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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Amazon Fresh

Amazon Opening Full-Sized Cashierless Checkout Grocery Store

Amazon announced today that its new Fresh grocery store opening this week in Bellevue, Washington will feature Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology. This is the first implementation of Amazon’s cashierless checkout technology in a full-sized grocery store.

The grand opening for the new Amazon Fresh is Thursday, June 17 at the Bellevue Factoria Mall. To use the new cashierless checkout technology, users scan their Amazon app or their palm (if they’ve signed up for Amazon One payment), or they insert a credit card into a turnstile upon entering. As customers shop, cameras and sensors automatically keep track of what they pick up. When it’s time to go, instead of standing in a checkout line shoppers scan their app, palm or insert their credit card into a turnstile to exit. The Just Walk Out technology tallies up the total and automatically sends the receipt.

Amazon kicked off the whole cashierless checkout movement with the launch of its first Amazon Go store back in January of 2018. Up until now, the technology has only been used in these smaller Go and Go Grocery store formats, and questions had hung over Amazon (and other players in the space) as to how big the system could scale, since most Amazon Go stores are 1,700 – 2,500 sq. feet. This new Fresh Market is 25,000 sq. feet — a significant leap for the technology. As the store size gets bigger, more cameras, sensors and computing power are needed to identify a huge number of SKUs while monitoring the actions of more shoppers.

The cashierless checkout space has been having a banner year in 2021. In the first part of the year, we saw startups emerge, funding news and partnerships formed. As we wrap up Q2, however, we are starting to see more news around larger-scale impelmention of cashierless checkout. Grabango, which has a deal with Giant Eagle, raised $39 million. Israel-based Trigo added German supermarket chain Rewe to its roster of clients. And now Amazon, which licenses out its Just Walk Out technology is in a full-sized store.

Part of the reason for all this activity in the cashierless checkout space is the pandemic, which had retailers looking for ways to reduce the amount of human-to-human interaction. Cashierless checkout reduces the number of staff interacting directly with other people, and keeps customers from congregating in checkout lines. Big supermarket chains, however, don’t move on a dime and need solutions that scale to thousands of stores immediately. We were probably already going to see a number of announcements from big retailers about cashierless checkout this year. But Amazon’s announcement today may accelerate those announcements as supermarkets look to keep Amazon at bay.

Amazon Opens Up Cashierless Fresh Market in London

Amazon hopped the pond and opened up a new cashierless checkout Fresh market in London today.

The new Fresh location is in Ealing, West London, is 2,500 sq. ft. and will carry 10,000 items. The market will also feature Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology, which uses cameras, shelf sensors and artificial intelligence to automatically keep track of what people pick up and charge them upon exiting the store.

This Fresh location also marks Amazon’s first brick-and-mortar retail operation outside of the U.S. The company has opened up 10 Fresh markets here in the U.S. as well as 26 of the smaller-format Amazon Go stores in Seattle, San Francisco, New York and Chicago. Amazon also has two of the mid-sized Go Grocery stores in the Seattle area.

It’s been a busy week for Amazon’s cashierless checkout team. On Tuesday, airport store chain Hudson opened up its first unattended retail store using Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology at an airport in Dallas, TX. That store (called Nonstop) is smaller, and the first of many Hudson plans to open.

As we’ve noted before, it’s been an eventful year for the cashierless checkout space around the world. AiFi partnered with Dutch chain, Wundermart, to open a thousand cashierless convenience store. Standard Cognition raised $150 million to scale up its cashierless checkout tech. And new startups like Nomitri and IMAGR are starting to go live.

Amazon is 800-pounds gorilla in the cashierless checkout line, however, so it’s worth watching where the company opens up new locations and who adopts its technology.

Data Analysis Shows Strong Foot Traffic Debut (and Dropoff) for Amazon’s Woodland Hills Fresh Store

It was by no means high on the list of disappointments in 2020, but I was still bummed that I couldn’t visit Amazon’s first Fresh grocery store in Woodland Hills, CA when it soft launched in August of this year.

It was Amazon’s first full, physical supermarket (the company had opened smaller scale Go Grocery stores before) and excitement was high. What types of Amazon-type technology would Jeff Bezos bring to the grocery sector?

Evidently a lot of people were keen on checking out Amazon, Fresh, according to data released this week from Placer.ai, a company that uses mobile phone location data to gather and analyze foot traffic to real world retail locations.

