April 8, 2014 – Word has it that Whole Foods Market is looking for a new location on the Monterey Peninsula. The new store would be Whole Foods’ second store in Monterey County.
The Austin-based national retailer already operates a thriving outlet in Monterey’s Del Monte Shopping Center. And it has long offered two stores in Santa Cruz County—one on 41st Ave. in Capitola and another on Soquel Ave. in Santa Cruz.
Among the new locations the retailer is said to be looking at is one at the mouth of Carmel Valley.
This development comes as demand for healthful, organic and high-quality food is on the rise on the Peninsula, and at the same as rumors are circulating that Portland-based New Leaf Markets has stepped up efforts to secure a Monterey Peninsula location.
Neither Whole Foods nor New Leaf are commenting, but a new store from either company arriving in Monterey County would be good news to many local shoppers because there are few stores here that provide the wide selection of organic and specialty foods that Whole Foods and New Leaf offer.
About the author
SARAH WOOD—founding editor and publisher of Edible Monterey Bay—has had a life-long passion for food, cooking, people and our planet.
She planted her first organic garden and cared for her first chicken when she was in elementary school in a farming region of Upstate New York.
Wood spent the early part of her career based in Ottawa, Canada, working in international development and international education. After considering culinary school, she opted to pursue her loves for writing, learning about the world and helping make it a better place by obtaining a fellowship and an MA in Journalism from New York University.
While working for a daily newspaper in New Jersey, she wrote stories that helped farmers fend off development and won a state-wide public service award from the New Jersey Press Association for an investigative series of articles about a slumlord who had hoodwinked ratings agencies and investment banks into propping him up with some early commercial mortgage securitizations. The series led Wood to spend several years in financial journalism, most recently, as editor-in-chief of the leading magazine covering the U.S. hedge-fund industry.
Wood now lives with her family in Washington, DC, where she is a freelance writer and manages communications for Samaritan Ministry, an antipoverty and antiracist nonprofit that provides struggling Greater Washington residents with highly personalized and compassionate life counseling and coaching.
