WASHINGTON — Whole Foods Market chief executive John Mackey will meet with lawmakers to discuss his bid to halt a federal review of the supermarket chain’s $565 million purchase of Boulder’s Wild Oats Markets.
Whole Foods, the largest U.S. natural-foods grocer, sued Monday in federal court in Washington to prevent the Federal Trade Commission from completing its internal antitrust review of the deal. The company claims the agency has “publicly prejudged the case” in violation of due process and the Administrative Procedures Act.
“We just want a fair trial,” Mackey said Tuesday in an interview on Bloomberg Television. “We believe that we can’t get a fair trial in the FTC’s own court because they’ve already prejudged the case. They’ve already said we’re guilty. They’ve already said our expert testimony is garbage.”
The chain completed its purchase of Wild Oats last year after the FTC lost a bid to block the deal over concerns that the combination would hurt consumers. An appeals court ruled in July that a district judge should have taken more time to consider the agency’s claims. The FTC then resumed its review.
“There’s only one place where Whole Foods has a monopoly, and that’s in the imagination of the lawyers at the Federal Trade Commission,” Mackey said at a news conference Tuesday. “How can a monopolist have negative same-store sales? Are people starving to death now because there’s no place to eat in America?”
The CEO and other company representatives will approach members of Congress to “ask for fair play for Whole Foods Market by the FTC,” the company said in a statement.
“We think that the competition between Whole Foods and Wild Oats matters,” said Dave Wales, acting director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition. “By taking it away, consumers will no longer get the benefits of that competition.”
Austin, Texas-based Whole Foods, which has 270 stores, has said it’s too far along in its integration of Wild Oats to undo the deal.
“We don’t want Congress to interfere in this case in terms of the merits,” Mackey told Bloomberg TV. “We just want Congress to understand that the FTC is not conducting themselves in an impartial, dispassionate manner.”
