Whole Foods Market

I live around the corner and this place is a blessing.
We shop there every day for basics such as milk, bread ( and the rest of the stuff at the patisserie counter and bakery which is all great as it is fresh, with no preservatives and no other junk in it unlike in most other places) and bits we are out at times even in the middle of cooking late at night you can just pop down quickly to get fresh herbs, wine or anything else.  Fantastic cheese selection, meat and even the fishmonger. 
On many occasions after dinner I have been sitting on the sofa and fancied somenthing sweet  fresh and nice and put the coat on and run downstairs to wholefoods to buy something. Lovely patisserie , fresh tiramisu etc... they close at 10Pm.
It is expensive which is why we do not do the entire weekly shop from there , just the fresh daily requirements but worth the money. We can't even buy bread anywhere else anymore as it is just not the same as in wholefoods, it tastes nothing like it.
They also have all sorts of quality supplements downstairs which I now buy from there as they do not cost any more than in any other  health food store and recently discovered they even sell organic cotton tampons!
There is no question that if you care about what you eat and like stuff to taste as it should this place is great.
Lovely flowers too and the staff  ( most of the time) has  manners and is friendly, can't say the same for Tesco down the road where  they should all have a training in  US  to learn what  customer service means .

So despite the prices the place is *****

really good coffee, staff werent too friendly but i was served quickly. easily can spend an hour or so here just browsing at all the food that is on offer.

Fantastic selection of fresh and store cupboard organic and natural foods. A little on the pricey side.

Will recommend the Conscious raw chocolate :-) mmmmm

I have a strange filling about Wholefoods, for one side because the “SheaS” said in her review, but for another side i’m starting to be a regular client there, i agreed is very expensive compared to another supermarkets but the quality is porporcional better. The fresh food is very tasty…you feel the quality.
In London I feel a big diference for what you pay versus quality. The price is proporcional to quality. And this is very stange for me, in my culture the produtos are very similar, if is more expensive in one side compared with another supermarket is for marketing reasons and here is diferent. For example: from Asda to Waitross or MSpencer you feel the diference in quality but also in price…but if you try Whole Foods is another step…higher in everything. But in my opinion…if you have money…i recomend Whole Foods.

FV

Yeah its relaxed, friendly and theres lots of eye catching stuff on sale - great for lunch if you work locally and we need more quality food courts everywhere like this. But ...my overwhelming thought in there was what about the waste ? Such a vast array of fresh food with a short shelf life must end up being chucked out. What madness. I dont buy it that they hand it out at the end of the day . With so many people having a hard time of it, food hikes and shortages worldwide - this show of gross opulance, pampering to the gluttons of Kensington and Knightsbridge just doesnt sit right with me.

If I have time, and I happen to be passing by, I love stepping into Whole Foods and having a poke around. Right through the entrance is their bakery section. I've never bought any of their cakes or desserts, but they look enticing and I've certainley considered it. I have bought their bread - and it's gorgeous, particularly the rosemary sourdough. And they almost always have a few tasters of bread so you can get an idea of the quality...

Downstairs are the fruit and veg - which always look great but are a wee bit expensive for me. Then there are the dry foods and teas. I love studying the range of teas sold here, and I've occasionally bought some as a treat. The same is true of their selection of cereal bars - including wallaby bars, which I love and are hard to find anywhere else.

There's a nice fish counter and a good butcher's, as well as an exciting-looking chocolate counter (with very nice chocolates too, if you want to splash out on something a little less commercial than places like Hotel Chocolat). And then back upstairs the cheese room is definitely worth a stop (and a nibble).

All that said, Whole Foods is very much somewhere I visit to look around and experience new foods. And they do run some great evenings and tasting sessions - I've been to one of their Thirsty Thursdays, where you get five little dishes and five glasses of wine to taste, and it's definitely worth the £5 they charge. Unfortunately, a lot of the other stuff seems over-priced. But I'll still keep visiting!

