In your new book, "Conscious Capitalism," you write that Whole Foods sees its customers as its "most important stakeholders" and that the company is obsessed with their happiness. The biggest complaint I hear about Whole Foods is how expensive it is. Why not drop prices to make your customers happier?
People always complain about prices being too high. Whole Foods prices have dropped every year as we get to be larger and we have economies of scale. Also, people are not historically well informed about food prices. We're only spending about 7 percent of our disposable personal income on food. Fifty years ago, it was nearly 16 percent.
A paper from Stanford last year concluded that there is little evidence of greater health benefits from eating organic. If it were ever definitively proved that organic foods offered no health benefits, would you still be a proponent?
Oh, absolutely. I've always thought the main argument for organic was more environmental than a health argument. I just don't think spraying a lot of pesticides into the environment on a routine basis is a good thing.
As I understand it, you're on an organic vegan diet, and you don't eat vegetable oil, sugar or processed food.
That is certainly the goal. I travel a lot, so can I always avoid oil and sugar and salt? Not to the degree I would like.
Oh, man. Salt too?
I don't completely avoid salt, I'm just trying to minimize it. In America, we're addicted to sugar, fat and salt, and restaurants put all three of those in in abundance.
I'm having a hard time imagining your diet being tasty. Give me an example of a delicious meal.
What did I cook for dinner last night? A salad, with my own walnut-cashew-based dressing, a stir-fry that I made without any oil, because you can do that with just water. It had kale and chard, onions, mushrooms and tomatoes in it, and mashed potatoes without salt or dairy, but I added some almond milk.
Considering your health consciousness, would you prefer Whole Foods not hire overweight people or smokers?
In some cases we don't hire smokers, but it's hard not to hire people in America who are overweight, because 69 percent of adults are. We're not discriminating against workers, but we are incentivizing them. Healthier team members get a bigger food discount. We give our sickest team members an option to go through what we call the Total Health Immersion, where we take them off for a week, and we do intensive diet-and-lifestyle education. Our regional president in the Southwest, Mark Dixon, was overweight. I got Mark to go. One year later he's lost 95 pounds, and he's biking over 180 miles a week.
How did you get him to go?
I nagged him. He didn't have to go.
Any thoughts about those stories in 2007 that you were active on a finance message board, anonymously saying negative things about a Whole Foods' competitor?
People make a big deal that I was hiding my identity. But message boards are like going to a Halloween masquerade party. Everybody has a screen name. I had a screen name too. So what? Now I have to be much more careful in what I say.
In 2009, some Whole Foods customers organized boycotts after you wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal expressing opposition to Obama's health care proposals. Do you wish you hadn't written it?
No, I don't. I regret that a lot of people didn't actually read it and it got taken out of context. President Obama asked for ideas about health care reform, and I put my ideas out there. Whole Foods has a good health care plan. It's not a solution to America's health care problems, but it's part of the solution.
So did you vote for Romney?
I did.
I imagine a certain percentage of Whole Foods customers will also boycott because of this.
I don't know what to say except that I'm a capitalist, first. There are many things I don't like about Romney, but more things I don't like about Obama. This is America, and people disagree on things.
INTERVIEW HAS BEEN CONDENSED AND EDITED.
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