Two years ago, when Whole Foods announced that it wanted to expand to 1,000 stores from a little more than 300 and open in places where it was assumed that consumers had never heard of kale and wouldn’t dream of spending $6 for a pound of humanely raised pork, some investors scoffed. Its traditional grocery store competitors snickered at the strategy. And even those on Wall Street enamored with the chain’s success expressed doubts that its forays inland into smaller, less urban markets would succeed.

Idaho, for instance, is the potato capital of the country, if not the world, home to the J. R. Simplot Company, supplier of the parboiled, frozen potato strips that become McDonald’s famous French fries — not exactly the sort of food Whole Foods sells, though it does stock locally grown organic spuds.

“I really did wonder what they were thinking,” said Meredith Adler, an investment analyst at Barclays Capital who follows the company. “But at this very early stage, the strategy does appear to be working.”

Like most grocery chains, Whole Foods does not release sales data on individual stores. But two years after disclosing its plans, it turns out that more shoppers do want, say, soda pop with no artificial coloring and flavoring and specialty meats, more than the experts had banked on. Cities like this one with its 212,000 residents, many of them college students and migrants from the cities where Whole Foods raised the bar on the grocery business, are embracing the company with an enthusiasm that has confounded the naysayers, propelled its stock price to heady highs and surprised even its executives.

“I was so excited when I heard it was coming here I even bought the stock,” said Beth Brigham, who drives about a half-hour — a trek by Boise standards — to get to the store that opened here a year ago, combining the trip with her exercise schedule. “I really like organic, healthy stuff, and the selection in other stores here was much more limited.”