According to Placer, Amazon Fresh saw a surge of customers in the first weeks it opened to the public in September. In a blog post this week, outlining its findings, Placer wrote:

The first week saw visits on par with two local players with very strong visits rates, Trader Joe’s and Ralphs. But, Amazon Fresh quickly burst ahead with four of the next five weeks seeing the location drive over 5,000 more visits per week than either of those two competitors.

Amazon Fresh was also getting roughly the same number of visits per visitor as comparable grocers. Ralph’s and Trader Joe’s were seeing 2.4 and 2.2 visits per visitor respectively, while the new Amazon Fresh was already seeing 2 visits per visitor, indicating that people were having a good enough experience at Fresh to come back.

Placer reports that one of the reasons Amazon Fresh enjoyed so much foot traffic is because of the store’s “True Trade Area.” When picking a location for a store, a grocer might consider its main customer base to be within a straight five-mile radius of that store. But Placer’s data gathering shows that this strict geographic limitation isn’t accurate, and that a store’s shopping base can actually come from further out. This expanded reach is what Placer calls the True Trade Area.

As you can see from this map, Amazon Fresh Woodland Hills’ True Trade area actually covers a large swath around Los Angeles, so it was pulling customers from outside of Woodland Hills.

I was curious about some of Placer’s findings, so I spoke with Ethan Chernofsky, Placer.ai’s VP of Marketing (and author of the Amazon blog post), by phone this week. My first question was whether some of Fresh’s sizeable foot traffic could be attributable to curbside pickup. Amazon.com’s customer base it so huge, perhaps people were just ordering groceries online and picking them up at the Fresh store, even if that meant driving to another part of town. But Chernofsky said that was unlikely, given the length of time people were staying at the Fresh location.

But while Amazon Fresh enjoyed an early boom in foot traffic, starting in October, Amazon Fresh saw its numbers fall. As the Chernofsky detailed his analysis “Between October and November, the Amazon Fresh True Trade Area decreased by 27.1%, just as monthly visits declined 27.6%. On the other hand, Ralphs saw visits rise 13.7% as its own True Trade Area declined by 7.1%.”

One explanation for the drop could be that the excitement wore off, and what was once shiny and new was no longer shiny and new. Chernofsky doesn’t think that’s it though. As he wrote in a corporate blog post “the close relationship between visits per visitor metrics between the top local grocers indicates that this location was actually succeeding in driving repeat visits even among the launch buzz.”

Instead, Chernofsky attributed the drop to the COVID resurgence in Los Angeles this fall. As the virus reemerged, travel and work was limited, so there was less cross shopping, or tacking on a visit to the grocery store during an errand.

Amazon Locations Around Los Angeles

Another factor could be the fact that Amazon added three additional Fresh locations in Los Angeles since the opening of the first Woodland Hills location. The Northridge and North Hollywood locations both opened in mid-November and seem like they would draw from the same pool of customers as the Woodland Hills location’s True Trade Area.

Regardless, data like that from Placer is worth looking at to see how well Amazon is doing as it starts its forays into real world grocery. I’m still looking forward to a time when I can see the Amazon Fresh stores in person.

First Amazon Fresh Grocery Store Opening in Woodland Hills, CA

The first Amazon Fresh grocery store is finally opening in Woodland Hills, CA, the company announced via blog post early this morning.

This Amazon Fresh is the first of many planned physical grocery stores for Amazon. The store will feature free same-day delivery for Amazon Prime members, curbside pickup and will even let you pickup your Amazon packages at the store.

Unlike Amazon’s other subsidiary, Whole Foods, which doesn’t sell products with things like artificial flavors or preservatives, Amazon Fresh will carry all manner of CPG products.

Amazon was supposed to open the Woodland Hills store in April of this year, but the COVID-19 pandemic altered those plans. Over the past five months, Amazon used the location as a “dark store” to fulfill online orders as the company desperately tried to keep up with a surge in demand for grocery delivery.

Though this Woodland Hills Amazon Fresh won’t feature Amazon Go-like cashierless checkout, it does have the recently announced Amazon Dash Cart. These carts basically enable cashierless checkout by automatically keeping track of whatever items are put in it.

