UCLA Library has acquired the papers of Sandy Gooch, a trailblazer in the natural foods movement and founder of Mrs. Gooch’s Natural Foods Markets, which merged with Whole Foods in 1993, it was announced on Thursday.
Mrs. Gooch’s Natural Food Markets was the first natural foods supermarket chain in the United States.
After being hospitalized in the mid-1970s for a life-threatening allergic reaction to an antibiotic, Gooch discovered that chemical additives in sodas and foods worsened her condition.
Motivated by that knowledge, she left her job to open her first market in 1977 in an old A&P grocery store space in West Los Angeles.
By 1993, Mrs. Gooch’s, which offered nutritious foods while advocating for healthy lifestyles, had expanded to seven stores and was one of the highest-grossing natural products markets in the world with annual sales of over $90 million.
In September 1993, Gooch sold her company to Whole Foods Market for $60 million, merging the nation’s two biggest natural foods supermarket chains.
The Sandy Gooch Papers, to be housed in UCLA Library Special Collections, document the founding and growth of Mrs. Gooch’s Natural Food Markets, as well as the founder’s life’s work. The gift from Gooch and her husband, Harry Lederman, includes business records, product information, advertising, decor materials, photographs and videos that record the importance of the natural foods chain.
Mrs. Gooch’s shelves were stocked with products free of refined white sugar and flour, hydrogenated vegetable oil, irradiated foods, GMOs, bovine growth hormones, harmful chemical additives and preservative agents, alcoholic beverages, artificial flavorings and colorings, and other unhealthy ingredients — some of which are now banned.
“This was not some arbitrary list that was pulled out of the sky; every criteria had science behind it,” Gooch said in a statement. “Stores all over the country understood the criteria of what Mrs. Gooch’s would carry, what was healthy and what was not. Because Mrs. Gooch’s did the research, salesmen would come out to health food stores, bring out samples and would be asked, ‘Is it Goochable?”‘
Gooch’s family connections to UCLA date back to the 1920s, when her mother attended the campus, which was “just a few buildings located in a bean field,” Gooch said.
Gooch taught UCLA undergraduates as an elementary school master teacher and later, while operating Mrs. Gooch’s, mentored MBA students at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. Also, her daughter attended the graduate program in education and acquired her teaching credential, and her grandson earned a bachelor’s in Japanese studies, she said.
The Sandy Gooch Papers will be available to researchers early next year. A companion lecture series — the Sandy Gooch and Harry Lederman Endowed Lecture Series — will be announced in the coming months, according to UCLA.