It was my good luck that on the same day I was touring Love.Life – a new luxury health centre conceived by John Mackey, co-founder of US supermarket chain Whole Foods Market – I was also nursing a gym injury. It felt promising, if not surreal, to arrive at the doorstep of an establishment with nearly every treatment I could think of under one roof: diagnostic tests, rejuvenating therapies as well as fitness and nutrition plans to stave off future health problems.
Love.Life’s lobby was blindingly bright, with porcelain floors and mod furniture in peppy colours. There was a spacious cafe on one side and a futuristic gym on the other, animated by various blinking screens.
Around the corner were what looked like red-white-and-blue space pods. What they were for, I had no idea. “Hi there,” said a receptionist at a clinically simple desk.
Was I in the lobby of a boutique hotel? A doctor’s office? Or was this an astronaut training centre? Or all of the above? The idea for this lavish temple of wellness had been swirling in the back of Mackey’s brain for almost four decades. After co-founding Whole Foods in 1980, and growing the natural and organic foods store into an international network of more than 460 outlets, Mackey and company sold the publicly traded company to Amazon in 2017 for US$13.7 billion.
Mackey left Whole Foods in 2022 but had already started working on plans for the club a year earlier. Over the last three years, he and his Love.Life co-founders – Whole Foods former chief executive Walter Robb and long-time executive Betsy Foster – transformed his dream into a reality: a swanky, holistic health centre that is part state-of-the-art gym, part high-end spa, part highly personalised doctor’s office and part exclusive social club.
If successful, Mackey envisions other centres in other cities before expanding internationally. Love.Life’s mission is to help its members live longer, healthier lives by deep-diving into their health history, executing an array of specialised tests and then suggesting fitness and lifestyle changes, paired with as many preventive health measures as humanly possible.
“We’re trying to help individuals become the healthiest, best versions of themselves – physically, emotionally and spiritually,” says Mackey. “When do most people go to a doctor? When they get sick. Our idea is: we want you to start seeing a doctor [now] so that you don’t ever have to see a doctor for the chronic diseases that kill.
” A Love.Life core membership starts at US$750 a month for either a “High Performance”, “Heal” or “Longevity” membership, depending on the goal. Some parts of Love.
Life will be open to the public, such as the cafe, select healing therapies and the spa, for which anyone can buy a US$100 day pass. But Mackey emphasises that membership and community are key to the experience. “If you have friends with good habits, you’re gonna pick that up,” he says.
I paid a US$100 visitor fee to enter and relaxed into a plush, leather Zero Gravity Chair, with heated seats and massage nodes, my head draped backward and my feet pointed high. This was a resting metabolic rate assessment, which measures your energy expenditure and how many calories your body burns at rest (the test was part of my reporting, and is not included with a spa pass). Attendants fitted me with a snug Vo2 max mask, which was synced to a nearby laptop.
Then I zoned out for about 20 minutes, nearly falling asleep. From there, Love.Life regional president, Michael Robertson led me into a private room where I slid my lower limbs into what looked like a spacesuit, while lying on a table.
Though I skipped the gym during my visit, personal trainer Shelle Tarver was there doing squats on something called an OxeFit machine. She faced a giant, vertical screen on which her digital avatar mirrored her moves and gave her real-time data about her power, velocity load and balance so she could make her workouts more effective. Cryotherapy is meant to reduce inflammation and increase circulation, Robertson said; but when I stepped out after one minute, I just felt very awake.
As the brand grew, it became synonymous with a certain aspirational lifestyle. Whole Foods became more than a place to pick up a carton of milk, it was a place to assert your values, and to feel good. And spend, as many people joked, your “whole pay check”.
Can Mackey find the same success with Love.Life? To thread the same needle in the realm of healthcare seems a much further stretch. But when your target market has bottomless pockets, a fantasy can become a reality.
As exciting as that might be for some people, it could have negative affects on the larger population, says Paul Ginsburg, a professor of health policy at the University of Southern California. “They’re extending the scope of what medical care is for their wealthy clients,” he says of Love.Life.
“If you’re wealthy, it’s a wonderful opportunity. But physician resources are stretched pretty thin today, and if the centres were to take off, engaging physicians in service to very wealthy people means drawing their time away from treating the general population – that’s the downside.” Mackey hopes that Love.
Life will follow in Whole Foods’ philanthropic path. Whole Planet, a project of the grocery chain’s non-profit organisation, has invested US$113 million in global communities since 2005. “Philanthropy comes from success,” Mackey says.
“We will do things to help improve the health of poor people. But it’ll come because we’ll have the resources to do that.”.