The opening of this Amazon Fresh comes during a time of record online grocery sales, thanks to the pandemic. But a recent Coresight survey found Walmart is now the leading retailer for online grocery shopping, while use of Amazon for grocery e-commerce has declined. Part of Walmart’s ascendancy could be attributed to its vast network of retail stores across the country that allow easy access to curbside pickup of e-commerce grocery orders.

The new Amazon Fresh isn’t open to the public yet. That will happen “in the coming weeks,” according to today’s blog post. In the meantime, select customers in Woodland Hills will be invited to come in and shop during this soft opening.

Get Alerts on When Delivery Slots at Amazon and Whole Foods Open Up with This Free JavaScript Tool

Like a game of whack-a-mole, people who are flocking to e-commerce for their grocery shopping in this time of pandemic are encountering a new headache: longer-than-normal wait times to get their food actually delivered.

Once you’ve placed your order, it can be one if not two weeks before a delivery window opens up. This a problem for people who really shouldn’t go to the grocery store (think: elderly parents, or the immunocompromised) or those who can’t get there because of essential work or family. The fact that grocers aren’t exactly great at alerting you that an item has gone out of stock between the time you order and the time you get your delivery only complicates the problem.

There may be a small fix for this. CNBC reports on a new tool you can run on your computer to make finding a delivery window a little bit easier.  Adrian Hertel built a downloadable program that alerts you when delivery slots in Amazon Fresh or Whole Foods open up. Hertel told CNBC he built the tool out of concern for his parents, who have immune deficiencies.

Now, before you get too excited, the tool, plainly dubbed Amazon Fresh/Whole Foods Delivery Slot Finder, is not some slick app that you install on your phone. It’s a JavaScript tool that you have to download from GitHub, and it only works via Script Editor on a Mac running Safari.

Once you download and run the Slot Finder, you have to visit Amazon/Whole Foods in the Safari browser. Then you have to go through the whole checkout process and stop once you get to the delivery options. Once there, you run the Slot Finder script.

Here’s how the script works, according to Slot Finder’s GitHub page:

  • It opens the checkout page in a new window, minimizes it, and then refreshes every ~60 seconds in the background.
  • Once it finds an open slot it alerts you by putting a notification on your screen and playing a sound, and opening the checkout page. You can choose to receive text messages when a slot is found
  • You can choose to have the tool ignore out of stock notifications and continue searching uninterrupted
  • Once you’re notified, quickly select a slot and finish checking out because available slots are snagged almost instantly.

It’s not the most elegant solution, and though I downloaded and set it up, I can’t test it out since Amazon Fresh/Whole Foods doesn’t deliver to my area. If you try it out, drop us a line and tell us how it went!

While the Slot Finder may be rough, it does highlight how people are getting creative in solving everyday problems caused by this pandemic. Hopefully, as the likes Amazon and Walmart hire hundreds of thousands of new workers to keep up with demand, delayed delivery windows will be a thing of the past.

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Join us for our free virtual workshop about building next-generation kitchen products on April 21st.

Whisk Partners with Amazon to Expand its Shoppable Recipe Reach

In a move that will bolster the trend of recipes becoming center for discovery and commerce, Amazon has partnered with AI food platform Whisk to create shoppable recipes from more than 20 publishers.

Whisk partners with major food brands such as Pillsbury and General Mills and publishers like BBC Good Food and Food Network to connect their recipes with retailers. So, for example, if you like Pillsbury’s recipe for Blueberry Biscuits with Sweet Lemon Glaze, Whisk’s platform lets you automatically order all the necessary ingredients for delivery with just a few clicks.

In the United States, Whisk has been working with Walmart and Peapod for ingredient purchases and with today’s announcement adds Amazon Fresh as another partner. Whisk’s partnership will extend to Amazon UK starting on March 1.

For Amazon, Whisk joins AllRecipes and Fexy Media as another channel for shoppable recipes sales. We pegged shoppable recipes as a trend to watch this year as it has the power to transform the way we think about meal preparation.

Recipes used to be a source of both inspiration and frustration when the contents of our pantries fell short of the ideal meal. With same day delivery, retailers like Amazon, Albertsons, Walmart can now monetize that inspiration with (somewhat) instant gratification. Shoppable recipes make cooking almost any meal more frictionless.

Amazon’s continued expansion into the shoppable recipe space is sure to set in motion more defensive moves from other grocers. Last month, Aisle Ahead bought BigOven to offer shoppable recipes services for grocers. Additionally, Kroger partnered with Myxx to bring shoppable recipes to its stores.

