Whole Foods
Opens New Stores
in Florida

| published May 21, 2026 |

By R. Alan Clanton,
Thursday Review editor

On May 21, Whole Foods Market opened a new store in Jacksonville, Florida. Its address: One Riverside Avenue, a few steps from the St. John’s River, a few steps from a stream called McCoy Creek, and right on the dividing line between two rebounding neighborhoods—Brooklyn and LaVilla, both within a five minute walk of downtown. The site of that sparkling new grocery store—a high value piece of waterfront property with a deep historical legacy—offers something of a business irony, but, more about that later.

Whole Foods Market is proud of the fact that the supermarket chain landed in the number one position on Newsweek’s annual survey of the most trustworthy companies and retailers. For 2026, Whole Foods beat out Ohio-based Kroger, Florida-based Publix, and Oklahoma-based Quik Trip for reliability and trust, based on Newsweek’s complex system and its interviews with thousands of grocery store customers. Publix, which is based in Lakeland, had topped that same list for many years.

Florida has been a rich and competitive environment for the grocery business for more than a decade, though it has also proven to be more of a challenge than some food retailers ever expected. After several years trying to wedge into the grocery delivery business, Kroger unceremoniously pulled up its anchor and abandoned the Sunshine State last year, leaving only its Harris-Teeter subsidiary to do battle with Publix—the grocery chain most popular with Floridians.

Almost a decade ago, with heavy investment from its larger partner Kroger, Colorado-based Lucky’s Market built aggressively in Florida, opening new locations in numerous towns and cities before quickly running into red ink. Unable to replicate their highly-likeable college-town-healthy-food formula in the Sunshine State, Lucky’s ran into trouble, and by the time Lucky’s began shutting down its brand new stores the subsidiary was $300 million in debt. After some bankruptcy negotiations, Lucky’s owners retreated back to Colorado, where they were able to retain their name and some of their original stores.

Jacksonville-based Winn-Dixie’s ups-and-downs have been well-tracked in the business press, but after grocery giant Aldi bought most of the Winn-Dixie footprint in 2024—rebranding some stores as new Aldi locations but keeping some stores as Winn-Dixie—the 90-year old grocery retailer began a comeback. It eventually entered into a partnership with Amazon to expedite home delivery of some food items in certain geographic niches in Florida. That experiment went well enough for Amazon and Winn-Dixie to expand the delivery program more-or-less statewide (a nifty way to fill in that gap left behind when Kroger halted its delivery services). Winn-Dixie was aso given some incentives by local government to retain its headquarters in Jacksonville.

Whole Foods is hoping to find the sweet spot in the always challenging grocery business in Florida, the nation’s third largest state, and where population growth has reached epic levels. In less than ten years, Florida has added more than three million new residents, creating the sort of rapid suburban sprawl that presents challenges to retailers and keeps developers busy. This can also create inadvertent food deserts—where large geographic expanses of residents have to travel more than five miles to get to a grocery store. Florida has already added almost a quarter million new residents in 2026 alone.

Even Florida’s most dominant chain, Publix, is unable to keep up with that pace, though Publix saw its busiest decade of building new locations. Publix has reason to keep that burst of growth going, and Publix wants to keep itself way ahead of what is now its closest rival, Aldi. Early this year Aldi announced its ambitious plans to add 180 new stores in 2026, and even more over the next two years. Aldi says it plans to be operating 3,200 retail locations by 2028, which will make it by far the largest grocery retailer in the United States. Aldi is opening four new stores in Florida in May, two on the same day (one in the panhandle town of Marianna, the other in St. Augustine).

One of Whole Foods newest grocery stores opened this week in Jacksonville, Florida. Located on Riverside Avenue, the store sits upon the cusp of two neighborhoods: the old “Brooklyn” area (essentially the in-town extension of Riverside), and downtown itself. From Whole Foods front doors, one can walk a couple of hundred feet and arrive downtown. One can also walk a few hundred feet and arrive at apartments, condominiums, and a scattering of two dozen restaurants. The very urbanness of this Whole Foods Market will prove to be a test; it’s a great location, unless it proves to be a lousy location.

