4 Most Promising Experience Enhancements from Amazon’s Whole Foods Merger

Gregarious Narain
Aug 28, 2017 · 4 min read
Photo by Raquel Martínez on Unsplash

Today, Amazon officially takes ownership of Whole Foods and the first signs of integration are upon us. Late last week, Amazon announced that it would reduce the prices of many best-selling Whole Foods products, including their 365 brand. This will help make Whole Foods more competitive with their competition and come as a reprieve for the “whole paycheck” crowd. This is just the beginning.

The integration of these 2 brands speaks to 4 very compelling new opportunities:

  1. Better pricing at the Whole Foods counter
  2. Broader distribution of Whole Foods products
  3. Expanded loyalty universe
  4. Enhanced experience

Better Pricing

Amazon is promising to drop the prices on several products.

Whole Foods Market will offer lower prices on a selection of best-selling staples across its stores, with much more to come. Customers will enjoy lower prices on products like Whole Trade bananas, organic avocados, organic large brown eggs, organic responsibly-farmed salmon and tilapia, organic baby kale and baby lettuce, animal-welfare-rated 85% lean ground beef, creamy and crunchy almond butter, organic Gala and Fuji apples, organic rotisserie chicken, 365 Everyday Value organic butter, and much more

Lower prices make Whole Foods either more affordable or finally approachable for consumers who were already customers or previously unable to justify the higher prices.

Amazon’s can afford to drive people to Whole Foods and also leverage its scale to broker better deals going forward.

Better Distribution

Whole Foods holds just 1.2% of the market meaning they were hardly the dominant player. Amazon, on the other hand, has a massive customer base distributed across the country and globe.

Whole Foods Market’s healthy and high-quality private label products — including 365 Everyday Value, Whole Foods Market, Whole Paws and Whole Catch — will be available through Amazon.com, AmazonFresh, Prime Pantry and Prime Now.

With Whole Foods products now available through the Amazon ecosystem, more customers will have access to the products than ever before. This also serves well to elevate the Amazon brand profile and to cultivate new customers for the Whole Foods brand. Amazon Fresh = Whole Foods drives is a massive lift in perceived quality.

Expanded Loyalty

Both Amazon and Whole Foods have legions of loyal customers. While Amazon has Prime, there has not been an equivalent on the Whole Foods side, outside of the largely self-identified loyalty. With the merger, this all changes.

One of the most important changes will be the expansion of Prime:

In the future, after certain technical integration work is complete, Amazon Prime will become Whole Foods Market’s customer rewards program, providing Prime members with special savings and other in-store benefits.

Amazon’s pay-to-play loyalty program expands its grip on the physical world by extending member benefits into their regular food shopping experience — the most reliable shopping any consumer does. Membership will absolutely have its benefits.

Enhanced Experience

Customer experience requires empathy at the strategic level and data at the tactical one. In converging both the operations and loyalty programs, Amazon quickly will be able to bring new data online to enhance the customer experience across the board. This creates an advantage for all.

While Whole Foods does not have the largest physical footprint, it will now cast a long shadow. Amazon, being an online-only (mostly) business, seeks more and more physical touch points to manifest its unique online experience for all. While each brand has its own experience, community, and loyalists, their combination will only serve to amplify each other.

Looking even further down the line, we can quickly imagine how new technologies like Amazon Go and drone delivery, may translate to the Whole Foods shopping experience at large. We know lockers are already making their way:

Amazon Lockers will be available in select Whole Foods Market stores. Customers can have products shipped from Amazon.com to their local Whole Foods Market (WFM) store for pick up or send returns back to Amazon during a trip to the store.

Customers already delighted should expect to see that continue to grow.

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Gregarious Narain is a serial entrepreneur and product strategist. A reformed designer and developer, he writes on his experiences as a founder, strategist, and father on the regular. Work with him at Before Alpha, connect on LinkedIn, follow on Facebook, or say hi on Twitter.

Before Alpha

An Innovation Consultancy, Designed for Rapid Iteration

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Gregarious Narain

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Perpetual entrepreneur. Advisor to founding teams. Husband to Maria. Father to Solomon. Fan of fashion. Trying to stay fit.

Before Alpha

An Innovation Consultancy, Designed for Rapid Iteration

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