It sells both nutritional values and naturally grown ingredients to a growing U.S. Spanish speaking demographic, generating growth and solid free cash flow to fund further expansion from both same store sales and store base growth alike.
Whole Foods has been a strong performer for several years with consistently high same-store sales, good cash flow, strong gross margins and controlled expansion.
As economies become richer, they can rely less and less on the brute force of capital spending, coupled with a steady flow of cheap rural migrants, to fuel their expansion.
But the ten years of drought before this efflorescence followed a huge expansion of irrigation in the 1970s and 1980s that reduced the flow of the Murray to a trickle.