The missionary of retail:
Interview with Whole Foods' Walter Robb

Note: This is the complete transcript of an interview I did with Whole Foods Market Co-President Walter Robb in late 2006. It has been lightly edited for grammatical sense and organizational logic. A much more condensed version was published under a different headline in the January/February 2007 issue of Corporate Board Member magazine (registration required).

Robb photos © Bart Nagel

How'd you end up in the grocery business?

Well, I actually started in it before John [Mackey, Whole Foods' CEO] did. After I graduated from Stanford, I started a small natural foods store in 1976. I borrowed $2,000 from my stepfather; we started it on a shoestring and ran it for 10 years. Then we sold it and moved to the big city, San Francisco, where I managed a three-store chain for three years called Whole Living Foods, then I started up another store in Mill Valley, which I sold to Whole Foods before it opened, which was store No. 11 for the company. I joined when there were eight stores.

Everybody in the natural food business was getting in at the same time, in the early and mid-70s. It was much different than it is today.

Why does have Whole Foods have two presidents, and how do you divide your roles?

A.C. [Gallo] and I have been friends and colleagues for almost 30 years together. So it's not the structure first and the people second, I think it's the fact that we are such good partners that the structure works. I'm the pusher; he's the Buddha. I'm generative; he's structural. By the time we hash something through, it's pretty well thought out from all angles.

One of the things that's unique about Whole Foods is we're all paid the same, the six of us, including John. We have a salary cap  at 14 times the average pay, and we all earn the same pay. We make our decisions together as a team. There's a lot about our structure that's a little bit different. [Note: In November the company announced that Mackey would reduce his salary to $1 and the salary cap would be raised to $608,000 — 19 times the average pay, low by Fortune 500 top executive standards.]

How do you balance responsibilities with Mackey?

John's a visionary. He's 10 years down the road. And what he does best is, first of all, he's an incredible business philosopher. His mission is nothing less than conscious capitalism and leading the way of a new way of thinking about business and business's role in society. He's brilliant. I remember when he and I went to dinner with Milton Friedman in San Francisco. Milton is one of John's and my heroes as an economist. We had a wonderful dinner talking about stakeholder philosophy versus shareholder philosophy.

John is sketching out the frontiers and parameters for a new way of thinking about business. [Mackey has a lengthy blog entry about this, as well as a fascinating discussion with Friedman himself and another CEO in Reason magazine.] History will record him as one of the great business figures of the 21st century. I think it's our place to support him in that and make that a reality in terms of the company and the company culture.

So what is it like to work with him? He's a close friend as well as the CEO. He trusts us, he's not a micromanager. You can see that by the fact that the company is innovative and different that these are principles deeply held. This is coming from our soul.

I was struck by how personally Mackey seems to take Michael Pollan's comments in The Omnivore's Dilemma. This is not just a job to him.

Absolutely. Look, we started when this was really small, and it was started from a place of believing that you can make a difference in the world. This retailing comes from our soul. It comes from a desire to effect change in the world. Nothing less than that. Not the money, not the prestige, it comes from a desire to make a difference in the world. From the sense of mission. And it's been that way long before Michael Pollan started writing, and it will continue to be that way. If people are skeptical about it, well so be it.

Yes, organic has now arrived. Wonderful. But as recently as two or three years ago, people were still saying "This is bullshit, blah blah blah." So it’s happened kind of quickly, and that’s one of the places where I think Michael has a stunning lack of historical consciousness or awareness. Just a few years ago Whole Foods was fighting to keep the standards intact, to keep sewage sludge and GMOs out of organic food.

You wrote in a recent article that "We're not retailers with a mission, we're missionaries who retail." Explain the difference.

The deepest core of Whole Foods — the heartbeat, if you will — is this mission of the stakeholder philosophy. If I put it in simple terms it would be one, to change the way the world eats, and two, to create a workplace based on love and respect. It’s been refined over the years from when we were kids and starting out, but I think that's still the heart of it, and the belief that business is run by meeting the needs of all the stakeholders, as opposed to operating it for the shareholders.