Forget The Fridge: GeniCan Moves Shopping List Smarts To The Garbage Can

One of the main selling points of a connected refrigerator is it allows a consumer to keep track of their food, manage shopping lists and even order groceries from the fridge itself.

But here’s the problem: continuously updating inventory and shopping via your fridge requires a significant behavior change on the part of consumers. Whether it’s scanning a barcode, manually logging a product or some other way of digitizing your inventory of foodstuff and home supplies, it’s just not the type of behavior most consumers have shown an eagerness or affinity towards doing.

But what if you moved inventory tracking and reordering to the point of disposal? In other words, instead of logging a product and putting it on the shopping list when you bring it into the home, you put it in the queue and get it teed up for same-day delivery from Amazon when you’re out of the product.

That’s exactly the vision NewTown, Connecticut startup GeniCan has in mind. The company, which was founded two years and a half years ago, has created an scanner that allows you to scan products as you dispose of them. It also lets you add things to the shopping list via voice by waking up the scanner as you throw things out. Hold a piece of lettuce or steak scraps in front of GeniCan and it will ask you “what may I add to your list?”

Another benefit of GeniCan is the ability to track dry goods.  Fridges are where you put the fresh food like milk, meat and eggs, but tracking all that stuff in the pantry is not a natural fit for the smart fridge.

The GeniCan has integrated with the Amazon Dash – one of the few announcements around Dash at CES this January – and the company is talking to other food replenishment and delivery platform providers about adding their functionality to the device. By integrating with Dash and adding voice capabilities, the GeniCan becomes in a way a strategically placed Dash Wand, Amazon’s original kitchen scanner.

So, will GeniCan get consumers to forgo that smart fridge to track their inventory at the point of disposal? Possibly. I know I often put things on the shopping list when I run out of things rather than when I bring them home, so inserting technology at this point of the consumption cycle makes a lot of sense.

The GeniCan is available for preorder for $149 from the company’s website and they expect to ship the product this year.

You can hear how the GeniCan works by watching my interview with GeniCan cofounder Dave Pestka above.

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The Year in Food Delivery

Despite a distinct cooling off of investment in the food delivery space this year, some big names like Uber, Google, and David Chang threw their hats in the ring.

That’s because the online food delivery market is estimated around $210 billion, with companies like FreshDirect raising $189 million in the past 12 months. It’s become such a pervasive part of our way of life that Google even added a food-delivery shortcut to Maps. And there are plenty of food-delivery crowdfunding projects to go around.

But enough with the numbers. Here are the highlights in this space over the past 12 months.

More Big Players Joined the Party

This year everyone wanted a piece of the pie. Google started to ship fresh food to customers in California through Google Express. Instacart and the Food Network launched a meal-kit delivery service, and Square acquired startup Maine Line Delivery in Philadelphia to boost Caviar. Meanwhile Facebook and Foursquare made it easier to order food from within their apps through Delivery.com.

NYC darling chef David Chang decided to blow up the entire idea of a nice restaurant by launching Ando, a restaurant that only does deliveries, and he raised the bar on delivery food everywhere by launching Maple, his own delivery service that promises a daily delicious menu.

Plus, where would the year be without a few gimmicks? Taco Bell and Whole Foods both came up with ChatBots that help you order food or suggest recipes, respectively, solely through the power of emojis. And Domino’s will now let you order pizza with one tap on your Apple Watch.

The Year of UberEats

So far I haven’t mentioned the biggest player, though: Uber. The company has had quite the year in food delivery. It shut down Instant Delivery in New York City, then launched UberEats in both the U.S. and London. Next UberEats drivers staged protests over the way the pay structure has been changed, and in November a courier filed a lawsuit against the company for missing food delivery tips. Yikes.

All of this commotion from big names and turmoil within UberEats suggest that the food delivery space is still young enough that no one has solved some of the primary problems within it. Companies are grabbing on to any stronghold they see (emojis! self-driving trucks! drones! more drones!), without regard to the longevity of the solution. Uber has faced the brunt of this fast-paced growth, but we expect to see more struggles in the coming years for other players as well.

Eat Local

This year the quest to eat healthily expanded even more into food delivery. Whole Foods hinted at a “meal solution spectrum” with some sort of delivery component in the future. Good Eggs, which many thought was defunct by this point, rose from the ashes with a $15 million round of funding to help it deliver local, quality food.

