Whole Foods has been running a test in at least one Philadelphia store that allows customers to buy conventional products from mainstream brands (i.e. Pepsi, Tide, etc.) while they shop, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal and reported on in Supermarket News.
According to the report, Whole Foods shoppers can order the products on the Amazon app, where ShopBots then fetch the items from the back room of the store. The goal is to drive more sales of conventional products to Whole Foods shoppers without diluting the retailers brand.
Whole Foods largely operated independently for the first few years under Amazon’s ownership, but Amazon has recently taken steps to remove the barriers between Whole Foods and the company’s other grocery business segments.
Amazon announced recently that it planned to cut at least 14,000 positions, and reportedly as many as 30,000, including corporate workers in the grocery division. However, Amazon President and CEO Andy Jassy said in an earnings call that he was confident in the opportunities for growth in the company’s physical store network.