Yes, it's ridiculously expensive. This is Kensington High Street, what do you expect? It's also fabulous, very baby friendly (there are fantastic changing stations even in the men's room!), and the top floor has great food with spectacular natural light.

I love this shop. The fresh salads are absolutely delicious, not necessarily very cheap, I paid around £6 for a small dish, but it was enough for lunch. It was so, so tasty. They have 3 different food bars where you get different size dishes and pay for them, both hot and cold food, and soups. Really spoilt for choice. The rolls and sandwiches are delicious too. They have a range of delicious speciality breads and there's something simply amazing about the chocolate chip scones. This shop is worth going to High Street Kensington for.

I have mixed feelings about the whole foods in Kensington. I'm a huge fan of the brand in the US but the product quality in this branch is poor. The fruit and vegetables are tasteless, the cooked food is often over cooked and the whole foods branded food isn't as good as equivalents in the US. Also, I wonder how environmentally friendly it is to have mounds of fresh, cooked and baked food (most of which is presumably chucked away at the end of the night). The upstairs canteen area is good, but very expensive. However, the sushi bar is well worth the money. The Hot Pot bar is also worth a stop. However, pretty much everything else in the store can be bought for cheaper and will be of better quality from one of the multitude of supermarkets on high st kensington. And genuinely, I don't think having such a huge store (a lot of which is dead space being lit and heated/air conditioned) is at all in accordance with the whole food brand. It is a feast for the eyes for sure, but there must be a massive amount of waste produced.

One of the reasons I like this store is the large range of supplements that they sell. I can normally be confident of finding what I want

I entered Whole Foods with not a small amount of trepidation. Any place that makes particular effort to highlight just how many tills it has at the store entrance is setting you up for a bit of a surreal experience. And, well, it didn't disappoint on that front.

It's hard to work out how Whole Foods maintains its soulless feeling when ostensibly it's a pretty decent concept. Big store without too many corporate overtones sells good quality food and drink to the affluent masses of mid-west Lahndan. Hmm, now I've written it down, I'm beginning to realise. The stuff in here is good quality, easy. There's delicious bread here and amazing cheese there, all laid out attractively on tabletops rather than packed in cellophane and shoved in shelves. It's like the world's biggest deli. They even have samples. Mmmmm, samples. Come to me, cranberry ciabatta; get in my mouth, chunky guacamole. Hilariously though, the prevalence of samples at the front of the store does tend to encourage the mind to think that everything laid out is free. Of course, no it is not. It is a pain au chocolat and it is a tenner.

The challenging prices of the store meant that my friend and I went for an extended walk around in search of samples and didn't end up buying anything. I went in as I thought it'd be a good place to pick up the hard to find ingredients... left a little disappointed that there was no mograbiah or pectin to satisfy my demands. Not even in the 'freefill-take-as-much-as-you-want' section. Woe. I grew tired of the novelty of putting my hands in the big bags of coffee beans and monkey nuts pretty quickly and hightailed it outta there - away from the raw food, gluten-free this and macrobiotic that - past the 28 tills, through the free bread section and out again.

It was fun I guess. But I shall leave it to the Sloaneys and the Gwyneth Paltrows of this world to enjoy in peace.

The idea's a great one - and it works really well in the US .... but has it worked here?

What I do like is the fact that each member of a group can chose from very different types of food.

What I also like is that there is some comfortable seating with large windows for a quiet cup of coffee and cake in the afternoon.

The low points have to be that it is not cheap and that the place can seem a little desolate.

Great location, though.

I have bought and thrown out two products under the Whole Foods 365 brand. These products are worse than the lowest level of regular supermarket products. One was the soy milk. It contains fillers and coagulants, so you can’t make a chai with it. Soy milk only needs soy and water. The other is their 365 cranberry sauce: just disgusting. We normally make our own but we thought theirs would do. We would have been better off buying the cheapest commercial jelly. Their brand was too sweet and the cranberries were mush: neither fruit nor jelly. I object to a store using their organic brand name to sell inferior product that would never move off a supermarket shelf. Shame on Whole Foods!