As I mentioned in my opening paragraph, its footprint presents something of a generational oddity: the shining, glittery-clean store was built atop the exact piece of land which was once dominated by a sprawling two-story mechanical facility and printing building owned by Florida Publishing Company, publishers for nearly a century of the Florida Times-Union. Inside that now long-demolished building was a massive printing press—a stout marvel of Twentieth Century mechanical efficiency, and the noisy, muscular mainstay of how major daily newspapers were published for almost two centuries. In its heyday, that immense steel and iron press rolled out not only the morning Times-Union, but also the afternoon Jacksonville Journal.

Like many daily newspapers in their golden years, those same printing presses cranked out black-and-white and full-color multiple-page circulars for almost all the grocery retailers in the area—advertisements which were inserted into the finished newspapers before those papers were delivered to thousands of retail locations and tens of thousands of home subscribers. (The Florida Times-Union is still around and still prints daily, but its news operations are housed in smaller leased offices downtown, in a skyscraper locals refer to as the Independent Life Building, and its printing is done elsewhere, in Gainesville and Daytona).

In an age when most daily newspapers face significant struggles to remain relevant to an ever shrinking readership, it may also seem anachronistic in the extreme for consumers to look at newspaper ads to glean pricing information. But that very day, in fact, Page Four within the durable Times-Union was nothing less than a full-page ad for the same Whole Foods Market now open for business on its former footprint.


On the Thursday that Whole Foods Market opened at this location, hundreds of people were already there giving the new store a look-over. The grand opening was at 8:00, though I arrived at about 9:00.

Outside, under the generous shade of a portico, a deejay played tunes and a store employee offered craft beer and wine samples. Inside, an obviously heavily staffed opening day store was awash in color and sound and light as shoppers—and some curiosity seekers—moved along the aisles. The novelty browsers and the curious clearly outnumbered full-cart shoppers, as very few of the customers at any of the checkout lines had more than three items in their bags or their carts.

Michael McNab, who told me he lived in an apartment in Brooklyn a short five minute walk from the new store, had put about four items in his bag.

“I definitely wanted to check this out today,” McNab explained. “And I’ll be interested to see if their pricing will make this a worthy walk.” McNab said he does not own a car, though his goal is to purchase one within the next year. “Walkability is my thing, right?” He gestured off toward the west northwest, presumably toward one of the many new four-and-five-story apartment buildings that now fill part of the landscape on the other side of Riverside Ave.

McNab said he was also very interested in how many meals he can squeeze out of one tote bag of food from this Whole Foods.

“The walk is easy, but maybe not if I’m lugging a twenty pound bag of stuff,” he said.

Claudia Ramirez lives with her two children in small house in the Murray Hill area. She said she was occasionally frustrated by the selections at the Winn-Dixie she frequents, and explained she also wants to shift her family from “convenience” eating and microwave meals—which she acknowledged can be often unhealthy—to meals using fresher foods, especially fresh vegetables and organic fruit—all of which were in clear abundance in the produce section at Whole Foods.

“But I’m a bit nervous, a bit taken aback by some of these prices,” Ramirez said. “Some of these sale items seem about the same price I pay over at Winn-Dixie.” However, she had still put quite a few items in her bag. Ramirez showed me some Whole Foods Market coupons which a friend had received in the mail, among them a coupon for $10 off of a $50 total purchase. She intended to use the coupon that very day.

“I have to find ways to save money,” she explained. “I spent $45 yesterday on gas for my car. And it’s difficult because I also want my kids to eat healthy food.”

Other customers had come from neighborhoods nearby, such as Carrie (she did not want to give me her last name) who said she lived in Avondale and divides her grocery shopping between Publix and Aldi.

"I try to game the pricing as best I can," she said. "The bogo price of something at Publix, or the super sale price of the item at Aldi."

