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Whole Foods' dream transformed into its worst nightmare

Whole Foods pioneered the organic-food movement decades ago. Now Americans are buying more organic food than ever, but they are abandoning Whole Foods.

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Whole Foods was a pioneer in organic food in the US decades before such food was popular, betting on the idea that people would pay a premium for the label.

The idea paid off: Sales of organic food more than tripled from 2005 to 2015, to $43.3 billion from $13.8 billion, according to the Organic Trade Association.

Whole Foods' business should be booming as a result.

But customers are abandoning the supermarket chain, as retailers including Kroger and Walmart ramp up their organic food offerings to meet growing demand.

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"The more conventional mainstream supermarkets have upped their game," Whole Foods CEO John Mackey said on a call with analysts on Wednesday. "We're going to do the best job that we can to keep our core customers from migrating back over to those guys."

Whole Foods' longtime dream — that organic food would eventually appeal to everyone — has become its worst nightmare.

The company's same-store sales have declined in each of the past six quarters.

The chain saw a 2.4% decline in that metric during its most recent quarter, with transactions — which is used to measure traffic — falling by 3.9%.

Whole Foods is now battling a wide range of competitors including specialty grocers like Sprouts Farmers Market as well as traditional grocers like Kroger, big-box retailers like Walmart and Target, and discount grocers like Aldi.

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"We were ignored for most of our history. Nobody paid any attention to us," Mackey said on the call with analysts. "But we continued to expand and grow and we got more and more successful, and then the conventional supermarkets ... began to pay more attention."

Traditional grocers have been offering "good enough" alternatives to Whole Foods, and the company has watched its sales decline as a result — particularly on the weekends, he said.

"Many of our stores where people used to drive long distances on the weekends and do big shops, we're seeing a little bit of a decline on that," Mackey said.

Kroger started expanding its private-label Simple Truth organic food brand several years ago, and it now devotes multiple aisles in its stores to organic and natural foods.

Walmart also now devotes a section of its fresh-produce department to featuring organic and locally sourced products.

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It has been rapidly growing its Neighborhood Markets stores, as well, which are much smaller than its Supercenters and focus solely on groceries and pharmacy.

The German chain Aldi, which is even cheaper than Walmart, invested heavily in organic food last year by expanding organic food brands, removing some artificial ingredients from its products, and adding more gluten-free items.

This year, Aldi is spending $1.6 billion to redesign 1,300 of its US stores to feature softer lighting and bigger produce sections.

The new stores look a lot like Whole Foods' new chain of stores, called 365 by Whole Foods Market, which the company launched last year to better compete with the increasingly crowded market for low-cost organic goods.

The stores are cheaper to build than Whole Foods' traditional stores, so it has more flexibility in pricing.

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