The colourful chalkboards and baskets of fruit that greet customers at the entrances of Whole Foods Market's shops paint a rosy picture. Yet shares in the American seller of organic and natural food have fallen by more than 40% since hitting a peak last October, in a period when stockmarkets have been strong. It is not that the retailer is in immediate crisis: its latest quarterly figures, on July 30th, showed sales and profits both up a bit. And it is not that people are going off the idea of paying more for food produced without chemical fertilisers, pesticides or additives: the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements reckons that the industry's worldwide revenues were a record of $63 billion in 2012; and Techsci Research, a market-research firm, predicts that the American market for such foods-the world's largest-may grow by 14% by 2018.
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