That's a very different way of thinking about your business, and I think you make good decisions when you balance all six shareholders in your decision making. For us, that's customer first, team member second. For managers, it's team-member happiness first; we know if we take care of team members, they'll take care of customers. That's our basic business philosophy.

It's even written into the company's charter.

It's in our DNA, actually. The same people who started the company are still running it. We don't lose senior leaders in this company. We don't have any turnover. And we've never brought anybody in from the outside, which is another unusual thing for a company of our size.

The goal of a"workplace based on love and respect" is also not something you hear from companies the size of Whole Foods.

I know, journalists can be cynical. But for us, this comes from the heart, it comes from the soul, from a desire to change the world. 

Cynics are just disappointed idealists.

Well I just want to remind you that journalists have a tremendous role to play in shifting this thinking about the role of business.  If media were to start talking about sustainability in business, and start talking about it as if it was a given, and asking "Why aren’t you?" as opposed to saying "is this really true" or "is this a fact," you could begin to shift the dialogue to where businesses would not think about operating any other way.

I think the table stakes for being a business in the 21st century are sustainability, treating your people well,  all these things that we’re talking about as new ideas. These are basically just the givens for being a responsible business in the time that we live in. When you see "An Inconvenient Truth," and you read Time magazine, and you see these concerns about global warming and the environment are real, what’s your answer to that? If you’re not doing something about it, then what are you doing?

Business is the most generative enterprise we have. It’s not the nonprofits; they can’t support themselves without business. It’s not the legal profession; they just gum things up. I don’t think it’s medicine, per se, that’s caught up in the bureaucracy. It’s business that creates jobs, energy, and enterprise, and change. Business is the change engine of the 21st century— if it chooses to be. Not only ethically, but also in terms of how it treats people, impacts the communities where it does business, internationally or globally. We’re hoping to set an example for that.

Historically that has not been the role of business. Corporate case law recognizes the rights of only the shareholders.

Yes, but you know what’s going to drive people there? Competition. Because businesses that are not meeting these standards are increasingly falling out of favor with consumers. It’s not a one-way dialogue from brand to consumer anymore.  It’s the consumer, with the new tools and the new transparency of the conversation, who determines who's going to survive. You look at the history of business in this country, and you’ll see that many of the biggest companies are no longer in business.

Anyone who’s not taking the longer view of what the competition and the marketplace does, they’re going to miss the boat. Maybe they’ll squeak a few short-term years out of it, but the market is moving and you better move with it.

You have to open yourself up and think of some of these things like sustainability, because consumers are increasingly going to demand it. And they’re going to have access to it — the companies that practice sustainability and transparency will be available to them. They're already asking, "Where do your products come from? Who’s growing them? How responsible are you functioning as a company?" If Wal-Mart’s feeling the pressure, why should anyone else be immune?

Wal-Mart is feeling the pressure, and in fact has announced all sorts of major sustainability initiatives. It is also moving into organic, and —

Let's come back to Wal-Mart. Let’s look at all the other areas that are under pressure. Executive pay. Who really believes that the CEO needs to make 500 times the average worker? That’s what’s going on at places like Home-Depot. Sure, this guy’s a great executive, but honestly — is anybody worth that much more money? How long are people going to say, "Yes, let’s support that kind of thing." I don’t know. And also when you’re making your products overseas. People are going to ask questions.

I think these things are real shifts in consciousness in the world, which is a wonderful thing. Business has to move along with it. I think the challenge is for business to lead that shift in consciousness, to step up to the role it can play in making it happen.

Isn't Whole Foods sort of 10 years ahead there? The only place where Americans seem caught up with you is on food, the "we are what we eat" idea. But most people seem  to focus on the personal-health benefits of organic, not its overall sustainability. And that’s why you’re starting to see this backlash of articles about how organic food is not actually any healthier for you.

