery sales, is dwarfed by global giants such as Kroger and Walmart. Its profit margins are significantly higher, though, and it continues to be the grocer others emulate when it comes to product offerings.
“I think we’re in a great spot in the industry,” said Jason Buechel, the CEO since Mackey’s departure in 2022, citing “the standards we put into place and the consciousness we helped bring to consumers.”
Yet in the eight years since it was acquired by Amazon, Whole Foods has found itself searching for a place in the very landscape it redefined. As its prices have come down, its feeling of exclusivity has waned. Rival grocers have built their own emotional attachments with shoppers, a relationship that would have seemed ludicrous before Whole Foods made it a core strategy.
And that was before the dramatic takeover of the nutrition debate by the “Make America Healthy Again” movement.
The MAHA version of the natural-food cause isn’t exactly political friends with the affluent, blue-state progressives who have long been the Whole Foods customer base. And in a moment when Americans are more concerned than ever about eating healthy, the world’s most visible health-conscious grocer has been uncharacteristically reticent.
The paradox is that Whole Foods, of all brands, should be ready to meet the zeitgeist. After all, Mackey is a vehement capitalist, a libertarian and a zealot when it comes to eating well. Whole Foods has horseshoe politics in its DNA.
“There has always been a get-out-of-my-face, don’t-tell-me-what-to-do, anti-government, anti-corporation side to the healthy food movement,” said Corby Kummer, executive director of Food & Society at the Aspen Institute. “Whole Foods has always been for people who want to reject the mainstream.”
Alex Clark loves Whole Foods. But she also resents it.
Clark hosts the highly rated podcast “Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark,” part of the Turning Point USA network founded by Charlie Kirk. During the pandemic, she was consuming a diet of ultraprocessed food — “I was at Chick-fil-A, like, four times a week” — when she underwent a conversion.
In a fit of disgust, she said, she “got rid of everything that had artificial dyes, seed oils and wasn’t organic. I mean, literally everything. I’m that type of person, all in or out. It was full throttle overnight.”
Today in Scottsdale, Arizona, where she lives, Whole Foods has become the “main place that I grocery shop,” she said. (According to her, Kirk was a frequent shopper there as well.) But she feels that the grocer has been reluctant to embrace MAHA publicly.
“It has to be politically motivated,” she said, “Like: ‘We don’t want to be perceived as Trump supporters,’ which is just ridiculous.” She accused the company of shying away from signature MAHA causes, such as opposition to seed oils, and betraying its mission to improve American health.
“The consumer has gotten very smart, and they do notice,” Clark said. “They do notice Whole Foods’ lack of voice in this movement and wondering where their leadership is in this.”
She’d like to tell Whole Foods: “This is the moment that you guys have allegedly fought for your entire existence. Why are you slowing down when you should be ramping up?”
Not everyone sees Whole Foods as distancing itself from the new health movement, however. Indeed, some wish the company would distance itself more.
“MAHA is clobbering public health right now,” said Jessica Steier, a public health scientist and a founder of “The Unbiased Science Podcast,” and companies are “jumping on the bandwagon.” She cited Whole Foods as “a place that is feeding into all of the logical fallacies that seed oils are bad, that food colorings are bad, supplements and all the other things that make us in the science space really cringe.”
Shopping bags are displayed for sale at the Whole Foods Market flagship store in Austin, Texas, on Oct. 16, 2025. As diet and wellness become increasingly politicized, one of the most recognizable grocery brands is navigating the debate. (Katherine Squier/The New York Times)
That people on both sides of the debate draw such different conclusions about Whole Foods’ stance suggests how murky the company’s messaging has been, just as some other businesses are seizing the opportunity of the MAHA moment.
When asked directly about its stance on the movement, the company responded with a written statement: “We welcome the growing recognition that health is closely tied to the food we eat. Whole Foods Market has always been a haven for customers that are seeking more holistic approaches to their wellness, and we plan to stay the course.”
It’s hard to imagine John Mackey being so cautious.
Mackey believes in what he calls “conscious capitalism,” an offshoot of libertarianism that venerates both the free market and sustainability.
A mystique developed, an aura of invincibility, of the ability to make almost anything work. In one audacious experiment, for instance, the company set out to build a network of local farmers in Hawaii to supply native staples like taro and papaya, which could be bought more cheaply in California and Mexico.
After the 2008 recession, as the appetite for emu eggs and saffron threads cooled, the company’s stock price stagnated. Investors grew disenchanted with Mackey’s freewheeling leadership style. He found himself increasingly on the defensive, fighting off the “sharks,” he called the investors publicly, who wanted Whole Foods to focus less on serving a “higher purpose” in order to compete with Kroger and Walmart.
“The regional model was really hard to manage,” said Errol Schweizer, a former vice president of the grocery division, particularly the high labor costs. In the 2010s, Whole Foods submitted to pressure with centralization in Austin and layoffs of between 3,000 and 5,000 store-level employees, Schweizer said.
Ambitious initiatives such as the Hawaiian supply network were abandoned, as “every operational element of the business was being scrutinized to be stripped down,” said Mike Schall, a veteran of Unilever and Wise Foods who came to Whole Foods to work for Mackey in 2011.
In 2017, Mackey made a desperate move, reaching out to Amazon. The $13.7 billion acquisition was concluded within weeks. “It was a shotgun wedding,” Schall said.
The deal gave Amazon a foothold it had long coveted in the brick-and-mortar grocery world, and allowed Mackey to preserve some of his business model. But not all.
The produce section at the Whole Foods Market flagship store in Austin, Texas, on Oct. 16, 2025. As diet and wellness become increasingly politicized, one of the most recognizable grocery brands is navigating the debate. (Katherine Squier/The New York Times)
Whole Foods under Amazon is clearly trying to be more things to more people.
“They’ve broadened their approach, and that’s the smart thing to do,” said Phil Lempert, a food industry analyst and the editor of SupermarketGuru. “Those die-hard Whole Foods people from generations before, they went to Erewhon. They went to Sprouts. They don’t exist anymore.” Under Amazon, he added, the company is “going after Gen Z, millennials and new generations of shoppers.”
So far, Amazon seems happy with Buechel’s tenure: This summer it consolidated its entire grocery business, including Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go, under his leadership.
Another change is that as Whole Foods has become less visible publicly, others have stepped into the pulpit where it used to lead the healthy food movement.
“Originally the movement was liberal,” said Sonalie Figueiras, editor of the progressive food website Green Queen Media. “Now it’s right-wing. Where is Whole Foods in the story? They moved the needle on food culture. They mainstreamed a lot of these things.”
“The left led the way on health and wellness for a long time,” Clark said. “I don’t know why, but they handed the baton to the right.”
The salad bar at the Whole Foods Market flagship store in Austin, Texas, on Oct. 16, 2025. As diet and wellness become increasingly politicized, one of the most recognizable grocery brands is navigating the debate. (Katherine Squier/The New York Times)
But there may be signs that the company is still looking to read the cultural winds.
Recently, it introduced a new design for its shopping bags, covering them with the slogan “It’s What’s Not in the Bag,” and a list of all 562 ingredients the company bans from its shelves.
“When I saw those bags, I thought the message they’re sending is ‘Everyone’s talking about this now, but we’ve been in the trenches,’” said Helena Bottemiller Evich, a former Politico reporter who runs the influential blog Food Fix. “Of course they did it without touching MAHA as a topic. It was very subtle, and also not subtle.”
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