We like data here at The Greenest. Sometimes we dig into which vegetables have the most nutrients. Other times we focus on what makes your neighborhood healthy (or unhealthy.) And there are times like these where we have a little fun with the data. Anyone who has walked into a Whole Foods on a weekend has often wondered “is this the busiest Whole Foods in America? What about the world? Or universe?” Or maybe that’s just us. Anyway, if you’ve actually wondered that too, then this list is for you. Because we are going to show you which Whole Foods are actually the busiest in America.
As with any list like this, we typically go into it with preconceived notions. The busiest Whole Foods has to be in some high density urban city like New York or LA, right? Maybe Chicago? Or maybe their very first flagship location in Austin, TX. And, typically, our preconceived notions are wrong.
The single busiest Whole Foods Market in the country is a suburban store with a massive parking lot at 331 N Glendale Avenue in Glendale, California — a Los Angeles bedroom community better known for car dealerships than for kale. It pulls an estimated 1.66 million visits a year. The Austin flagship doesn’t crack the top 20. Neither does any store in Manhattan until you reach #16.
We ranked all 450 Whole Foods locations based on how many visits they get each year. The result is a map of where America’s most famous grocery store is actually busiest — and it looks nothing like the brand’s image of itself.
The 20 Busiest Whole Foods in America
The takeaway: The ten busiest Whole Foods stores in the country are separated by barely 11% — a cluster of suburban juggernauts each doing roughly 1.5 million visits a year, with Glendale edging Garden City, New York by a margin too thin to mean much.
Rounding out the top 20: 11. Metairie, LA · 12. Pembroke Pines, FL · 13. Phoenix, AZ · 14. Roseville, CA · 15. Chicago, IL (Lakeview) · 16. Manhattan, NY (14th St) · 17. Las Vegas, NV · 18. Lynnwood, WA · 19. Tustin, CA · 20. Albuquerque, NM. Each still clears 1.27 million visits a year.
The Busiest Whole Foods Is in the Suburbs
The takeaway: Nineteen of the top 20 are suburban or strip-mall stores with parking lots, not the dense urban-core flagships the brand is famous for. The one true city-center store on the list, Manhattan’s 14th Street location, ranks 16th — behind Albuquerque and Metairie, Louisiana.
The reason is structural, and it is the opposite of what the brand mythology suggests. A downtown Whole Foods is hemmed in by its own footprint: no parking, a walk-in catchment of a few blocks, and shoppers who stop in for a basket, not a cart. A suburban Whole Foods anchored to a freeway and 600 parking spaces draws the entire affluent half of a metro area doing a full weekly shop. Glendale isn’t winning because Glendale loves Whole Foods more than Brooklyn does. It’s winning because Glendale’s store can physically hold — and park — three times the crowd. Think of this like Disneyland. If Disneyland was in the middle of Manhattan it could only fit so many mouseketeers. But when you make it it’s own city, it’s a whole different ballgame.
Glendale, by the Numbers
Let’s deep dive into #1: 1.66 million visits a year is an abstraction until you take a step back. The Glendale location is open fifteen hours a day — which means a shopper walks through the doors of this one grocery store about every twelve seconds, all day, every day.
New York Doesn’t Have the Busiest Store — It Has the Most of Them
The takeaway: No single metro dominates the #1 spot, but the New York area packs the list deeper than anywhere else. Four of the top 20 ring the city, but zero of them are in Manhattan proper.
Garden City (#2) on Long Island, Brooklyn (#5), Paramus (#9) across the river in New Jersey, and finally Manhattan’s 14th Street (#16): the New York metro’s Whole Foods traffic is real, but it’s spread across the suburbs and outer boroughs, where the stores are bigger and the parking exists. California matches it on raw count — Glendale, Dublin, Roseville, Tustin — but spreads those four across the whole state rather than one metro. The pattern holds nationally: this is a suburban-affluence story wearing an urban-cool brand.
One fun outlier we found was in Honolulu’s lone Whole Foods on Kamakee Street. Despite being on a relatively low population density it actually ranks 7th in the entire country. This single store is out-drawing every Whole Food location in Chicago, Phoenix, and Washington, D.C. When a market has one Whole Foods and a lot of money, that one store inherits all of it and everyone flocks to it.
How Whole Foods Stacks Up Against Its Rivals
Whole Foods leads the category as both the busiest chain and the highest traffic per store. WF just edges out Trader Joe’s by about 22k visits per year. Erewhon’s which has its own cult status but comes in a pretty distant third (although they’re still pretty popular!)
So why does all this matter? Because these are the most affluent consumers in the grocery industry. And all these chains are in a battle to get the attention and time for their target demographics.
Whole Foods ($111,100 median shopper-neighborhood income) and Trader Joe’s ($107,200) draw nearly identical crowds of nearly identical affluence. Erewhon, which has a reputation for being even more expensive than Whole Foods, actually draws a consumer that average 109k household income. A tad bit lower than Whole Foods. Sprouts Farmers Market runs a tier below on both ($96,600 income, ~360,000 visits/yr per store), though its busiest single store in Los Angeles still clears a million a year. All four chains grew their foot traffic year over year; the premium-grocery boom is real, and it is not slowing.
About This Data
Store rankings come from our proprietary location-intelligence dataset covering 450 Whole Foods Market locations and their measured foot traffic over a six-month window (November 1, 2025 – April 30, 2026); annual visit figures are estimated by doubling that window. Visit counts are foot-traffic measurements, not sales. “Median shopper-neighborhood income” describes the census characteristics of the neighborhoods each chain’s measured visitors travel from, not the personal finances of any shopper. Erewhon’s busiest-store figure reflects a 12-month window (May 2025 – April 2026). Bar lengths in the chart are proportional to each value within the chart. Coverage reflects the locations in our dataset, which covers essentially the full U.S. Whole Foods footprint (~448 stores).
Cory Jones has spent 20 years in media and publishing and now leads the data and editorial operation behind The Greenest. He built and maintains the site’s Neighborhood Wellness Score — a proprietary dataset scoring food access, walkability, air quality, healthcare access, and health outcomes across 18,357 U.S. ZIP codes, drawing on CDC PLACES data, EPA air quality readings, and verified location intelligence. He is a huge fan of Rancho Gordo beans and tries to work out more than he actually works out.
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