Amazon To Roll Out Smaller-Format Whole Foods Concept

The next locations of the Amazon-owned grocery store Whole Foods will be smaller and have more streamlined offerings in an attempt to capture business from urban shoppers looking to get in and out of the store quickly.

Called Whole Foods Daily Shop, the stores will measure just 7K SF to 14K SF and won't feature self-serve buffets or meat counters. Shoppers will find a “slimmer assortment of products, ranging from fresh produce and frozen food to prepackaged meals and Whole Foods’ 365 branded products,” Bloomberg reports. The first location of the new store format is planned for the Upper East Side in Manhattan by this fall.

“The introduction of home delivery has changed customers’ mentality,” Whole Foods Market Executive Vice President of Growth and Development Christina Minardi told Bloomberg. “People want things fast.”

Whole Foods has signed five leases in New York City for the concept and plans to explore a wider U.S. expansion. All the new stores will have cashiers, self-checkout stations and palm-recognition payment service Amazon One.

Replicating the success of Whole Foods, which Amazon purchased in 2017 for more than $13B, has proven an elusive goal. 

Whole Foods has experimented with smaller formats before, launching its 365 by Whole Foods Market stores in 2016. Those stores of about 25K SF were larger than the Daily Shops will be but were about half the size of a regular Whole Foods, which average about 40K SF, according to Bloomberg. Whole Foods stopped rolling out new 365s in 2019. 

Early last year, Amazon announced it would close Fresh and Amazon Go stores as it reworked its grocery business to find more successful formats, but it reaffirmed its commitment to the sector shortly after.