Temporary Hold On My Blog

Dear Stakeholders,

A Special Committee of our Board of Directors’ is conducting an independent internal investigation into online financial message board postings related to Whole Foods Market and Wild Oats Markets. In light of this, it is in the best interest of the company to temporarily hold off on posting on my Company blog. The ability to post comments to this blog will be disabled during this time as well. I look forward to resuming our conversations and plan on being in touch with you again soon.

Best regards,

John

* July 17, 2007
Apology Statement

* July 17, 2007
Whole Foods Market’s Board of Directors Begins Independent Internal Investigation Associated with Online Financial Message Board Postings

* July 17, 2007
SEC Contacts Whole Foods Market as it Begins Inquiry

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By John Mackey

First I want to express my appreciation to everyone who sent positive and supportive comments on my blog posting. I really appreciate your kind thoughts and your good will. I won’t respond to your comments below because there is nothing more that I can really add to what I just said. However, I want you to know that I really appreciate your support even if I don’t respond directly to your comment. Thank you very much.

The response to my blog, and the interest and passion the FTC’s complaint against the Whole Foods Market/Wild Oats merger has generated is fascinating. I find the great majority of passionate comments, e-mails, and letters fall into one of five categories:

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by John Mackey

Executive Summary

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) recently filed a complaint challenging the merger of Whole Foods Market and Wild Oats. Whole Foods Market intends to fight this complaint in court. My blog posting provides a detailed look into Whole Foods Market’s decision-making process regarding the merger, as well as our company’s experience interacting with the FTC staff assigned to this merger. I provide explanations of how I think the FTC, to date, has neglected to do its homework appropriately, especially given the statements made regarding prices, quality, and service levels in its complaint. I also provide a glimpse into the bullying tactics used against Whole Foods Market by this taxpayer-funded agency. Finally, I provide answers in my FAQ section to many of the questions that various Team Members have fielded from both the media and company stakeholders.

As stated in our initial press release about Whole Foods Market’s challenge to the FTC’s complaint, we set an intention as a company to be as transparent as possible throughout this process. This is my first detailed effort at transparency. We will provide additional information as we field new questions and receive updates on the proceedings from the FTC and the courts.

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Many of you have probably heard about the FTC challenging our proposed merger with Wild Oats. Here’s a link to some detailed information that we presented to the FTC summarizing our case. Watch for a more extensive blog post from me next week.

• View FTC Updates Section

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As part of a recent public dialogue with Michael Pollan, I presented a slide show on the Past, Present and Future of Food. This slide show, as well as a link to a recorded version of the presentation and subsequent discussion with Pollan, are included in this blog post.

As an introduction to this material, I am sharing part of a monthly newsletter authored by Michael Strong, CEO and Chief Visionary for FLOW, a social entrepreneurial group I co-founded. He speaks to the events leading up to the conversation with Michael Pollan in Berkeley on February 27, 2007, as well as the greater meaning of the ongoing dialogue. Strong’s article adeptly references the linkage between this current presentation and my previous blog post on Conscious Capitalism. I invite you to read it with those things in mind while I work on an expanded, written version of my presentation to be posted on my blog in the near future.

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Hi Everyone,

I’ve been very gratified and impressed with your responses to my dialogue exchange with Michael Pollan over the last six months. The following lengthy essay is something I have been working on for several months; the ideas have been gestating for many years. The topic is Conscious Capitalism and I encourage you to read this material with your mind open to the possibilities inherent in these ideas. The essay is long and it may take extended time and concentration on your part to read. However, I think the ideas I articulate here are important ideas and they deserve to be read by an intelligent and critical audience.

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The following message from John Mackey was distributed to all Whole Foods Market Team Members on November 2, 2006.

To All Team Members,

I want to announce a couple of significant changes regarding compensation at Whole Foods Market. First, as you know, we have a salary cap policy which limits the total cash compensation that can be paid to any Team Member. The Board of Directors has voted to raise the salary cap from 14 times the average pay to 19 times the average pay, effective immediately. Why is this change happening? We are raising the salary cap for one reason only—to make the compensation to our executives more competitive in the marketplace. With our tremendous growth and success there has been an explosion in interest from our supermarket competitors in virtually everything we are doing. From copying many aspects in the design of our stores to selling more organic foods of all types, other supermarkets are studying and emulating us in dozens of different ways in their attempt to compete more aggressively against us. One of their competitive strategies has also been to aggressively seek to hire several of the executive leaders in our company. Everyone on the Whole Foods Leadership Team (except for me) has been approached multiple times by “headhunters” (Executive Search Firms) with job offers to leave Whole Foods and go to work for our competitors. Raising the salary cap to 19 times the average pay has become necessary to help ensure the retention of our key leadership.

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Hi Michael,

Thanks for your recent letter to me. I appreciate the fact that you wrote the letter in an overall positive tone. I want to respond to your letter with an equally positive tone and match your efforts in “constructive criticism.” I’ll take your letter section by section, with my responses below each section. I will then conclude by writing about some of the new initiatives Whole Foods Market will be beginning very soon, which I hope you’ll find exciting. I know that I’m very excited about them.

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Last month, John Mackey, the president of Whole Foods, wrote me a letter (also published on the Whole Foods Web site), taking issue with some of the points I have made about his grocery chain-in my book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” in my column for TimesSelect and in some of my public remarks. What follows is my response to Mr. Mackey.
Continue reading “Michael Pollan’s Response to Whole Foods Market”

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Michael Pollan’s new book The Omnivore’s Dilemma has been near the top of the best seller’s list since it was published in April, and it deserves to be. This is mostly an excellent book which I strongly recommend people read, along with Peter Singer and Jim Mason’s new book The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter. Both books are real wakeup calls about how our food is being produced in the United States today, and how our food choices potentially can make a positive difference in the world. While Singer and Mason have many nice things to say about Whole Foods Market in their book (especially regarding our approach to improving farm animal welfare), Pollan is far more critical and skeptical about many of Whole Foods Market’s practices, both in his book and in subsequent interviews about the book in the media. Unfortunately Pollan did not carefully research Whole Foods Market’s actual practices while writing his book so many of his comments about us are either inaccurate or misinformed. The letter that follows is one I gave to Pollan in person on May 25th after I spent a delightful hour and a half in productive dialog with him. (I have also included an additional section called “Creating a Third Way with Country Natural Beef” that was emailed to Pollan a few days after our meeting.) I found him to be highly intelligent, a good listener, open minded, thoughtful, and idealistic—all in all quite an interesting and impressive person. I came away from my dialog with him convinced that we will likely become proactive allies working together in our joint quest to reform “industrial agriculture.” I only wish we had met and had this productive dialog before he wrote his book. Unfortunately we didn’t and as result many misunderstandings are now circulating about Whole Foods Market as a result of his book and recent interviews. This letter is an attempt to address those misunderstandings.
Continue reading “An Open Letter to Michael Pollan”

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