For John Mackey, stopping into a Whole Foods while traveling evokes a twinge of nostalgia: “It feels a little weird,” says Mr. Mackey, the empire’s founder and former CEO, who is stepping down in 2022 after 44 years at the helm.
“I don’t feel relieved,” he says. “I don’t feel sad either.” Instead, during a recent stop, Mackey explains: luckShe visited the New York offices of to talk about her new memoir. The whole story: an adventure in love, life and capitalism“It’s like a kid: When they grow up, I still love them. But they have their own life, their own destiny. And I’m really proud of the way that kid has grown up and how they’re living that life.”
In his book, McKee, 70, details the company’s birth and early activities, from its humble hippie beginnings in a three-story Victorian home in Austin, Texas, to its phenomenal growth into a chain with 540 stores across the United States, Britain and Canada that was acquired by Amazon in 2017 for $13.7 billion.
“This was my final gift to Whole Foods Market,” the Houston native says of his magnum opus. “This is our story, and it’s not just about a big company, it didn’t start out that way, it has history and personality.” Writing the book offered McKee personal closure: “I got to relive a big part of my life,” he says, adding that he decided to write it because he “wanted to inspire people.”
The entrepreneur’s list of inspirations is long, but psychedelic drugs, which feature multiple times in the book, are high on the list.
“People might get the mistaken impression that I’m always tripping, but that’s not actually true,” he says. “For me it’s always been a spiritual thing.”
Turning the power on and tuning
McKee recalls that he could count the number of times he’s taken psychedelics on one hand, and that each time he experienced a revelation. It all started when he took LSD with a friend at age 19, while studying at Trinity College in San Antonio. “My mother urged me off the path of becoming a doctor or a lawyer,” McKee recalls. “I became awakened to the fact that there was a deeper spiritual reality… I started reading Eastern religions and Eastern thinkers.” He studied philosophy at the University of Texas and began “searching for the meaning of life.”
Years later, while high on MDMA (also known as ecstasy or Molly) at a New Age gathering in Austin, he recalled, “I realized that the most important thing in life is love, and I’ve never forgotten that. There’s nothing like it. That inspired me to want to create a more loving culture and whole foods.” He then turned to the New Age Bible. A Course in Miracles, I got serious about meditation and after a few decades, I started reading Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind, To help McKee get through the transition of leaving Whole Foods, we go on a guided MDMA-psilocybin trip.
“I was able to repair a relationship that had been damaged. It was a very wise choice,” he says. McKee also committed to the yoga-based breathing techniques that he began exploring in the 1980s, which likewise had a profound impact on his psyche.
Courtesy of John Mackey
“Breathwork is a very simple and safe way to have a transcendental experience,” McKee says. “People don’t realize that just by doing the right breathing techniques, you can have a deeper connection with your soul.”
McKee’s other revelations fall into what he calls “food awakenings.” The first came in 1976, after he moved into a vegetarian co-op, adopted a mostly vegetarian diet, and opened his first health food store. The other came in the early 2000s, when he became vegan, inspired by PETA and other activists who criticized Whole Foods for doing business with suppliers involved in foie gras production.
“It was a process,” he explains of his transition to veganism. “I was reading a lot of books.Animal suffering, domination: human power; A lot of other thoughts came to mind, and in the back of my mind this thought started to come: ‘Why not be vegan? Why kill animals? Why?’ And that thought didn’t go away. It got stronger as time went on, and finally I realized that it was the right thing for me to do.”
Welcome to Love.Life
Now, McKee is excited to share his discoveries with the world through his latest venture, Love.Life, a wellness club brand that will offer meditation, breathwork, psychedelic therapy and other treatments once they’re legalized.
“The first one will be released in California. It’s not legal yet, but it’s only a matter of time,” he says. “You know why? Because the science is pretty clear that the combination of psilocybin and MDMA is very effective for PTSD.”
“Love.Life is an extension of my personal, higher purpose in life. It’s part of my own hero’s journey,” he says, lamenting the idea that most people don’t go to the doctor until they get sick and that our healthcare system generally “only treats the symptoms of chronic illness.”
McKee’s idea is to create a “one-stop holistic health membership club,” with the first opening in El Segundo, Calif., on July 9. On offer will be a variety of treatments and activities geared toward the health-conscious: a fitness center with pilates and yoga, a spa with massages, facials, wraps, peels, cryotherapy, an infrared sauna and a hyperbaric oxygen chamber, and three pickleball courts, where McKee is a recent convert.
“When you first play it, it becomes fun right away because there’s a threshold of fun right at the beginning,” says Mackey. His other fitness pursuit is long-distance hiking, a passion that’s only grown since completing the Appalachian Trail (twice) and the Pacific Crest Trail years ago. “Being immersed in nature for weeks at a time changes your heart rate and shifts your mindset,” he says. Not to mention, “Many of my best ideas come on hiking trips.”
Love.Life will also have a medical center staffed by doctors trained in both Eastern and Western healing practices. “Ideally, our vision is that people will come in and take a battery of tests to establish a baseline of health,” McKee says. “The average person doesn’t know if they’re healthy because their doctor says, ‘You’re fine,’ but we want to know exactly what your health status is.” The test results will be used to create precise, personalized health plans. “If you want healing, we’ll help you heal,” McKee says. “If you’re looking for peak performance, we’ll help you achieve peak performance. If you’re an aging baby boomer, we’ll help you live longer and healthier.”
Finally, there will be a health-focused restaurant that is “plant-forward” rather than plant-based, which McKee describes as something of a compromise.
“Love.Life opened a vegan restaurant in Los Angeles, but it failed,” he says. “By offering our plant-based menu with the option to supplement it with high-quality animal products that are sourced responsibly with an animal welfare perspective, we are inclusive of our broader member community and their dietary preferences. We care deeply about the plant-based community, and I myself will always be an ethical vegan, but for the business to succeed, it needs to find a market.”
McKee’s goal is to grow the first Love Life store into a chain that he hopes will do for doctor’s offices what Whole Foods has done for supermarkets.
“Younger people don’t know how bad supermarkets were. They were awful, and people hated going there,” he says. That’s why, in the first few years that Whole Foods existed, people were freaked out when they came there.
That’s the reaction he’s hoping for at Love.Life.
“People will say, ‘I’ve never seen a place like this before. It’s so amazing. Why hasn’t anyone done this before?’ In hindsight, it’s clear that this was meant to happen.”
