Heather Stern has a lot in her cart. As the senior vice president for legal affairs and general counsel at Austin, Texas-based Whole Foods Market Inc., she oversees a nearly 75-person team that handles everything from litigation to loss prevention. Before going in-house, Stern clerked for a federal appellate judge and spent a year as an associate at Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton.

She joined the popular health food grocery chain in April 2017, just three months before Amazon announced that it would acquire Whole Foods for $13.7 billion. Previously, she had spent nearly 12 years at Office Depot Inc.