Whole Foods Market

Whole Foods Market was founded in 1978 when 25-year-old college dropout John Mackey borrowed $45,000 from family and friends to open a small natural foods store called SaferWay in Austin, Texas. In 1980, Mackey merged with Craig Weller and Mark Skiles, owners of the nearby Clarksville Natural Grocery, to open the first Whole Foods Market — a 12,500-square-foot store with a staff of 19. At the time, there were fewer than half a dozen natural food supermarkets in the entire United States. The chain grew rapidly through acquisitions of regional natural food chains throughout the 1990s and 2000s, expanding coast to coast. In 2017, co-founder John Mackey sold the company to Amazon for $13.7 billion, making Whole Foods the first major grocery chain to be owned by a tech giant. Today it operates more than 500 stores across the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, and remains the largest certified organic grocer in the country.