John Mackey’s Whole Foods changed how Americans eat. Now Mackey wants to change healthcare

Everything is an evolution. Even John Mackey.

The cofounder and longtime CEO of Whole Foods left his post last year after 44 years of growing his market concept into a national chain of stores that he sold to Amazon in 2017 for $13.7 billion. Where once there had been a ragtag patchwork of natural foods co-ops and such now stood more than 500 supermarkets that have influenced the entire grocery business.

But Mackey isn’t retired. Although he’s pursuing personal passions such as thousand-mile-plus hiking treks and writing his memoir of building Whole Foods, The Whole Story, that’ll be published in May 2024, Mackey is also starting a new, ambitious business. Love.Life is a startup healthcare company dedicated to preventative, holistic health that aspires to take care of the “body, mind and spirit.”

Mackey, who will turn 70 on August 15, has reteamed with two 25-year Whole Foods veterans: Walter Robb, who worked his way up to become Mackey’s co-CEO, and Betsy Foster, who left as senior vice president. Love.Life made three acquisitions to get going—a Miami restaurant called Love Life Cafe, which Mackey made the startup’s whole brand; an online coaching company named Mastering Diabetes; and a chronic disease and prevention medicine practice, Plant Based TeleHealth. Love.Life will open its first flagship store in the Los Angeles area next year.

Mackey sat down with Fast Company in late July in his understated Boulder living room, and over a glass of kombucha, he opened up about his vision for Love.Life, the problem with today’s American diet and medicine, and how his Apple Watch app got him to stop drinking. In our conversation, edited for length, he explains why Love.Life will drive what he calls Medicine 3.0 and eventually outlive him and how he’s in business for the “infinite game.”

Fast Company: It’s impressive you want to start a company as you’re turning 70. You could easily go on to do other things. What keeps that entrepreneurial fire burning?

John Mackey: It’s so much fun. I’m back to startup mode. I’m not dealing with a big bureaucracy. I’m creative again. There are two kinds of entrepreneurs: There’s the builder, and there’s the serial entrepreneur, who creates a business, sells, and then creates another business. Turns out I’m a serial entrepreneur after all, just four decades later.

FC: Why did you start Love.Life?

JM: I really want the world to be healthier. Whole Foods was about that, selling food, helping to change the way people think about food, helping change the agricultural system to a certain degree. But there’s only so much you can do as a grocer. With Love.Life, we can go so much deeper.

I have been thinking about it since 1985. If you think about health, there’s physical health, which Love.Life will be geared toward with healthy food, very advanced medical care, and precision wellness-type therapies. There’s also your psychological health. We live in a stressful society, and we live in a place where people have a lot of emotional damage. Then finally, we have a spiritual crisis, right? People don’t have a spiritual meaning, people don’t necessarily have a sense of higher purpose. That’s why it’s fascinating to me, watching these psychedelic therapies come into play, because those can really help people crack into greater meaning.

FC: What in your own experience informed the company?

JM: At Whole Foods about 15 years ago, we started a program called the Total Health Immersion. Whole Foods was self-insured, and when I was looking at the math, about 10% of our team members at Whole Foods spent 90% of our healthcare dollars. We had a high deductible, and while there was the occasional motorcycle car accident or a premature birth that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, more than anything [the expense] was for chronic diseases—people that had Type II diabetes, heart disease. When we sent over 4,000 people through the Total Health Immersion, I was just amazed. I didn’t realize how fast people could get better if they just would change their lifestyle and their diet. 

My takeaway was that the human body is actually very resilient. If we stop poisoning it with toxins and begin to nourish it with healthy food and nutrients and relaxation techniques and exercise, the body responds quickly.

FC: What is your strategy with Love.Life?

We have two big strategies with Love.Life. The first one is a virtual format. We have a telehealth business, and we practice medicine now in all 50 states, plus D.C. and 27 or 28 countries around the world. We’re launching three membership programs. 

Right now, with Medicine 2.0, you go to the doctor when you’re sick. With Medicine 3.0, we want people to be members of our community and first establish a baseline. So we get people to do different degrees of testing. I’ve done them all now. I’ve checked out my genetics, had my poop examined, I know what my microbiome is, I wore a continuous glucose monitor. I know my blood sugar. I did a cheek swab that can compare your biological age to your chronological age.

We’re also announcing that we acquired an online coaching business called Mastering Diabetes. They’ve now launched Mastering Weight Loss, and we are going to launch several other coaching businesses like Mastering Hypertension, and mastering various autoimmune diseases. So Love.Life will have this virtual business that’s half of our strategy. 