That’s b.s. that you’re hearing that organic food is not more nutritious than industrial. The Organic Center, which I am on the board of, is something we started three years ago to prove the benefits of organic. The research in Europe is farther along than it is in the U.S. But look at the USDA study nutrient density. In the last 50 years, the nutrient density of 12 major nutrients has substantially declined. That’s fact. So this post-WWII, factory-food revolution is coming to an end, for a lot of reasons. It’s not sustainable, all these externalized costs for pesticides and water: they're going to be cycled back in the true cost of food, and the cost of the workers and the workers’ health and the community health, all that’s coming to the surface now.

In time, it’ll come out that vitality trumps nonvitality, and  the big picture trumps this sort of individual standpoint. That’s the way things are moving, because the planet’s almost demanding it.

But I think you’re right, in terms of consumers catching up to us on food. I think that’s a wonderful thing, that this is more broad-based now, and our opportunity and challenge is to go to the next level. That’s what we intend to do. We’re not going to sit here; we’re going to raise the bar, we’re setting animal-compassion standards. The way animals are being raised in this country — factory farming? Not good.

Consumers, for the most part, they’re into natural/organic, but there’s a higher standard to be created there, in terms of your awareness of your meat purchase. We intend to go there and create that, and hopefully keep raising the bar for food.

Whole Foods donates 5% of after-tax profits to nonprofit organizations, and also oversees two foundations. How does philanthropy contribute to the bottom line of a publicly traded company?

Again, talking about our mission — we’ve been a public company since 1993. We’ve delivered comparable or superior shareholder value through this business model, so it's not like our shareholders have suffered.

If you go back to us being a values-driven, mission-driven company, we keep looking for the larger mission of the company. It’s just part of the higher table stakes for being a responsible business in the 21st century: you must accept your responsibility to contribute to these larger problems. It’s been our experience that we can do that and still deliver shareholder value. They’re not two separate things. We’re just getting there a different way — through working our stakeholder philosophy, by taking care of our customers and our team members and our communities. It’s just a different way of thinking about operating a business.

There are 6 billion people on the planet right now, and 2 billion of them live on less than $2 a day. And many of those folks live in the areas where we source some of our products, like coffee or chocolate. We have a responsibility to contribute, and we think the way we can do that best is with the Whole Planet Foundation, which has partnered with Grameen Bank [to provide microcredit]. We’ve made about 750 loans already in Costa Rica and Guatemala. The average loan is about a dollar right now. Can you believe that? Yet it’s already making a tremendous impact. If you’ve read Bankers of the Poor, by Muhammad Yunus, you can’t help but be moved.

[Grameen Bank and its founder, Muhammad Yunus, were named joint winners of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to create economic and social development from below."]

In about three or four years [the foundation] will be a sustainable enterprise. I think most folks need a hand up, they don’t need a handout, and the NGO approach to development has been consistently proven to be not as successful, because it gets stopped at the top with corruptions, etc. This is directly giving people that are there an opportunity to build their own future.

And the Animal Compassionate Foundation is supposed to be a clearinghouse of information about humane and sustainable practices for meat producers?

It’s basically the same idea. When you look at how most animals are being raised for eating in this country, we’ve got to support a greater awareness about that, and greater transparency, so we can change it. Because it’s horrible. You go to a chicken farm, or a pig farm, it’s just gross. These chickens have their beaks and their tails cut off, they’re bred for big breasts so they can’t even stand on their own feet, but that doesn't matter because they’re crammed into these little cages and they’re crapping on top of one another.

It’s just not responsible, and it’s not sustainable. With this foundation, we’re supporting and spreading the applicable resources to allow producers to learn from other countries and setting up a network that allows that information to move around.