And Amazon, never one to be shown up, expanded its Amazon Fresh program to Boston, among other major cities. The difference here is that Boston customers can shop from local markets, a feature that we imagine will be implemented elsewhere if it’s successful in Beantown.

You Say Potato, I Say Share Economy

In such a young and moneyed space, different business models are flying around faster than those drones I mentioned earlier.

Some want to deliver fresh ingredients to customers to help simplify cooking at home. Juicero, for example, delivers prepackaged ingredients for green juice, made in its blender that doesn’t even require cleaning. Similarly, Raised Real wants to deliver ingredients for homemade baby food, thereby making it that much easier to make your baby’s food from scratch (sounds ambitious to me).

Speaking of raising babies and tapping new markets, Drizly raised $15 million for its liquor delivery service, among other parts of its ecommerce model. And DoorDash added alcohol to its food delivery options in California (what about the rest of us?!).

Meanwhile Foodhini calls itself a “for profit social enterprise” and delivers ethnic food made by immigrant chefs: Foodhini and the chefs each receive $2.50 from each meal, after costs.

And BringMe wants to out-Uber Uber by combining delivery with the share economy in Fairfax, VA, enlisting regular folks to deliver food as “bringers.” There are already a few models out there like this, such as Favor in Texas and Tennessee, and we expect to see more too.

Of course, while all of these business models are innovative and interesting, none of them beat the ultimate and original delivery food: pizza.

Dash & Go: Amazon’s Strategy To Attack The Grocery Market

I can’t stop thinking about Amazon Go.

If you missed it this past week, Amazon blew our collective minds with the unveiling of their rethink of the grocery store. I wrote, “if you’re a grocery store and aren’t worried about what Amazon is doing, you should be. With Just Walk Out, they are looking to utilize IoT, AI and mobile to extend their dominance from the online and in-home commerce world to the corner grocery store.”

How does this fit together with what else they’re doing in the grocery realm? I’d describe it as a strategy of ‘Dash & Go’, where they ‘Dash‘ towards the middle of the store filled with dry goods and commodities and then ‘Go‘ after what I call the “fresh edge”, around the perimeter of the grocery store where everything is fresh, artisanal, green.

This strategy crystallized for me when I read the following description of Amazon Go:

“We offer delicious ready-to-eat breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack options made fresh every day by our on-site chefs and favorite local kitchens and bakeries. Our selection of grocery essentials ranges from staples like bread and milk to artisan cheeses and locally made chocolates. You’ll find well-known brands we love, plus special finds we’re excited to introduce to customers. For a quick home-cooked dinner, pick up one of our chef-designed Amazon Meal Kits, with all the ingredients you need to make a meal for two in about 30 minutes.”

That’s the fresh edge, folks.

When you look at Amazon’s Dash partners, you see a whole lot of packaged goods, whether that means bottles of fizzy drinks, cleaning supplies, or toiletries, etc. It’s the high-volume, sometimes boring stuff that consumers know they need and just want to make sure they have at all times.

Some have speculated Amazon Go is a proof of concept meant to showcase the technology to potential customers like, well, grocery stores. I disagree. Just Walk Out, the technology platform at the center of Go, is certainly interesting and something other grocery chains would want. But here’s the thing: I’m not sure Amazon is in the innovation business to help other grocery stores.  While they may “lend out” their innovation in the areas of cloud computing and Alexa through as-a-service models and APIs, I can’t see them creating a massive reinvention of the grocery store concept for others to use without first trying to capture as much of this market themselves as possible.

Some may also wonder why I don’t see Amazon Fresh, Amazon’s grocery delivery business, as a “third leg of the stool” in this grocery strategy. I’m not ruling out that the delivery of fresh will some day become a very important business for Amazon, but you have to wonder why a grocery delivery business they’ve been working on for a decade hasn’t been scaled very widely yet. This tells me that they may realize home grocery store delivery, which has been a dream of Internet innovators since the days of Webvan, may not be the most efficient way to get food to consumers.

Lastly, I don’t think Amazon is done. They hint in the video (see below) they’ve been working on Go for four years, which makes you wonder what else they are working on. I’ve heard from multiple Amazon folks they have a bunch of new tricks up their sleeves in 2017 (one of which could be a “kitchen computer”), so there’s a good chance the company will blow our minds next year as well.

Introducing Amazon Go and the world’s most advanced shopping technology