Josh Weiner
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Jason Buechel wears two titles at once: CEO of Whole Foods Market and, since January, vice president of Amazon Worldwide Grocery Stores, putting him in charge of Whole Foods, Amazon Fresh, Amazon Go and the rest of Amazon’s grocery footprint. Speaking with Fortune, he laid out why he thinks grocery — not devices or cloud computing — is what finally makes Amazon part of people’s daily routine rather than just their occasional online cart.
“Amazon has been known as the everything store, and I believe with grocery we are going to be the everyday store,” Buechel said, describing the goal as “greater engagement, not only just within grocery, but the broader store.”
The stakes are considerable: Amazon’s grocery business generated more than $150 billion in sales last year, nearly a decade after the company paid $13.7 billion to acquire Whole Foods in 2017. Buechel has led Whole Foods since September 2022, after joining the chain in 2013 and rising through the ranks as chief operating officer, and the business has grown under him to more than 535 locations with what the company has described as record sales growth.
His expanded grocery mandate, which consolidates oversight of Amazon’s various food retail formats under one executive, comes as Amazon pushes a more “deliberate” strategy across its grocery operations — language Buechel himself used in an internal memo detailing a restructuring of the Fresh Go format earlier this year. The logic: a shopper who orders groceries from Amazon every few days is a fundamentally stickier customer than one who places an occasional package order, and getting people to treat Amazon as a daily habit rather than an as-needed retailer is the clearest path to deepening engagement across the rest of the company’s businesses.
Buechel’s dual role effectively makes Whole Foods the proving ground for that bet — if the “everyday store” strategy works, Amazon’s leadership will be watching Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh as the model for how grocery can anchor the company’s broader retail ambitions.