Aren't you increasing your base costs by encouraging these animal compassionate standards, because you’re asking ranchers to implement more costly measures of raising animals, which gets passed along to consumers in the form of higher prices? How is that effective for shareholders or even for customers?

Well first of all, ultimately in the marketplace you have to continue to differentiate yourself, and that’s ultimately your competitive weapon: being able to offer products that are not available elsewhere. And by raising awareness about issues, people will come because they can’t get your products anywhere else. I would argue that continuing to sketch out our competitive position as the food industry leader is a positive thing for shareholders because it sets up apart and we don’t just drop into the morass along with every body else.

No. 2 is, it’s incremental. So we’re not selling only those products, we’re just adding those products and gradually raising the bar; the other products are available too, consumers can make their choice, and we think his is where they’re going.

But you don’t sell any meat from the standard factory farms, do you?

That’s correct, we don’t offer any meat that’s not “natural” — there are minimum standards that are posted on our website: no debeaked chickens, for example. So there’s a baseline in terms of our standard, but not everything’s going to be animal-compassionate. It’s going to be a fairly small percentage at first. But no other grocer has these complete animal standards by species, and backed up by the inspections. The word “natural” doesn’t mean anything anymore; the USDA says “minimally processed,” but what’s that?

So A, it’s a competitive position. B, in terms of being the market leader and being the place that consumers trust to give good information — that translates into tangible returns for shareholders. Third, it’s consistent with our mission, so it contributes to us being authentic. The world is not a static place; it’s a dynamic place. We believe, looking at all the signs of things that are happening that people are waking up to more and more areas of our interconnectedness  and our interdependence, if you will. And this is just another area that’s coming to light. As history has shown, as consumers become aware, things begin to change. I think when we look back five or ten years from now we’ll see this is just a natural step from the local food movement to saying "I want to know that the meat I’m purchasing is responsible. "

The animal compassionate standards are relatively recent move for Whole Foods. How much of this is driven by Mackey's recent conversion to being vegan, which actually came after he looked into allegations of duck mistreatment that an animal-rights activist  made at a shareholder meeting?

John kind of ignored her at the time, but then later he started reading, and educating himself — as is his way, if you've ever been to his house he's got stacks of books everywhere, he's a reader and he has an incredible memory. He read [ethicist] Peter Singer's "Animal Liberation," and of course what Singer does with that is he creates at least a second way where you can still eat animals, but only those ones that are being treated compassionately. You're accepting that human life has a higher value than the animal life, but you're at least choosing consciously in the terms that the animal's going to be treated with while it's alive.  So that's a midpoint you can go to. But John has a real philosopher bent to him, and he could not convince himself why he should continue to eat meat at the expense of the animal's suffering. He's a very principled individual , and giving up animal products is the decision he made.

So that has certainly influenced our looking at this area, but again, we're one of the companies that started the natural-meat business and started raising questions about meat in the first place. Ultimately, animal compassionate standards are about acknowledging that people eat meat, so it's not a vegan point of view. It's actually a point of view about where's the next standard for selling meat.

Do you eat meat?

I'm class II. I eat very little meat. I won’t eat red meat, I do eat chicken occasionally, and fish, but only if I know where it comes from, otherwise I won't. I'll just eat vegetarian. Ethically, I don’t know why I would want to support factory farms. So I don't.

Did you guys comment during the USDA's grass-fed label period?

We did, and we intend to offer 100% grass-fed product soon. We’re pushing our producers; we’re doing some experiments, we have lots of activity in that area.

I was surprised to see that your proposed animal compassionate standards for cattle only mandated pasture for two-thirds of its life.

There’s nothing inherently incompassionate about feeding an animal grain or finish; it’s more the way that it’s done that causes problems. If the USDA allows 80% grass and 20% grain to be labeled "grass-fed," that’s just misleading. It’s like the word “natural,” it doesn’t really mean anything. We intend to give it meaning, and say this animal’s been raised on grass 100% of the time. And that means to get the finish out of it, and the flavor of the animal, you’re going to have to do some progressive agriculture, and use grasses that have been used in places like New Zealand to finish the animal. We will be absolutely transparent on that, once we have the supply line down.

