The Everything Store is looking for a more organic way to sell you junk food. Enter Whole Foods, the grocery chain that built its name on natural ingredients.
Having its Berry Chantilly Cake and Little Debbies, too: Amazon, which bought Whole Foods in 2017, doesn’t want to sully the chain’s clean-living reputation, but it also doesn’t want to miss out on Americans spending on groceries.
So, it’s experimenting with ways to introduce mass-market brands, like cordoning them off to their own special section. According to the Wall Street Journal:
- In one Philadelphia-area store, if customers crave something they can’t find, they can order it on the Amazon app, and a team of backroom robots will get it to them.
- In Chicago, one store’s coffee shop and seating area were replaced by an “Amazon Grocery” kiosk reminiscent of a convenience store.
More is in store: Amazon, which has been working to more closely integrate its operations with Whole Foods, hasn’t said whether it’ll expand the experiments, but it’s definitely not done tweaking its grocery game. Amazon plans to launch its own private label grocery brand and expand same-day delivery of perishable food items to 2,300 cities by 2026.—BC
This report was originally published by Morning Brew.