John Mackey

So I always tell people, to show you how fast Whole Foods grew,

At the end, when we went public in 1992, 14 years after we'd opened the first Whole Foods Market, no, the first Safeway store, we were up to 12 stores.

It took us 14 years to get to 12 stores.

When I retired 30 years later, we were 540 stores.

So once we got the formula down and it worked, we scaled it pretty rapidly.

And we acquired Mrs. Gooch's in LA.

We acquired Bread and Circus in Boston, Fresh Fields in DC.

We acquired a lot of our friends.

and cashed out the entrepreneurs, made them very wealthy and gave us new platforms for growth in different geographical areas.

And then we took the best practices from each one of them.

We didn't think Whole Foods was better than everybody else.

We just, these were our peers.

And so we had an attitude of what can we learn from them that makes us better?

Well, everything's always evolving.

Yeah.

So Whole Foods, for most of our history, was very decentralized.

We were, and there's always trade-offs in organizational structure.

We were very innovative historically.

When we're decentralized, we empowered regional leadership to innovate, to create new things.

A lot of them didn't work, but the ones that did work, we could copy and spread.