Within the store, there are ample reminders of the Whole Foods strategy and the company’s standards. Signage in most areas explains what those standards are, in case you miss the point by simply looking at the foods. Large signs over the dairy section outline some of the key points. “We don’t allow high-fructose corn syrup in any food we sell,” one sign reads. “Our standards prohibit over 300 preservatives, flavors, colors, sweeteners and other ingredients commonly found in food,” says another sign.

The produce section of the store was arguably the most dazzling aspect of the space. Arrayed below a giant sign which reads “Supporting Organic Farmers” were hundreds of fruit and vegetable selections in an instinctively pleasing pallet of colors. Many items were marked as “on sale,” though just as many seemed decidedly not discounted. I witnessed several shoppers make direct comparisons using tools on their phones—comparing the Whole Foods Market’s “sale” price pears and bell peppers to the regular price at Publix, or Aldi. In the difficult balance to choose between natural foods, healthy foods, and the broader range of organic items, will shoppers chose to develop loyalty to Whole Foods when every dollar—and sometimes every dime—proves critical to a single person’s budget or to a family's tight cash flow?

Though over the recent decade Whole Foods has shown resilience despite the whiplash of supply chain issues, rising labor costs, grocery price challenges, its biggest task has been figuring out how to grab, then retain, customer loyalty. As that recent Newsweek survey indicates, Whole Foods has so far excelled at keeping customers coming back.

But the new Whole Foods Market in this edge-of-downtown spot may prove problematic for another reason: almost directly across the street, behind a row of small restaurants, is a Fresh Market store—arguably Whole Foods’ closest rival. McNab even mentioned that fact and pointed out that it was about 500 feet away. For this busy part of the Jacksonville footprint, will it prove to be too much of the same grocery shopping experience?

Whole Foods thinks not. In fact, the grocery chain—a fully-owned subsidiary of Amazon since 2017—is betting that in high-growth Florida, and especially in neighborhoods like this one in Jacksonville, where thousands of younger families and single adults now live in obvious visual proximity to downtown jobs (and where cars are deemed more of an option than a necessity), that both stores can thrive profitably. The rapid turnaround of the Brooklyn and nearby LaVilla areas of Jacksonville, from down-and-out conglomerations of light industry, warehousing, antiquated cheap housing, and outright blight, into this area of mid-rise and high rise apartments, offices and hotels, may prove to be one of the drivers of success for both Fresh Market and Whole Foods, even as they face each other by a few hundred yards.

Furthermore, Publix operates a grocery store in the Five Points Area, only about 12 blocks away to the southeast. That store too is popular for its walkability in a heavily congested area dotted with restaurants, consignment shops, vape stores, and tattoo parlors. But again, Whole Foods may be betting rightly that there is safety in numbers: the store’s inescapable presence will surely provide some positive feedback for the real estate equation: apartment and condo people seeking a place to live that is in close proximity to their lifestyle and their budget, and well within their template for healthy food.

Whole Foods opened its first store in Austin, Texas in 1980, and it was—by the standards of that era—a “health food store,” occupying a niche that worked in some college towns and progressive urban markets. The chain began to grow slowly through mergers with other similar health food and healthy-eating stores, including Clarksville Natural Grocery and a store called Safer Way. Eventually Whole Foods found the resources to open stores in Dallas and Houston, then to expand into other areas outside of Texas, including substantial moves into California, North Carolina, and Georgia.

According to date analytics firm Scrape Hero, Whole Foods now operates roughly 530 grocery stores in 45 states. More than 90 of those stores are in California, and Florida ranks second with 37 stores.


[Editor's note: As a follow-up, Thursday Review will make item-to-item comparisons of Whole Foods' pricing to see how it stands-up against other grocery retailers, such as Publix, Winn-Dixie, and Aldi. Related Thursday Review articles:

Aldi's Ambitious Expansions; R. Alan Clanton; Thursday Review; February 13, 2026.

Did the Sunshine State Kill Lucky's Market?; By R. Alan Clanton, Thursday Review editor; May 3, 2026.