I’ve always walked past this place, assuming that it only for people who like looking cool so much that they’d happily pay a tenner for two grapes, just so they can swan out with one of those Whole Foods-branded jute bags; therefore saying to the world ”’I’ve arrived!” And don’t get me wrong: buying blueberies from this joint for a month will result in you having to a) remortgage your house b) pay less rent if you don’t own yours just to make up the cash, but in these credit crunching times, there are a whole range of things you can get here that won’t break the bank.

I go there for protein shakes, seeds and pulses, nut butters and tea. All reasonably priced.

And what’s especially nice about this as with all the other branches, you can come in with the most wildly unconventional food preferences known to man (Macrobiotic vegan? sure… what you want is down this aisle.”) and you won’t get looked at as if you’d just announced that you love punching five year olds.

I know this by experience. Just try explaining to the peeps at your local Tesco that you’re eating raw food only for a charity challenge and that you’re on the hunt for almond butter and wait for the look on their faces! By contrast (and I suspect this is what you’re paying the premium for, the service here is relaxed, friendly and the atmosphere is surpisingly zen-like, even when it’s rammed. Wave ta ta to being elbowed in the guts by people with trolley rage, say hello to tomatoes that actually taste of tomato.

Even if you don’t need to buy any food i would come here just to see the food on display. Everything looks delicious, especially the fruit and veg.
The prices aren’t cheap so don’t expect to get much change. There is 3 floors with bakery, tills and salad bars & hot food on ground floor, fruit veg and larder goodies in the basement with cosemtics and toiletries, and food counters on the top floor.
If you have any food intolerences this is the place to come, as you can get everything. There are normally lots of 'try before you buy’ counters so you can sample the goods.
If i could afford to shop here everyweek i would!

Arrays of tempting glazed fruit pastries, cheesecakes, savoury pies, chilled dairy products all seemingly sourced from original organic suppliers.

An upmarket foodhall worthy of a browse even if the bank balance can’t stand any purchases.

The Wholefoods Supermarket is simply the best place there is in London for all those hard to find organic or vegetarian brands you have been searching for – it seems to stock the complete ranges as well. It sells organic meat as well so is not wholly vegetarian and also stocks health and beauty items. Choice of food if you are eating there or grabbing to take away is immense. The displays of bread, fruit and vegetables are fantastic. Downside are the prices – top of the range for almost everything (some bargains if you search hard though) – I’d like to move in to this place and never leave!

Just entering this Whole Foods is a culinary experience. While you pay extraordinary prices for the food, the wine bar, cheese room, flower shop, bakery, sushi bar and more all combine to overwhelm and dazzle the senses. Think of Whole Foods not as a place to do your shopping by a food museum. Worth going in for the smells and fun layout alone.

I love this place!

As a vegan, it is rare that I have the choice from such a huge range of products: 'cheese’, mock meats, snack bars (nakd, trek and a massive selection of larabars), as well as canned items (refried beans, canned pumpkin etc), refridgerated (tofu stuffed pasta!) and frozen items (dairy free ice cream, amy’s frozen meals ; ) ).

The food is not cheap but not overpriced considering that a lot of the products are organic and some are shipped from abroad.

This shop is a must visit place for any veggies or vegans who are after a wider range of products for cooking with.

Big huge organic supermarket selling lots more. Its great…. so well catered for, even your trolley gets its own escalator. Everything is well liad out and well presented. Has everything from huge bakery and patisserie to the largest salad bar i have ever seen. Huge choice of sushi on shelves and everythign you would expect from any supermarket. Downstairs a vast array of eggs, laid out in huge displays as opposed to box in a normal boring format, fruit looks inviting and again is well displayed on the top floor has restaurants with multiple food stations.
It has to be said there are a few of these around now and its a great experience, albeit expensive to keep doing weekly shop there. Little out of the way to get to as well if using the tube but well worth a visit even if for the novlety factor, the glorious displays and of course the trolley escalator.