Getty/Justin Sullivan
- Whole Foods has 505 US stores, more than 105,000 employees, and makes roughly $16 billion in sales.
- The grocer has high customer turnover, but added more new ones than it lost last year.
- Whole Foods’ average shopper is a West Coast woman who is 29 years old and earning $80,000 per year.
- See more stories on Insider’s business page.
Whole Foods is estimated to be the 10th-largest grocery chain in the US, making sales in the neighborhood of about $16 billion, per its last annual report before Amazon bought the company in 2017.
Founded in Austin, Texas in 1980, there now are 505 Whole Foods locations in the US, 14 in Canada, and 7 in the UK, employing more than 105,000 workers.
Just one out of 10 US shoppers are Whole Foods customers, according to data from the analytics firm Numerator prepared for Insider.
Numerator found that Whole Foods’ typical shopper is a West Coast millennial woman between 25 and 34 years old. She typically has a graduate degree and an annual income of more than $80,000.
Although a slight majority of Whole Foods customers identify as white, the store is especially popular with Black and Asian American shoppers, according to Numerator.
The typical customer visits Whole Foods every three to four weeks — about 14 trips per year — and picks up 9 products for a total cost of about $46 per trip, Numerator found.
Whole Foods has the highest customer turnover among the major brands surveyed, with less than half of its 2020 shoppers returning in 2021. At the same time, the grocer added a higher percentage of new customers than any other store in the survey last year, and that number of new shoppers exceeds the number that that quit visiting the brand.
About 5% of her spending takes place at Whole Foods — about half of what she spends on Amazon. Whole Foods shoppers also tend to choose the stores in-house 365 brand, as well as Organic Valley dairy products and Applegate meats.
Across all retailers, Whole Foods shoppers buy a lot more kombucha than the typical US shopper. They also love Driscoll’s berries.
Read more of our typical shopper profiles:
- Walmart: A 59-year-old white suburban woman earning $80,000 a year
- Costco: A 39-year-old Asian American woman earning more than $125,000 a year
- Target: A millennial suburban mom with a household income of $80,000
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