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Special 2026 Outlook with Bryan Bottarelli and Karim Rahemtulla

Save Your Spot Here.

– Stephen Prior, Publisher

I was driving to the pickleball court with John Mackey last March – yeah, the guy who founded Whole Foods – when he dropped a story that made me want to immediately double down on my Instacart position (trades under the name Maple Bear, ticker: CART).

We’re cruising along, talking business, when Mackey starts telling me about the conference table meeting where he sold Whole Foods to Amazon.

Picture this: you’ve got Bezos sitting across from the founder of the most successful organic grocery chain in America, and Mackey’s trying to explain why they shouldn’t mess with what’s working.

“When I ran Whole Foods,” Mackey tells me, “we used Instacart as our delivery service. It was like a star on our balance sheet – we were showing hundreds of millions in profit from that partnership.”

But here’s where it gets interesting.

Bezos looks across that conference table and says he doesn’t want some third party delivering groceries with an Instacart logo. He wants Amazon delivery cars. He wants the Amazon brand front and center.

Mackey’s response? “That’s not a good idea. This thing isn’t broken. Don’t fix it.”

Guess who won that argument?

Bezos got his Amazon delivery cars. He killed the Instacart partnership. And according to Mackey, about a year later he looked at Whole Foods’ P&L statements and they were showing hundreds of millions in losses where they used to show hundreds of millions in profits.

That conversation happened maybe twenty minutes before we started playing pickleball, and I’m sitting there thinking about what Mackey had just told me.

Here’s what that story really reveals: Instacart has figured out something that Amazon couldn’t replicate even after spending hundreds of millions trying.

So when Instacart took a hit over the holidays because people got upset about their AI pricing model, I’m looking at this thinking – isn’t that essentially what every single airline in the history of the world is doing?

They’re using smart pricing to maximize profitability. Why should this be a big deal if Instacart is doing it?

The fundamental business that made Whole Foods hundreds of millions in profit with Instacart?

That’s still there. Amazon tried to replace it and lost a fortune in the process. And now we’re supposed to be concerned because Instacart uses dynamic pricing like every other successful service company?

I’m not saying there won’t be more temporary concerns about pricing models or competition.

But when the founder of Whole Foods is basically giving you a case study in why Instacart’s business model works, and Amazon’s approach was a multi-million dollar mistake, you pay attention.

YOUR ACTION PLAN

Sometimes the best investment insights come from the most unexpected places. In this case, it came from a car ride to a pickleball court with a guy who had a front-row seat to one of the biggest ego plays in recent business history.

We’re still holding our position, and stories like this are exactly why.

Want to know what else we like?

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