Amazon bought Whole Foods eight years ago — now it’s bringing it deeper into the fold
As competitors like Walmart up their e-commerce game, Amazon is unifying its grocery strategy.
Eight years after acquiring Whole Foods Market, Amazon is finally exerting more control over the company. As reported by Business Insider last week, corporate staff at Whole Foods will be brought under Amazon’s employee programs, with leadership changes expected at the top as well, as it works to grow its wider grocery business.
Execs at Walmart and Costco will be watching carefully for any signs of a change in strategy at Whole Foods, with the high-end grocer having been broadly left to its own devices since being picked up by Amazon in 2017 for $13.7 billion.
At the top of Amazon’s grocery empire is Jason Buechel. Promoted to the role after running Whole Foods since 2022, Buechel has assembled a leadership team to streamline processes and deepen the integration between Whole Foods and Amazon’s wider grocery business — his “One Grocery” plan.
“Too frequently we are duplicating efforts and missing easy opportunities for efficiency,” Buechel said in an internal memo seen by BI.
Given Amazon’s expertise in logistics and technology — as well as access to an almost unlimited amount of capital for new investments — the company’s new grocery chief should have all of the tools for success.
But the company still remains a relatively minor player in the US grocery world. Whole Foods and Amazon respectively had just 1.6% and 1.4% dollar market share as of March, which was way behind Walmart’s 21.2%, according to research firm Numerator. And Walmart’s efforts in e-commerce, like adding automated distribution centers, are starting to bear serious fruit: a new study out this week from Coresight found that more Amazon Prime members bought groceries online from Walmart than from the retail giant itself.
