John Mackey's father Bill was a professor of accounting, CEO of LifeMark, a health-care company, and investor of Whole Foods Market, before he died in 2004.

In two years, they merged SaferWay with Clarksville Natural Grocery run by Mark Skiles and Craig Weller and renamed the business Whole Foods Market.

He studied issues related to factory farming and decided to switch to a primarily vegan diet that included only eggs from his own chickens.

[13] Additionally, he is a board member of Farm Forward, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that implements innovative strategies to promote conscientious food choices, reduce farmed animal suffering, and advance sustainable agriculture,[14] and he has been a member of the board of directors for the Humane Society of the United States since 2009.

[15] In 2006, Mackey announced he was reducing his salary to $1 a year, would donate his stock portfolio to charity, and set up a $100,000 emergency fund for staff facing personal problems.

[18] In July 2007, The Wall Street Journal[19] revealed that Mackey was, for at least seven years, using the pseudonym "Rahodeb" (an anagram of his wife's name, Deborah) to post to Yahoo Finance forums.

It authorized the FTC staff to seek a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction in federal district court to halt the deal, pending an administrative trial on the merits.

Incorporated in 2020 as Healthy America LLC, and doing business as Love.Life, the company opened its flagship medical center focusing on preventive care in El Segundo, California, in 2024.

[29] As a beginning businessman, he was challenged by workers for not paying adequate wages and by customers for overcharging, during a time when he was having difficulty breaking even.

He began to take a more capitalistic worldview, and discovered the works of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman.

[36] Mackey said, "If you want to be competitive in the long term, your business needs to have discovered its higher purpose and it needs to adopt a stakeholder philosophy".

[37] Mackey opposed the public health insurance option that ultimately did not become part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

[38] Mackey's statement that Americans do not have an intrinsic right to healthcare led to calls for a boycott of Whole Foods Market from the Progressive Review and from numerous groups on Facebook.

[39] Alternatively, Tea Party movement advocates organized a number of buycotts in support of Mackey's suggestions.

[40] In August 2009, Mackey wrote the editorial in the Wall Street Journal expressing his viewpoints on universal healthcare in the United States.

He continued: "Many promoters of health-care reform believe that people have an intrinsic ethical right to health care – to equal access to doctors, medicines and hospitals.

In fascism, the government doesn't own the means of production, but they do control it – and that's what's happening with our health care programs and these reforms.

[43] Mackey is known for his strong anti-union views, having once compared unions to herpes in that "it won't kill you, but it's very unpleasant and will make a lot of people not want to be your lover.

Nevertheless, he rejects the scientific evidence for dangerous anthropogenic global warming, believing instead that "climate change is perfectly natural and not necessarily bad.

"[49] In a 2010 discussion of books on his reading stack with journalist Nick Paumgarten, Mackey explained his views on human-caused climate change were similar to those of Australian geologist and author Ian Plimer: ...Mackey told me that he agrees with the book [ Heaven and Earth ]'s assertion that, as he put it, "no scientific consensus exists" regarding the causes of climate change; he added, with a candor you could call bold or reckless, that it would be a pity to allow "hysteria about global warming" to cause us "to raise taxes and increase regulation, and in turn lower our standard of living and lead to an increase in poverty.

[51] Much in line with the ethos of Whole Foods, Mackey doesn't eat frozen or processed meals, and is a practitioner of an organic and plant-based diet.