Amazon’s next ideas for growing its grocery business could blur the lines between Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh by enmeshing the two businesses’ fulfillment networks in a new set of experiments, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Amazon has reportedly started shipping Whole Foods products from 26 Amazon Fresh fulfillment centers and plans to build a microfulfillment center at a Pennsylvania Whole Foods Market and stocking it with Amazon Fresh household goods and groceries. Another part of the plan includes an experimental “Amazon Grocery” inside a Chicago Whole Foods that offers brands and groceries that the upscale store wouldn’t normally carry, according to WSJ.
The goal of the tests is to give Amazon customers a way to buy products “ranging from organic produce to Tide detergent and Cheez-It crackers” from one source, rather than multiple stores, the Journal writes. Doing that could give its grocery businesses “greater scale with online customers” as it tries to drive deeper into a market dominated by companies like Walmart and Kroger, which already distribute orders from their many brick-and-mortar stores.