Amazon said Tuesday it plans to sunset its Fresh and Go brick-and-mortar chains, marking a major pivot in the company’s grocery strategy.
“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, converting various locations into Whole Foods Market stores,” the company wrote in a blog post.
Amazon said the closures are part of an effort to prioritize investments, noting it still plans to roll out other brick-and-mortar concepts, including “a mass physical store format.” It will continue to operate its Fresh online grocery service, the company said.
Amazon said it plans to open more than 100 new Whole Foods locations over the next few years. It will also expand its line of Whole Foods Daily Shops, which are mini-markets that offer a smaller assortment of grocery items.
For almost two decades, Amazon has been determined to become a bigger player in the grocery market. In 2017, the company spent $13.7 billion to acquire Whole Foods, the largest deal in its history.
Amazon debuted its Fresh grocery chain in 2020, with an eye toward mass-market shoppers. The rollout was turbulent in its early days, with Amazon opening a flurry of locations, before it shuttered some stores and halted expansion of the chain as part of broader cost-cutting efforts.
The company launched a revamped Fresh store concept in 2023, and then continued to tweak its strategy. Amazon shuttered all of its U.K. Fresh stores last September, and closed a handful of locations in Southern California soon after.
Amazon’s Go convenience marts, which debuted in 2018, were a pet project of founder Jeff Bezos. The stores were designed to alleviate the headache of standing in a checkout line by allowing shoppers to “Just Walk Out.” Each location was outfitted with an array of cameras and sensors that tracked each item shoppers picked off the shelf and automatically charged them as they exited the store.