Heather Stern, general counsel of Whole Foods Market Inc.

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.

Stern's legal career started in Georgia. She graduated from the University of Georgia law school in 2002, clerked for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Atlanta 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.

Stern spoke with staff reporter Kristen Rasmussen about the challenges associated with handling legal matters for a company in the food and beverage industry and how she guided her department through Amazon's acquisition. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How is working in food and beverage retail  different from working in office supply retail? There are a lot of regulatory issues and other types of issues that are present in food and beverage retail that are not in office supply retail. You have the food safety regulations, and I think that is the largest difference that I see, and where I have had to spend some of my time learning. I have a very talented regulatory team that is very well-versed in those regulations and those laws, so I have been able to lean on them and have them teach me some of that. But I think that is the area that I find to be the most different.

You mentioned that you have a dedicated in-house litigation team in the Whole Foods legal department, which is fairly unusual. What are its main responsibilities? They actually litigate cases in court, though not every case. We do have outside counsel for some things as well, but they do spend some of their time actually litigating cases and arguing in court. They are an extremely talented group of litigators. There are three of them, and they get good results for the company and are able to save some money by doing some of the work in-house. Obviously we can't litigate every case, but we do what we can in-house.

How did you lead the legal department through the transition of being acquired by Amazon? Anytime there is a big change in the company it is challenging. But I have a philosophy with respect to that: Run toward the chaos. And what that means is that when things are difficult or challenging, you run toward it as opposed to away from it because that is how you grow as a lawyer and as a person.

And when I came here, I had some experience with mergers and acquisitions at Office Depot, so I was able to share some of those experiences and that philosophy, and I think that was helpful to the team in leading through that change.

Kristen Rasmussen is an Atlanta-based reporter who covers corporate legal departments and in-house attorneys, Georgia government and health care.