Quick Take — Amazon Fresh shops will close

The company will convert its physical shops to Whole Foods Markets. The move is not surprising, since the company reduced its Amazon Fresh offering last year. Amazon closed several shops in California and all 19 Amazon Fresh shops in the UK.

What can we say? Since 2017, the date when Amazon bought Whole Foods, the company had its sights set on a possible conversion in the shops that were born in Austin (Texas), but chose to experiment with technology and, in my opinion, uninteresting. Customers are interested in a few things: prices, quality and service, as well as a pleasant environment and friendly staff. Here – in the various Amazon experiments – there was a cold atmosphere, where the quality of private-label food counted for little or nothing.

Obviously this will have an impact on employment: 16,000 people will be laid off.

Edited 27 January, updated 29 January 2026

Quick Take — Amazon lays off 16,000 employees

The latest round of job cuts brings the total number of redundancies to 30,000 in 3 months

The retailer laid off around 14,000 employees last October, bringing the total amount of redundancies to 30,000 in three months.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy warned of workforce reductions in June 2025 due to the company’s investment in AI.

Also on Tuesday, Amazon said it was closing its Fresh and Go grocery shops, after deciding to focus its efforts on expanding Whole Foods Market shops and same-day deliveries of fresh food from warehouses (with Amazon Now).

As a result, the company is laying off employees who helped run Fresh and Go’s operations, according to an internal memo seen by the Wall Street Journal.

Read also this article.

Quick Take — Whole Foods Market private label products land in Singapore

An initial assortment of almost 300 products will be sold on Amazon platforms in the region, as well as on local grocery shops

The leading organic grocery shop will start with nearly 300 private label products in many categories, adding to the tens of thousands of grocery and everyday essentials from Amazon.sg, Amazon Fresh and local grocery and speciality retailers in the region.

In addition, exclusive brands from Whole Foods Market – acquired by Amazon in 2017- will be available in-store at Little Farms, a natural and organic supermarket in Singapore, which has eight locations across the city-state .

Whole Foods has long been selling its products where it has no shops, via the web: the Italians could have taken the cue to export to the rest of the world by developing e-commerce.

Unfortunately, only the Americans, the Germans – Lidl- and the Chinese – Temu – are doing this with their marketplaces.

Read also : Amazon Uk converts Amazon Fresh to Whole Foods and its platform beats the marketplace

Below the private-label line of Whole Foods sold abroad. Compiled 23 September, updated 24 September 2025

Quick Take — Amazon Uk converts five Amazon Fresh to Whole Foods and its platform beats the market

The others will be closed. Amazon “…said it is strengthening its online grocery business, which it says is growing faster than the rest of its UK operations. Through its main UK website, Amazon Fresh online, Whole Foods and delivery partnerships with UK grocery groups Morrisons, Co-op, Iceland and Gopuff, the company already offers more than two million grocery and household items with fast delivery.

By early 2026, the company plans to double the number of Prime subscribers who can access three or more grocery delivery options, with the goal of making at least one of its grocery partners available to more than 80 per cent of Prime subscribers. Amazon also plans to add perishable groceries to millions of other products on Amazon.co.uk for same-day delivery, a service recently implemented in more than 1,000 US cities and towns .

The company also highlighted the surge in UK demand for essentials, with hundreds of millions of items delivered in 2024 alone, representing a growth of almost 20 per cent year-on-year. In the first quarter of 2025, food and household products grew at almost double the rate of all other product categories and now account for around one in three units sold on Amazon’s UK website…”

Quick Take — Amazon and the $100 billion grocery business

Amazon claimed to sell $100 billion of consumer packaged goods.

Two big problemsremain : fresh produce and the fact that it has not yet found an integration between all the group’s brands.

Here are the latest tests:

  1. Co-location of selections from Whole Foods Market, Amazon.com and Amazon Fresh in the same distribution centre, allowing customers to purchase items from all three brands and have them delivered in one order
  2. Open a small-format grocery shop under the same roof as Whole Foods Market in Chicago, allowing customers to purchase their favourite natural and organic products from Whole Foods and get a larger assortment of products from Amazon in one trip.
  3. Launching Whole Foods Market’s Daily Shop, a fast-food fast-shop format.

p.s.: the fact that there are ‘too many’ signs and too many tests is not a good sign. for the food industry: Walmart is definitely dominant and has much clearer ideas.

Quick Take — Amazon: 100 billion (gross) groceries

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy opened up in a recent question-and-answer session with shareholders on the company’s strategy and performance in the food sector, emphasising his focus on the many aspects of the physical and online food retail business.

“I’m very bullish on groceries. I think some people don’t realise how big a grocery business Amazon has today. If you look at our core aisle stuff – so it’s things like consumables, canned goods, pharmaceutical items, beauty products, really, everyday essentials – if I exclude just Whole Foods Market and Amazon Fresh, we did over $100 billion in gross sales in our grocery business on those items last year alone…”

The figure would then cover Amazon Go, Amazon Grocery and the ubiquitous Amazon.com website.