It seems that other companies are deciding that it’s time for them to catch on, and riding your wave of responsibility. How are you going to explain to Whole Foods customers why they should pay, say, $2.59 a pound for organic apples versus $1.59 for them at Wal-Mart? Wal-Mart has said it intends to sell certified organic produce for just a 10 percent premium over the industrial kind.

Wal-Mart backed off, you know; they later said that they realized they couldn’t sell it for that, because the supply isn’t there. And they may offer it, but the early information doesn’t show that they’re necessarily selling it. Just because Wal-Mart decides to sell something doesn’t mean the Wal-Mart consumer is going to buy it. We’ve spent a lot of time educating our customers about organic.

Let’s remember that Wal-Mart is in a difficult competitive position. Their comps — a retail term for same-store year-over- year growth — have been on the very low end of their scale, and they have to grow just like any other company. So they’re looking around for how they can grow, and one of their answers is, "Well we’ll be more sustainable and we’ll sell more organic. " Wal-Mart just had to back out of China, they’ve backed out of Korea and Germany, they weren’t successful there; like anybody else they’ve got to grow their business. So this is a strategy for them, as well as a feel-good thing.

You sound kind of cynical.

I’m not cynical, but I think you have to make sure you look at it from both sides. Just because Wal-Mart decides to do it, doesn’t mean the consumer’s going to follow. Listen, Wal-Mart’s the best retailer on the planet and you’ve got to have respect for them. And we certainly do.

However, I think it’s a good thing that they’re doing this. I think it says that sustainability is really here. We don’t have to discuss anymore whether it’s a fad or it’s bullshit. We can all agree that it’s a good thing for the planet. I don’t know that Wal-Mart thinks that as much as it think that’s a business game for them, based on that [spokesperson’s] comment about it organic being "just another merchandising scheme," but I don’t know [CEO] Lee Scott, so I don’t know what he really thinks.

It’s going to encourage more supply. Ultimately it’s going to help bring the price of organic down for everybody.  I do think there is a difference between "Deep Organic" and "Shell Organic" that Jane Goodall talks about in her book "Harvest for Hope," have you read it? [He looks disappointed.] Well, you may want to read that little section there.  Deep Organic is about things like local, transparency, sources, there's a labor component to it and an environmental component  that you don't necessarily get with the organic standard the way it is right now.

Over 10% of organic food is sourced outside of the U.S. now; there's always that concern over how it's certified.  Organic is not ultimately just a price thing.  Are we respectful of Wal-Mart? Absolutely. Are we encouraged by the steps that they're taking as a business? Absolutely.

Back to your point about price — Americans spend less of their income, around 10%, on food than any other industrialized nation. One avenue out is people making more proactive, responsible choices in their diet. Europeans tend to spend 14% to 15%. So whether it's at Whole Foods or wherever, encouraging consumers to make better choices with the quality of their food is important. Americans are buying more food, and a lot of these foods that have been developed are nutritionally empty. But we don't sell those foods.

That reminds me. You're said you're working on getting rid of the nickname "Whole Paycheck," but you don't like "Holy Foods" either. So why do you have such a long list of "unacceptable" food ingredients? 

You mean the quality standards? Well, not being Holy Foods just means we're not preaching religion to you. We're not saying you're wrong to drink coffee or eat ice cream.…

As long as that ice cream doesn't have artificial sweeteners.

No, we're not saying that. We'd never say that. What we say is, "Here are our standards. Here's what we stand for. If these are choices you want to make, we can support you in those choices."

You don’t ever hear anyone out there proselytizing — we do talk about quality, that's our differentiator, but I would never tell you what's right for you. Even science suggests that nutrition is such an individual thing. We're there about providing these choices for you for a healthy lifestyle. And if it works for you, great.

