Sprouts Farmers Market

Sprouts Farmers Market is a specialty retailer of fresh, natural and organic foods at great prices. Stores offer a complete shopping experience that includes fresh produce, bulk foods, vitamins and supplements, packaged groceries, meat and seafood, baked goods, dairy products, frozen foods, natural body care and household items catering to consumers' growing interest in health and wellness.

Headquartered in Phoenix, AZ, Sprouts Farmers Market employs more than 14,000 team members and operates more than 167 stores in eight states.

The company said it plans to open as many as 55 new Sprouts stores in 2014 and beyond.

The company went public in July 2013 selling 18.5 million shares at $18 per share.

History

Henry Boney was a strapping young man from the West Texas town of Kress, where he grew up poor, selling cream from 20 head of cows the family owned to generate a meager income. Like many people in the Dust Bowl era, he moved to California seeking better fortune. He arrived there in 1934 and did what he could to make ends meet, including driving an ice cream truck for Arden Dairy. Through that job he met Jessie Grame and married her in 1943, at the age of 29. The newlyweds then borrowed $600 from her parents to buy a pickup truck, and used that to haul some peaches down from the orchards of Julian. They opened a fruit stand at the corner of 71st and El Cajon Boulevard near La Mesa...and a tradition was born. (True to the family's high ethical standards, they also paid her parents back within three weeks!)

Henry was a food retailer, a man who, because of his earliest roots, cared deeply about making fresh foods affordable to everyone. Over the years, Henry Boney and his family would start and sell many retail businesses, including Speedee Mart (the original convenience stores, eventually sold to Southland Corporation, parent company of 7-Eleven), Boney's, Bradshaw's and Superama. Though he lived his life as an entrepreneur through and through, it was never about making money. "It was always for the sense of accomplishment and the way this business makes us feel," he once told the San Diego Union-Tribune.

The second generation of Boney's stores were opened in 1969 by Henry's sons, Stan, Steve, and later, Scott. The name was changed to Henry's Marketplace in 1997, in honor of the family patriarch...and that's where things got really complicated. The Boney family ran Henry's until 1999, when the stores were sold to Wild Oats Markets, Inc. Stan, his son Shon, and family friends Kevin Easler and Scott Wing all worked for Wild Oats for a time, but eventually left and, to avoid the terms of a non-compete agreement that prohibited them from running stores in California, moved to Arizona to found Sprouts Farmers Market. The first store opened in Chandler, AZ in 2002.

Under the leadership of Stan and Shon Boney, Sprouts grew rapidly – and, from afar, that made Henry and Jessie Boney exceedingly proud. Henry eventually passed away in 2005.