This is the Katori Daily Podcast for Wednesday, July 28th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

With labor markets and supply chains rattled by pandemic, how has Whole Foods weathered the changes?

Last week I spoke with John Mackey, Whole Foods CEO, about how the pandemic has changed

his business and what this strange event means for retail going forward.

How has Whole Foods weathered this pandemic?

The pandemic of course has been difficult for everyone. It's been difficult for

food retailers. I mean we've had to sterilize everything and social distance

and mask and that went on for a long time and but of course we were also as an essential business so we had a lot of our

business actually increased during the pandemic and we because Amazon put such an emphasis on home

delivery that we really saw that part of our business significantly grow.

And though we had to shut down our prepared foods.

We had our prepared foods drop initially over 75%,

but that was made up by very large increases in our in our grocery, produce, meat, and seafood

sales and I might add beer and wine sales too. Yeah and with the with Amazon

in the Whole Foods business, you had a transition already to delivery that was underway.

Yeah, from the first day that our deal closed, they put a real emphasis on scaling up delivery.

So that ended up being present in terms of we, I can't say we were ready for it when COVID happened because our sales

we had such an increase in sales to delivery that we we couldn't handle it initially

we didn't have enough we didn't have enough people working on delivery

we didn't have enough drivers we didn't have enough pickers we didn't have the systems

themselves could not handle the order loads that were coming in, but Amazon has a lot of resources.

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