Whole Foods Business Analysis

As mentioned above, the two opportunities Whole Foods had are overseas expansion and customer awareness creation on the diversified nature of organic products. Whole Foods Market could have chance to expand globally; it owned 8 stores in Canada, and 7 in the U.K. (C-14), which matches company’s growth strategy. Taking advantage of consumer enthusiasm, Whole Foods has implemented various ways of promotion and food presentation to increase consumers’ awareness, which are consistent with company’s pricing and merchandising strategies.
As the world’s healthiest grocery store, Whole Foods has a high competitive strength in a very attractive industry. Since 1991, it has expanded globally through opening new stores and acquisition. After acquiring
More precisely, Whole Foods has most of its stores in the U.S. By the end of 2014, the management planned to have 400 Whole Foods stores and expected to have 500 stores until September 2017; management had the confidence to grow its geographic coverage to 1,200 stores in the U.S only (C20). It also opened a flagship store with 99,800-suqare-foot in London (C20). It seems that Whole Foods is very successful in expanding its business in the international arena.
Whether Whole Foods opened new stores by its own or acquisitions, they are all parts of growth strategy. It liked finding potential stores with desirable size and good location around the world. Opening a new store allowed customers to taste the organic products.
People love healthy life; however, some of them do not know how to access to it. Taking green food is the first step. As the world biggest seller of organic products, Whole Foods offered more than 10,000 items in the small stores and 50,000 items in the large stores; the all-store average was about 21,000 items (C-20). Its catalogs included fresh products, pet supplies, floral items, and educational items (C-20). It seems that customers could buy everything they want in Whole Foods. Since Whole Food relied on word-of-mouth and spent less on advertising and marketing, it had to focus on promotion and food presentation to increase customers’ awareness
Although Whole Foods used to set higher price tags than did the same products sold in other supermarkets, it changed its strategy because of the U.S. economic recession in 2009. It had adjusted prices to make its products more competitive. Furthermore, food displays reflect Whole Foods’ merchandising strategy, which could show customers more information about the special deals. Therefore, taking advantage of consumer enthusiasm for healthy foods, Whole Foods successfully used pricing and merchandising strategies to attract more customers to walk in