Whole Foods CEO John Mackey has built a remarkable business.  My jaw still drops every time I walk in to a Whole Foods store.  That’s one reason a seemingly customer-oriented, cool, together business like Whole Foods disappoints me when I hear their CEO completely lacking in common sense.  Mackey’s anonymous participation in a Yahoo stock-market forum talking-up Whole Foods performance while trashing rival Wild Oats is a bit nutty.  The tricky part for public relations professionals who represent Mackey and Whole Foods is how you defend this, at minimum, unethical behavior.

The SEC, FTC and a horde of lawyers will do what they have to do in determining if Mackey’s behavior was illegal.  Legal or not, the result of “Rahodeb’s” postings on the Yahoo site is a loss of corporate reputation, the certain death of the proposed merger with Wild Oats and at some point it could mean Whole Foods says “bye bye” to its founder and CEO.

From a public relations point of view, what are Mackey’s and Whole Foods’ options?  To date, the company line out of headquarters has defended Mackey’s nearly eight years of postings as “fun” and occasionally “playing devils advocate” according to the Wall Street Journal.  All of this spin seems to ignore the fact that Whole Foods is in the midst of a PR crisis.

If there is a defense for Mackey, it’s that he started blogging before most people could even spell blog.  But it was still a public forum and he was still posting anonymously.  And based on the text of some of his postings, Mackey was at times arrogant, vain and disingenuous.  It is time to come clean.

If Mackey has any chance of saving his position and restoring the company’s reputation, it is time for some serious eating of humble pie.  The problem for Whole Foods is that it is nearly impossible to let the emperor know that he has no clothes when he’s the CEO and the founder to boot.  Mackey is probably listening to his lawyers who are telling him he has a defensible legal position on the postings.  Often legal counsel and the principals in a firestorm such as this focus on the legal outcomes.  But the public relations outcomes can be far more damaging.  Mackey should start by saying he is “sorry.”  It is time for Mackey and Whole Foods to simply say he made a gross error in judgment.  In the future, Mackey should pledge to do what many corporate CEOs including Robert Lutz of GM and Jonathan Schwartz of Sun Microsystems do which limit his comments to his corporate blog.  It may not be as much fun, but it’s legal and at least the buyer knows what they’re getting.