Colorado is getting a new Whole Foods…in Basalt. It will open in 2010. Why it takes three years to build and open a grocery store, I don’t know, but that’s the deal. It will be on Highway 82 in the Willits Town Center. In Denver, I can think of a lot of places in addition to Cherry Creek I’d like to see a Whole Foods. Uptown comes to mind (I love Marczyk’s and stop in almost every day but it’s a market not a full-fledged grocery store.) Yet, it doesn’t seem like Colorado is getting more Whole Foods any time soon.

Whole Foods also announced signing leases for eight other stores, averaging 42,000 square feet, in: Capitola, Calif., Lafayette, Calif., Palm Desert, Calif., San Francisco, Calif., Santa Rosa, Calif., Honolulu, Hawaii, Ann Arbor, Mich., and Yonkers, N.Y.

They must be doing something right.

Whole Foods operates 194 stores in the United States and United Kingdom. The company was founded in Austin in 1980. In 2006, it recorded total sales of $5.6 billion.

Whole Foods is supposed to be acquiring Wild Oats. Maybe we’ll get more Whole Foods stores that way.