High fructose corn syrup isn't yet on the list of banned ingredients, is it?

It's not banned, but it's going to be moved. We're not encouraging it in new formulations. It's not a good choice. Ultimately it's linked to type II diabetes, and a lot of members have been pushing for us to move out of it. If you look at our sodas, it's not the first ingredient like it typically is in many. It's not a preferred ingredient. I think you could see a day where we would decide to do that as a next stage. We did get rid of the hydrogenated oils — the trans fats are just flat-out dangerous. High-fructose corn syrup is definitely in our sights.

Whole Foods has been named to Fortune’s list of the best companies to work for in each of the nine years since the list was started. But Mackey compares putting up with unions to having herpes. How do you square those two things?

Okay. That’s a memorable quote, but he said it in 1983—give the guy a break. Listen, Whole Foods is pro-worker, pro-team member. If you look at our very core, our DNA, the second stakeholder is the team member. Unions in this country started because companies were exploiting people—coal companies in the 1850s and 1870s, then factories and mines. Today less than 10% of U.S. workers in the private sector are in unions. Let’s remember that unions are a business, and their membership is declining. I believe there’s a question of whether they truly represent workers.

So if they’re ineffectual, why not allow them?

Where is it written that unions are the only ways you can be a team-member-friendly company? Was that handed down by Moses or something? I missed that. The point of a union was so that companies would be partners with and responsible to the people working for them. Structurally, we walk our talk. We have the salary cap for executives; we have open information-sharing about all salaries; 93% of our stock options are held outside the executive team. Everybody in the company belongs to a team, and they vote on new hires for those teams. We have gains-sharing every four weeks, a system we set up where a share of labor savings is given back to the team.

Now is everyone completely happy? No, it’s not paradise; it’s not idyllic all the time. The thing about unions is, you have to talk to a third party to talk to your own workers. We strive for direct communication and partnership. And I think on the whole we’ve been successful. If a union comes up at Whole Foods, if people feel the need to go outside the company, then we don’t really have the company that we think we do.

So something went wrong with the store in Madison, Wisconsin, that voted for a union in 2002?

Yes. That was a giant wake-up call. The store team leader fell asleep at the switch. The people working there no longer believed the promise of Whole Foods, and I don’t blame them. They voted for the union, and it lasted a year. On day 366, a group of the workers in the store filed a petition to disband the union, which they did. That was a tremendous learning experience. Now we’re doing town-hall meetings in every region every year, and we do anonymous morale surveys twice a year. We let every team member vote on the health-insurance plan, and we did a ballot on the whole benefits package for the company.

How big can you grow and maintain that balance among all the six stakeholders? Are there any role models for what you're doing?

It's an interesting question. We don't know ourselves, this is the furthest we’ve ever been. From where we started we've gotten very big. Where do we want to be? We've said that by 2010 we'll be at $12 billion in sales, and we’ve said that we're going to be international company. We're competitive folks, we're not, you know,  hippie-dippy la-di-da-das. We intend to compete and produce the best food stores that we possibly can, and make an impact. So how big can it get? I don't know. Five -year plans don't even work in Russia.

We're currently operating 6.5 million square feet and we have 5 million square feet of retail already signed and in the bank, so we can $12 billion in sales in 2010 being a very achieveable goal. That's within our grasp. I mean, every time we've said how big we think we can be, we've been wrong.  I don't even want to try to predict. We have to keep our mission and values in the forefront, if we operate from that place, that will give us the best chance of being successful.

With the housing bubble popping, and consumer spending possibly downshifting, can you see Americans returning to a place where they don't want to spend more money for food?

Economics go in cycles. You have the ups and downs, but on the other hand you have these deeper trends about people and their health and their awareness and their consciousness and how lifestyle plays into that. And you've got 80 million baby boomers realizing they want vitality in their lives. And these are mega trends. These are shifts that people are not going to go back from.