The other half of the strategy is opening up physical locations. Our first flagship will be in the L.A. area, El Segundo, and we’ll be taking over an Old Best Buy location. It’ll be big, 45,000 square feet. We’ll have a small healthy food restaurant, a medical center, a gym or health club, a wellness center, yoga, Pilates, various restorative treatments like cryotherapy, cold plunges, infrared saunas. It will have various wellness practices such as acupuncture, chiropractic, physical therapy, and Reiki.

The physical locations are going to be such cool places. They’re going to be hip, beautiful. I guarantee the celebrities will be talking about it and they’ll be coming in . . . [for] the very best treatments that we can provide. It’ll take us years to build out the physical locations across the United States. El Segundo will be that proof of concept to raise more capital.

FC: So what’s your biological age?
My cellular age is 65. But my metabolic age was 40.5. So I prefer to tell that story, that I’m 29 years younger than my chronological age. I’m very proud of that.

FC: Talk to me about the spiritual aspects of the business. Will psychedelics be part of the plan?

JM: I spoke at the [Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies] conference recently. I came out of the closet and talked about my own psychedelic experiences. You’re going to have to wait for the book to get the details on that. Places like Oregon and Colorado now have legalized this for therapeutic purposes. Talk therapy might help people 5% or 10% of people, but [psychedelic therapy] helps, like, 80%. It’s very powerful. If they’re legal in Oregon, Colorado, I don’t see any reason why we wouldn’t do [it].

FC: Will Love.Life be affordable to everyone? Whole Foods, after all, catered to wealthier customers.

JM: I’ve obviously had to listen to the “Whole Paycheck” narrative for a long, long time. Whole Foods didn’t cater to rich people, or people with more money. We just sold the highest-quality food we could find, and we created a great experience in the stores and gave high service and that was available to anyone. Americans spend less than 10% of our disposable income on food. If you go back to when I was a boy, we spent close to 50% of our disposable income on food. Food has never been less expensive than it is today on a relative basis.

Love.Life is aiming for people who want what we’re going to offer, and that will probably initially be markets with people who are just simply more conscious, and they will care more about their health, and they will already have made the connection about food and making a difference in their health. You start where you find the market.

FC: How will technology play into Love.Life?

JM: I’m going to tell you a story. I stopped drinking alcohol a year and a half ago because of my Apple Watch and an app that tracks my sleep. I began to notice that anytime I had any alcohol, even one glass of wine—and I love alcohol—my deep sleep would go to zero. My pulse rate, which normally is about 48 when I’m asleep, would go up to 56 to 58 when I would drink. Then the third thing was that the total length of my sleep would be shortened by about an hour. So I wouldn’t sleep as long. I’m not going to say, I’m never going to drink again, because I probably will. But it’ll be conscious. If I ask myself the question, do I really want to give up a good night’s sleep?—so far, the answer has been no.

[At Love.Life] there’s testing technology. It goes beyond just blood testing. There’s also microbiome testing and grail cancer testing, the most comprehensive early cancer testing you can do.

I think AI will be a key part of the business. It will be a key part of every business. It’s like the internet. If you’re doing a diagnosis, you might as well see what the AI thinks, too. You’ve got nothing to lose, and you might make a better diagnosis. Over time, as AI gets more advanced, it’s going to be integrated into your life, just like smartphones are.

FC: You have talked about purpose. Do you feel that has changed over time?

JM: I read a powerful book [called The Infinite Game] a few years ago, written by a well-known business writer named Simon Sinek. It had a huge impact on me because I realized, “Oh my God, I didn’t know it, but this whole time I’ve been playing an infinite game.” So football is a finite game. You’ve got these rules, there’s a clock, and the game is going to end. The infinite game never has to end. I created Whole Foods to be an infinite game. Love.Life is an infinite game. I will not see the end of its fulfillment. We will eventually have 540 locations—I got to see that at Whole Foods. Even though I think I’m going to live a long time, I may not get to see that [with Love.Life]. It’s an infinite game, because it’s a conscious business with a higher purpose, and it’s able to evolve, learn, and grow.

FC: What advice do you have for other entrepreneurs?

JM: Most people are paralyzed by fear. Fear stops people from doing, from finding themselves. You can’t be creative if you’re scared. You have to move past fear. Early on, the big thing that changed me was I just decided to follow my heart. 

Love.Life is a new adventure. I’m playing again. I don’t know: It may not work. I mean, I think it’s going to work. I feel called to do it. It’s what my heart calls me to do. I might lose most of my fortune I made on Whole Foods on it. It might go all down the toilet. I have to do it. Because what if I got to the end of my life, knowing I might have been able to help millions of people live a healthier life, and I was too chickenshit to do it? I wouldn’t be very happy, so I have to try.