Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says he's ‘very bullish’ on grocery
Grocery retailing — in store and online — is still very much part of Amazon’s agenda.
In a recent Q&A with shareholders, CEO Andy Jassy discussed Amazon’s grocery business, and his optimism about its future.
“I'm very bullish about grocery,” Jassy said. “If you look at our center of aisle things — so these are things like consumables, canned goods, pharmaceutical items, beauty products, really, everyday essentials — if I just exclude Whole Foods Market and Amazon Fresh, we did over $100 billion in gross sales in our grocery business on these items last year alone. So 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 that Whole Foods is growing “meaningfully faster” than the grocery industry in general, with a "really good" profitability trajectory with the changes made over the last couple years and a great customer experience.
“I'm also excited about the new smaller format Daily Shop that we launched in New York City,” he said, adding that the customer response has been excellent, even “better than we anticipated, so you could expect us to roll more of those out over time.”
[READ MORE: Whole Foods Market Daily Shop opens second location]
The company has also been working on the second version of its Amazon Fresh stores, with the updated version showing meaningful progress in terms of what the performance looks like versus the first version of Fresh stores.
“We've also been experimenting with a number of other concepts that we think have promise,” Jassy said.
The CEO said he believes the way people buy groceries is going to continue to evolve over time.
"So I continue to be very, very bullish on our grocery business. It's large today and has a chance to be much larger in the future," he said.
