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John Mackey: the 51-year-old co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market on profits, principles, chocolate-enrobed salmon, and why his wife won't play games with him anymore.

Article Excerpt
On the way over to see you I passed the old Whole Foods location, at Tenth and Lamar [in Austin], and I got to thinking about how far you've come in the past couple of decades--not distancewise, since it's only a few blocks from there to the new, 80,000-square-foot store, but in terms of everything else. I'm less nostalgic about that location than the one that predated it--SaferWay, which was at Eighth and Rio Grande. It was the beginning of Whole Foods. My girlfriend and I started it. After two years we opened the store at Tenth and Lamar, and then we had a second store, and then a third and a fourth, but my memories of SaferWay are more intense. We literally lived in that store. We weren't supposed to, but we were buying stuff direct and putting it in the living room of the house we were renting; you'd come in the front door and you'd have to weave through all these bags of flour and rice and whatnot. Our landlord found out and gave us the boot. So then we said, "We're at the store all the time anyway. Why don't we just move into the third floor?" The story I love to tell is that we didn't have a shower. It was zoned commercial. So we used to take baths in the Hobart dishwasher, which had a little hose that hung down. And Barton Springs, of course.

Could you ever have envisioned going from there to here? Was that even your ambition? No, of course not. We started the business because, first, we thought it would be fun. Second, we needed to earn a living, and third, we wanted to earn a living in some way that we thought would be beneficial to other people. We were young and idealistic. I was 25, and she was 21-when you're young you don't know what you can't do. If someone had said, "You're going to open a whole bunch of stores and have a $4 billion company," I would have thought that was the most ridiculous thing I had ever heard.

Would it have upset or offended you? At a lot of companies founded on principles, the notion of making money is almost antithetical to the ethos of the place. From the very beginning our business has existed to meet the needs and desires of multiple constituencies: customers, team members, vendors, shareholders, the community. So I always wanted to make money. I never thought profit was bad or evil. To be sustainable, business has to be profitable. A business that is not...

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