On Monday, Amazon’s chief merchant, John Farrell, announced in a LinkedIn post that he’s leaving the company to “explore new challenges.” Farrell oversaw buying for its Fresh division and joined Amazon in 2019 from British supermarket chain Tesco.
Amazon is reshaping its grocery business as it continues its nearly two-decade effort to become a giant in the U.S. grocery market.
In recent years, Amazon has expanded its selection of fresh food and grocery staples at same-day warehouses in the U.S., while testing 30-minute deliveries of groceries and other items in some areas.
The company said Tuesday it expects to open more than 100 new Whole Foods locations over the next few years, expand its line of Whole Foods mini-markets and test new formats, including a superstore outside of Chicago.
Last January, Amazon tapped Buechel to oversee its sprawling grocery business. He’s taken steps to bring Whole Foods, which Amazon acquired for $13.7 billion in 2017, closer to the company’s in-house grocery teams. Buechel has dubbed the effort “One Grocery.”
Jassy told investors in May that he remains “very bullish” about Amazon’s grocery business. The company says it’s “one of the top three grocers in the U.S.” with over $150 billion in gross sales and more than 150 million customers shopping groceries each year.
“It’s a very significant business, and then I think we have a bunch of other areas that will allow us to grow in this area,” Jassy said.
As part of the store closures, Buechel said the company is laying off some employees across the grocery organization, and is working to help staffers secure jobs elsewhere at Amazon. He didn’t say how many jobs were impacted by the restructuring.
“To our team members who helped develop, build, and run our Fresh and Go stores: thank you,” Buechel wrote.
Hi team,
Our Worldwide Grocery Stores organization delivered strong results in 2025, making it easier, faster, and more affordable for customers to shop for groceries. As we look ahead to 2026, we have ambitious plans to build on this momentum and further expand access to fresh food and everyday essentials to millions more customers.
To achieve these plans, we need to make deliberate choices about where we invest and how we operate. Today, I’m sharing several significant changes to our business and team structure. These decisions weren’t easy, but they position us to deliver even more for customers in the years ahead.
Closing Our Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh Physical Stores
First, after a careful evaluation of the business and how we can best serve customers, we’ve made the difficult decision to close our Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh physical stores. This decision means we had to eliminate roles across our organization, and notifications to impacted employees have been completed. While we’ve seen encouraging signals in these formats, we haven’t yet created a truly distinctive customer experience with the right economic model needed for large-scale expansion. Importantly, the Amazon Fresh brand will continue online, where customers can shop for fast and convenient delivery.
It’s never easy when a decision affects talented people who have given so much to our customers and our mission. We’re working to help affected employees find roles elsewhere in Amazon and are supporting them with 90 days of full pay and benefits, career transition services, and severance packages.
To our team members who helped develop, build, and run our Fresh and Go stores: thank you. You pioneered something new and, most importantly, showed up for our customers and each other every day ready to make a difference. Although we’re closing these stores, the impact of your work will shape our next generation of store concepts and customer experiences.
Evolving Our Amazon Grocery Logistics (AGL) Organization
Next, as part of our One Grocery efforts to align work across Amazon to better serve customers, we’re transitioning our online grocery fulfillment operations, return logistics, and AGL corporate operations teams to Udit Madan’s Worldwide Operations organization. We’re also aligning our pickup and return counter operations in Whole Foods Market stores to Store Operations under Bill Jordan. Vishy and Bill will share more on these changes later today.
This strategic decision reflects both the maturity of our grocery logistics capabilities and the massive growth opportunity ahead. We began building our chill chain network in 2007 with our first Amazon Fresh delivery service, and our team has evolved into a world-class operation delivering affordable, high-quality groceries across multiple countries. Managing a large perishable supply chain is complex, and I’m proud of our talented team’s expertise and innovation.
Now it’s time to bring this expertise to scale within Worldwide Operations as we accelerate the expansion of fresh groceries through our core fulfillment and delivery network. When we launched perishables as part of Same-Day Delivery in over 2,300 cities and towns last year, fresh groceries quickly became nine of the top 10 bestsellers. This transition brings together our chill chain expertise with Sub Same Day’s extensive fulfillment network, advanced automation capabilities, and operational scale to capture this enormous opportunity. This is our One Grocery mindset at scale. Our teams will continue working closely together, similar to how we partner with Worldwide Operations today.
I want to thank Vishy for his leadership in building the robust grocery logistics capabilities that position us for this next phase of growth. We will share an update on his next role in the coming weeks.
What This Means for Worldwide Grocery Stores
You might be wondering: what does this mean for our organization? We are the stewards of grocery across all of Amazon and that responsibility has never been more important. We’re accountable for maintaining the highest standards for selection, freshness, and quality across the entire supply chain, from partnering with farms and suppliers to stocking shelves and delivering to customers’ doorsteps.
We will continue to partner with teams across Amazon—from fulfillment to technology to product to Prime—to set the standard. Ultimately, it’s our job to ensure customers trust Amazon to provide fresh, high-quality food at great value.
To support this effort, we are adding a new role focused on grocery quality to our WWGS Leadership Team. This role will be our single-threaded leader for all aspects of quality across our customer experiences, including product and order quality, and will be announced in the coming weeks.
When we work together across Amazon, our collective impact is remarkable:
• Same-Day Delivery of fresh groceries now reaches over 2,300 cities and towns, with expansion to many more areas in 2026.
• We’re opening more than 100 new Whole Foods Market stores in the next few years, including our Daily Shop format.
• Amazon Grocery, our new unified private brand, now offers over 1,000 items at exceptional value, and we’re gearing up for further expansion in 2026.
• We continue to invest in new physical store experiences like Amazon Grocery, which we launched alongside Whole Foods Market in Chicago, Illinois, and our ‘store within a store’ in Whole Foods Market in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania, with plans to open new physical store formats in the coming years. As an example, the team is working on a new retail concept in Orland Park, Illinois, designed to make it convenient for customers to shop Amazon’s broad selection and low prices across fresh groceries, household essentials, and general merchandise.
Looking Ahead
I know change is hard, especially when it impacts our teammates, and when we’re saying goodbye to stores and programs this team has helped build. I want to leave you with this: I’m genuinely optimistic about the future of our grocery business and the opportunities we have to make a positive impact on our customers, suppliers, and communities. The future is bright, and I know we’ll continue to find new and better ways to serve our customers, whether through faster delivery options, new physical store formats, or innovations we haven’t imagined yet.
The entire WWGS leadership team is here to support you during this transition. If you have questions, please reach out to your leader or PXT/TMS partner.
Thank you for everything you do, and for the resilience and dedication you bring to this work every day.
Jason
