AUSTIN, Texas (Feb. 27, 2014) – Whole Foods Market ranks No. 20 in FORTUNE magazine’s 2014 “World’s Most Admired Companies” list. The company is also named as the Most Admired Company in the food and drug store industry, leading the top 10 list of retailers in the category.
“It's not every CEO who writes a treatise on how to make money and have a heart, but leave it to Whole Foods co-founder John Mackey, who last year co-authored the book 'Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business,'” reported the magazine, adding “Mackey advocates that profits follow from a 'higher purpose – including being nice to the environment…'”
Whole Foods Market is ranked in the top 10 for innovation, social responsibility, people management and quality products and services. The only company from Austin to make the list, Whole Foods Market is one of four Texas-based companies included in the top 50 this year.
The list and related stories appear in the March 17 issue of FORTUNE, available on newsstands beginning March 3 and at www.fortune.com.
METHODOLOGY
The Most Admired list is the definitive report card on corporate reputations. Our survey partners at Hay Group started with about 1,400 companies: the Fortune 1,000—the 1,000 largest U.S. companies ranked by revenue and non-U.S. companies in Fortune’s Global 500 database with revenue of $10 billion or more. Hay then selected the 15 largest for each international industry and the 10 largest for each U.S. industry, surveying a total of 692 companies from 30 countries. To create the 57 industry lists, Hay asked executives, directors, and analysts to rate companies in their industry on nine criteria, from investment value to social responsibility. A company’s score must rank in the top half of its industry survey to be listed. Because of the distribution of responses, only the aggregate industry scores and ranks are published in Energy; Forest and Paper Products; Mining, Crude-Oil Production; Pipelines; Temporary Help; Trading Companies; and Wholesalers: Diversified. Because of an insufficient response rate, the results for companies in Health Care: Pharmacy and Other Services and Wholesalers: Food and Grocery are not reported.
To arrive at the top 50 Most Admired Companies overall, Hay Group asked the 3,920 respondents to select the 10 companies they admired most from a list made up of the companies that ranked in the top 25% in last year’s survey, plus those that finished in the top 20% of their industry. Anyone could vote for any company in any industry, which is why some results may seem anomalous.
