Meet the typical Whole Foods shopper, a highly educated West Coast millennial woman earning $80,000
- Whole Foods has more than 500 stores, more than 105,000 employees, and makes an estimated $17 billion in annual sales.
- The grocer has high customer turnover, but added more new ones than it lost last year.
Whole Foods is around the 10th-largest grocery chain in the US, making sales in the neighborhood of about $17 billion, estimated by market-intelligence firm AlphaSense. The company no longer reports revenues since Amazon acquired it in 2017.
Whole Foods was founded in Austin, Texas, in 1980 and the company says there will soon be as many as 546 Whole Foods locations across the US, Canada and the UK. It employs 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 a little more than once per month — about 15 trips per year — and picks up nine products for a total cost of about $42 per trip, Numerator found.
Whole Foods has the highest customer turnover among the major brands surveyed, with less about 70% of its 2021 shoppers returning in 2022 — an improvement over the year before, however.
At the same time, the grocer added a higher percentage of new customers than any other store in the survey last year, and the number of new shoppers exceeds the number that quit visiting the brand, suggesting that the store is gaining popularity.
About 5% of the typical shopper's spending takes place at Whole Foods — about half of what she spends on Amazon. Whole Foods shoppers also tend to choose the store's 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.