I nearly cried the first time I went into Whole Foods in New York. Admittedly I’d just been to four exceptionally tedious fashion shows with Paris Hilton.

But it wasn’t that. It was the horn of plenty that Whole Foods represented. You could buy smoothies by the gallon and there were dispensers that poured out Niagara Falls of nuts. Whole Foods was not just any old organic food store with positive messages about sustainable farming dangling about the place; this was expansive supermarket, café, bookstore, sushi bar, Indian buffet and organic quinoa, pine nut and pomegranate salad counter and home delivery rolled into one. There are seven gazillion kinds of salad. This is choice, American style: a talisman of Western democracy. When I saw Jamie Oliver waiting to pay in line 9 one day I had to stop myself rushing up to him and begging him to please, please bring something like Whole Foods to our beleaguered homeland.

No need, as it turned out. Because, after 20 years’ expansion in the US and Canada, Whole Foods decided to bring Whole Foods to Britain. To the Barkers building on High Street Kensington, once home of the mythical Biba store. How very 2007. What genius sorted that coup?

“Don’t know why you’re so excited,” said a British friend who has lived in Manhattan for 15 years. “It’s got nothing in it Waitrose hasn’t. You just don’t appreciate how good UK supermarkets have got.”

Poor Simon, I thought. He really needs to throw away those rose-tinted spectacles. I counted the months until the big opening and told everyone it would change our lives.

As luck would have it, I was away when the doors finally swung back on 80,000 sq ft of salad bar, organic butcher, Niagara Falls nut area and 13 “dining venues”. But that meant I had ample opportunity to write a shopping list bursting with ingredients that only Whole Foods would be able to provide.

So here I am, two hours back in the country, armed with extensive list, two daughters (not since the opening of Primark and the launch of Kate Moss’s Topshop range has the female teenage demographic of London been so alert to new possibilities of spending money), driving round the vicinity of High Street Ken. And round and round. There’s nowhere to park. The whole of Kensington Square behind Whole Foods is residents-only parking until 10.30pm. What cretin picked that site?

Still, 30 minutes later we’re in the store. We have found a trolley (much bigger than normal trolleys), we’re gazing in awe at the separate escalator trolley that allows your much-bigger-than-normal trolley to travel in fine style between the three floors, and we’re ready to go. Which is when it all starts to unravel.

First, 80,000 sq ft looks thrilling when you walk in but it is simply too big. I couldn’t find anything on my list, partly because Whole Foods isn’t laid out like a traditional UK supermarket, and partly because products are arranged according to country of origin. And no, I don’t know where tahini comes from. The staff are lovely if somewhat linguistically challenged, but if any of them have been given more than a nanosecond’s training (“Have a nice day!”) then I’m a bottle of wheat-free soy sauce. I couldn’t find that, either, which in these days of multiple food intolerances is intolerable. Rice cakes? Got taken to the brown rice aisle. Medjoul dates? Followed the instructions and found myself by Jason’s organic shower gels. Agave nectar? No one had a clue. Thank God for the nut dispensers. I accidentally released about seven tons of pecans, thought about hiding the evidence, thought positively (no need to run the gamut of residents parking until next January) and realised at the till that the Nut Assistant stuck the wrong prices on everything. Upstairs my children found the sushi bar — although the take-out choices don’t seem as varied as they are in New York.

An hour later, we emerge bowed and very nearly broken. We have sushi. We have nuts. We have something that may or may not be an alternative wheat-free soy sauce. We have spent £135. There is no carry-to-car service.

You cannot even stop your car outside, so the girls have to race to the corner with our shopping bags (we have taken our own reusable Sainsbury’s ones because they are much bigger and cheaper than Whole Foods’) while I slow down the car. We agree that we are never going back.

Two days later my elder daughter calls me from Whole Foods Sushi Bar. “Thing is, mum, there’s nowhere else that has such a choice.”

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