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On the corner of Seventh Avenue and Virginia Street in Seattle is a restaurant. It’s a restaurant much like many other downtown restaurants: tall glass windows, comfortable seating, a view into a bustling kitchen and a creative – sometimes edgy – menu. But there is something that makes this restaurant different. 
Walk into any of the nine PCC Natural Markets in Puget Sound and it’s clear your not in your parents’ (or grandparents, if you’re young enough) food co-op! No more cozy slightly run-down food markets with barrels of flour and bags of rice on the floor, around which barefoot children played tag while their parents debated politics and planned social actions against “the establishment.” Today, the PCC (as it’s fondly referred to here in Seattle) is every bit the contemporary supermarket. So what is so special about the nation’s largest natural food co-operative? 
Whole Foods Market® is opening a new Seattle-area market in Lynnwood on March 15, and we got a peek behind the curtain at the controlled chaos going on before the grand opening. We arrived early for a tour of the new facility and dodged between trucks belonging to landscapers, electricians, and vendors. Inside we saw what looked like a laptop-armed battalion frantically tapping away at their keyboards and small groups of trainees in the check out lanes listening closely to their instructors. 
We attended one of Whole Foods Market™ Speaker Series events; this one titled “Consumer’s Conflict: The Cost of Fresh Picked Produce in the 21st Century.” The guest speaker was Barry Estabrook, author of Tomatoland – How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit. In the end, there was too much Whole Foods and too little discussion of the real cost of fresh produce and what to do about it. And we paid $40 to hear it… 
Austin, Texas is already home to Whole Foods, but that won’t stop a group of entrepreneurs from founding a new grocery store right in the natural food behemoth’s backyard. While the new store – In.gredients will also specialize in local and organic ingredients, there’s one major difference between this venture and its hometown competition: In.gredients promises to be the country’s first ever “package-free, zero waste grocery store.” 
Together Derek Sarno, Global Senior Chef and Educator on the Whole Food Market’s Healthy Eating team, and I explore Whole Food’s new Health Starts Here program and discussed how consumers can implement the program in their daily lives. 
After careful consideration, in order to insure that the company he, his family, and his long-time employees worked so hard to build would continue to grow and reflect his values, Bob Moore, founder of Bob’s Red Mill, chose to create an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP). |
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