Case Study: Whole Foods Market achieves streamlined identity management and 32% support cost savings with Microsoft Azure Active Directory Premium

Whole Foods takes natural next step to protect applications in the cloud

Whole Foods Market, a Fortune 500 natural‑foods retailer with about 91,000 employees and 462 stores, faced a rapidly growing identity-management challenge as it moved to SaaS (including Workday) and doubled the number of user credentials beyond its on‑premises Active Directory. Employees struggled with multiple passwords and IT spent significant time on resets, while expanding on‑premises infrastructure to support the growth would have been cost‑prohibitive.

Whole Foods built on its existing Active Directory by deploying Microsoft Azure Active Directory Premium to all 91,000 employees in 12 weeks, enabling single sign‑on to 30+ SaaS apps and using features like self‑service password reset with write‑back, dynamic group membership, conditional access, and multifactor authentication. The rollout reduced support‑contract costs by 32%, cut pre‑onboarding support for SaaS apps by 50%, avoided roughly $350,000 in on‑premises expansion costs, allowed the same team to manage 10× more SaaS applications, and strengthened centralized security and control.

Whole Foods Market

Will Lamb

Infrastructure Coordinator