I see greater value coming into the organic offering. I see the scale bringing the potential for closing the price gap on that. I also think it will close because conventional food will have to include more of the costs. Externalizing all of those costs, like Wal-Mart not offering health insurance, the effects of pesticide, all of those things will start to get factored in and people will start to say, "Hey that's not really what it costs to buy that food." So it may close from that, and I think it may close from this side. At the very least these other trends are on equal weight to the economic trends right now.

The price of conventional food— food grown with chemical inputs —has just been falling for years. Why would that trend reverse?

Fuel prices play a big role, they're part of the cost of doing business, and they're going up. And ultimately as retailers you pass that cost on for producers. Oil costs are affecting everyone: from the cost to operate your farm machines, to pack and ship and distribute the food, the cost to operate our stores — it's affecting everybody. The good news is you've got a lot of people looking at how they can go to biodiesel on the farm or in the trucking . We've got a couple of distribution centers on biodiesel now; we've got two solar stores, we've made commitments to wind powers. Fuel prices have spurred people to look at ways to save. But is affecting everyone.

Is there much tension with Wall Street with some of Whole Foods' sustainability and philanthropic initiatives ?

Tension would be too strong a word. Ultimately they're looking at the results for the company. If we were not making our numbers, then someone might start bitching about why we were spending so much on this or that. But what they're really looking at is our sales, and net income, and return on invested capital relatively to the pure company, so that's what they look at.

Do you think there is a growing awareness  in the larger business world that business as usual is not sustainable?

I think it is happening. We are in a period of questions being asked. There are not that many companies, Starbucks and a few others, that are even having this type of dialogue. 

Are baby boomers in senior-management positions asking themselves whether their job and their company has meaning?

No, they're asking, "How do I compete? How do I get the results on a practical level?"  I think some are idealistic, but the much larger crowd is not. Whole Foods comes from a place of idealism and vision, but I think others may come from a practical place but they're realizing there is real value in this conversation.

Because corporate responsibility makes for good PR?

There are two ways to think about that. Some people think about this as, "We're going to do our business, and then we'll have a corporate responsibility department." What it really should mean is that you're functioning in a responsible manner that's not outside of your normal functioning, but that you've brought it in as part of who you are and your day-to-day functioning as a company. It's not something you outsource, or something you can fake. There's a mindset. The argument John is making, and I agree with him, is that we should rethink the purpose of business — why is it here and what can it do in terms of change.

It also seems to pay dividends in terms of employee satisfaction.

Surveys of workers consistently show that what motivates people is not money, even though the money is important, but the sense that they are themselves contributing to something more than themselves. I would argue that we our team members read about the Animal Compassionate or the Whole Planet foundations, they feel that through their work they are either helping solve problems on the globe. And that feels good. That's a reason to come to work. You have to give them a reason to be with you, to support you, and to serve their customers, that's deeper than just the paycheck. If your team members are happy and satisfied, they’re going to go beyond to serve the customer.

What else could other companies learn from Whole Foods?

Look, first, even though we're very proud of what we've accomplished, we're not over here thinking everybody else is bad. There's no arrogance over here. However, we believe earnestly in what we believe, and in the example we’re trying to set. We're trying to live our principles and be true to who we say we are. So in that spirit we would love to share, interact, network about this conversation about the role of business with anybody, and we do so at every opportunity.

Business is hard. It's not an easy marketplace to compete in these days. There are constant challenges. These things have to be done thoughtfully ; you can't just take something from another company. So it's a commitment to start down a path and think about things more holistically, but ultimately you should find those things that are true to you within your own stakeholder groups and find them in a way that's authentic for you. Because ultimately what the customer wants, I think, is authenticity.  They want to associate with brands that they feel are real, and can make a contribution to their lives. And you can only find that inside. If we can contribute to that through what we’re doing, then that's a wonderful thing.