After buying Whole Foods, Amazon has been selling more groceries via its AmazonFresh delivery service. Customers are buying Whole Foods branded products through Amazon’s online grocery offering. Heather Haddon writes:
Whole Foods’ brand items like bacon, coconut water and frozen blueberries helpedAmazon.com Inc. AMZN -1.13% gobble up more U.S. grocery sales last year.
Products carrying the natural foods chain’s brand helped push sales at Amazon’s online grocery-delivery service, AmazonFresh, up 35% to $135 million in the last four months of 2017 over the previous four months, according to data analytics firm One Click Retail. Amazon bought Whole Foods last summer.
Top selling items included organic baby spinach, shredded Parmesan cheese, organic riced cauliflower, unsalted butter and smokehouse bacon, the analysis found.
Amazon is building out its grocery delivery service to capture more of an increasingly competitive market. Amazon sold an estimated $11 million of Whole Foods’ 365 Everyday Value natural and organic products last year, small compared with the private-label sales of its supermarket competitors. Kroger Co.’s . natural and organic brands are nearing $2 billion in sales a year, while Albertsons Cos. said this month that its organic line does $1 billion in annual sales.
But food analysts said Whole Foods products are helping AmazonFresh compete with online grocery companies. “It…may be bringing new people into AmazonFresh,” said Jim Hertel, senior vice president at food retail consultancy Inmar Willard Bishop Analytics. “That would be a real positive.”
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