John Mackey
Co-Creator and CEO · Love.Life
Whole Foods Market co-founder leading Love.Life's food-as-health, lifestyle-medicine, and conscious-capitalism thesis
About
John Mackey is Co-Creator and CEO of Love.Life, which he co-founded with Walter Robb and Betsy Foster in 2020. He is best known as the co-founder of Whole Foods Market, where he helped grow the company from one Austin store into a national natural-foods retailer before its 2017 sale to Amazon. Love.Life is his next expression of the same broad thesis: food, lifestyle, community, and purpose can shape health when they are built into everyday environments.
What to Know
Signature approach
Mackey's role is vision and leadership, not clinical care. He brings the conscious-capitalism and plant-forward operating philosophy that shaped Whole Foods into a club that combines functional medicine, fitness, recovery, food, and community.
What sets them apart
- Category-defining founder. Few wellness-company founders have already built a consumer health-adjacent brand at Whole Foods scale.
- Food-as-health continuity. Love.Life extends a long-running plant-forward thesis rather than inventing a new identity.
- Conscious-capitalism platform. His books and public work make the company's mission-driven language part of a larger operating framework.
Expertise
Patient types
Affiliations
Thought Leadership
Books
- The Whole Story: Adventures in Love, Life, and Capitalism · BenBella Books, 2024
- Conscious Leadership: Elevating Humanity Through Business · Portfolio, 2020
- Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business · Harvard Business Review Press, 2014
- The Whole Foods Diet · Grand Central Life & Style, 2017
Notable Collaborators
- Walter Robb · Love.Life co-founder; former Whole Foods Market co-CEO and decades-long Whole Foods executive partner
- Betsy Foster · Love.Life co-founder and President; former Whole Foods Market executive
- Raj Sisodia · Co-author of Conscious Capitalism (2014) and co-founder of Conscious Capitalism, Inc.
Other specialists at Love.Life
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