Whole Foods

As Whole Foods prepared for its 25th anniversary in 2005, it opened its biggest store yet, an 80,000-square-foot flagship in its Austin, Texas, home base.

It has a number of new touches in the aisles, such as a seafood “theater” that the retailer compares to Seattle's Pike Place Market and an in-house smoker for aging meats on-site, plus the usual assortment of wines, baked goods, cheeses and prepared foods, all hewing to the retailer's carefully cultivated “organic, natural, earth-friendly” profile.

“To put this store in perspective, every department features more variety than you'd find in a standalone specialty shop,” says ceo John Mackey, “but with products free of artificial additives, sweeteners, colorings, preservatives and hydrogenated oils.”

But how to light a space a third larger than the typical Whole Foods store? One big challenge for the environmentally responsible retailer was conforming to the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) regulations limiting store lighting to 1.9 watts per square foot. The other was maintaining its department store-style contrast ratios. Fortune magazine once wrote, “Whole Foods lights up heirloom tomatoes the way Tiffany's lights diamonds.”

The newest generation of fiberoptic lighting helped provide the answer. EFO (efficient fiberoptics) from Energy Focus (Fremont, Calif.) offered low watts, high light output and no heat. “We were able to replicate the light output of MR-16s,” says Fiberstars marketing vp Ted des Enfants, “but no heat on the perishables” – such as seafood, where merchandisers complained that they had to change the ice in the bins twice a day under MR-16s, plus deal with bacteria that formed.