The Anarchist's Cookbook

It's hardly the oddest description of Mackey. His management style, his beliefs, are a baffling blend that defies categorization. Through stock ownership, Mackey is a multimillionaire, but he is unpretentious and uninterested in money. He's now a vegan, on the principle that all food causes harm to the animals that produce it. He does eat eggs produced by the chickens that he and his wife raise on their Texas farm "because I know those chickens are happy. They live in chicken heaven."

Raised in Houston, Mackey studied philosophy at the University of Texas in Austin, but he never got a degree. He remains an omnivorous intellect. In the course of an hour's conversation, he'll quote from the management theories of Ryan Matthew and Watts Wacker's The Deviant's Advantage, the demographics book Millennials Rising, Somerset Maugham's novel set in 1930s Paris, The Razor's Edge, and J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Animal-rights activist Ornelas says Mackey read books about animal husbandry that even she had never heard of. On a wall of Mackey's office is a framed poster of the starship Enterprise; Mackey is an admirer of the political organization of Star Trek's United Federation of Planets -- and the regional organization of Whole Foods is similar.

The National Leadership Team of the company has 24 people on it, and, says Mackey, "We make decisions by majority vote. I almost never overrule them." He doesn't just delegate; in fact, he can seem almost diffident about his company. Asked how 140 cashiers can function as a single team in the way that Mackey originally imagined -- an absolutely fundamental question in preserving the culture of Whole Foods -- he looks like an anthropologist who has just had a student ask a great question.

"That does sound like a problem," he says. "A team that large could confound the basic operating principle. But I'll tell you, I don't have the faintest idea how they've solved that problem. That's not my job anymore. But call them up, ask. I guarantee they have found a solution. I'd be curious to know what it is." (In practice, the team has 13 supervisors, one subteam, and everyone meets as a massive group each month.)

And yet last year, Mackey spent months on the road, visiting 135 stores, talking to hundreds of employees. He overruled everyone to dictate the massive size of the new Austin flagship store -- it will be 80,000 square feet. And as inclusive and decentralized as he wants management to be, Mackey is more clearly in charge at Whole Foods than ever before. Eight years ago, two longtime veterans of the business and the company, Chris Hitt and Peter Roy, were each helping run operations nationwide. Both eventually had the title "president," and Mackey said either could run the company.

Both Hitt and Roy are gone now, as are cofounder Craig Weller, food guy Lex Alexander, and several other longtime executives. Feelings are still pretty raw on all sides -- "There are power struggles and crap that goes on below the surface at every company," says Mackey -- but there was no crisis. Just personality differences, growing pains, and people whose expectations didn't get met. Mackey has taken back the title of president, and he won't say a word about succession except, "I have no plans to go anywhere for at least 10 years."

Trouble in paradise? "There are power struggles and crap at every company," the CEO says.

Hitt says he thinks Mackey may one day be considered as much a pioneer as Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. But in the same breath, he says, "Whole Foods isn't just John Mackey. It's a huge number of incredibly committed senior executives and people who [have worked] in those stores their whole careers."

Mackey and Whole Foods are already having a profound impact on how Americans eat. No less a giant than Dole Food now sells organic bananas -- bananas are the number-one produce item in the nation -- to Whole Foods and will soon sell organic pineapples. Much to Dole's surprise, half the demand for its organic bananas comes from conventional supermarkets.

Organic Valley cooperative, a large national supplier of organic milk, grew up alongside Mackey and Whole Foods -- "When they would open a single store, we would increase our production," says Organic Valley's marketing chief, Theresa Marquez. And Whole Foods' markets are still 16% of Organic Valley's business, but no longer its number-one customer. Organic Valley's biggest account is Publix, a classy regional supermarket chain in the Southeast that is five times the size of Whole Foods -- and thoroughly mainstream. "Sixty percent of our business is the mass markets," says Organic Valley CEO George Siemon.