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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Whole Foods

Whole Foods Adds Amazon’s Cashierless Tech

Well, we knew it was only a matter of time before this happened: Today, Whole Foods announced they are adding Amazon’s cashierless technology to two stores in 2022. In the announcement, the retailer says Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology will be an “option” for customers in their Washington, D.C.’s Glover Park and Sherman Oaks, California locations.

Ever since Amazon acquired the iconic retailer who helped pioneer the organic and less-processed focus grocery retail movement, Whole Foods has been cautious about adding touches of Amazon to the in-store experience. Sure, we’ve seen some Whole Food Locations install pick-up lockers, but the online retailer knows as well as anyone their presence can ruffle feathers.

This is probably why Whole Foods is starting slowly with cashierless. The grocer, which only just installed self-checkout in a limited number of locations starting in 2019, will offer the technology at only two locations and, I am sure, will emphasize to long-time customers accustomed to Whole Foods customer service that this latest iteration of the grocery store express aisle only just an option.

The cashierless checkout space has changed quite a bit ever since Amazon debuted its technology at the first Amazon Go in downtown Seattle in January of 2018. Since that time, a whole new cohort of cashierless tech startups has popped up as funding has flooded into the space. Now, with Whole Foods and others helping this technology go mainstream, I don’t see this space slowing down anytime soon.

Food Tech News: Tik Tok Creator’s Menu and Biodegradable Bacardi Bottles

Happy Halloween! This year’s holiday will certainly look different, but I know I will be checking out the full moon, making my own chocolate peanut butter cups, and watching The Shining. Maybe you can find joy in creating a candy chute or developing your own candy delivering robot for trick-or-treaters. Or, you can spend some time catching up on food tech news like Tik Tok’s new food menu, biodegradable Bacardi bottles, Whole Foods’ predictions for new food trends, and adaptogen coffee pods.

Tik Tok partners with Postmates for “Creator’s Menu”

Tik Tok has skyrocketed in popularity amongst millennials this year, with the majority of its users between the ages of 16-24. To capitalize on this demographic, Tik Tok partnered with Postmates to create a menu of this year’s most popular food trends that millennials are salivating over. Available from October 28 to November 22, local restaurants in Los Angeles will be serving up their versions of whipped coffee, cloud bread, pancake cereal, and a bento box. These are the food trends on Tik Tok that have reached between 259 million to 3 billion hashtags. With the whipped coffee going for $7.50 and the bento box $20, this is a price only a millennial could justify.

Photo from Bacardi

Biodegradable Bacardi Bottles

Bacardi has started using bottles that look exactly like regular plastic, except for the fact that these bottles are apparently able to break down in the trash, both outside and in the ocean. The material used to make the bottle is called polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA), and its main component is canola oil. Danimer Scientific, which makes this material, feeds canola oil (which contains carbon dioxide that was stored in the plant) to bacteria. The bacteria then turns this into PHA, which is extracted to make plastic-like products. Companies like Nestlé and PepsiCo are also using this material for packaging.

Whole Food predicts food trends of 2021

Whole Foods released its annual food predictions for the upcoming year, and it should come as no surprise that plant-based foods are a trend that is predicted to continue on an upward trajectory next year. Healthy baby food, chickpea-based foods, vegetable jerky, and upcycled foods are some on the list. Out of all the predictions made, my personal favorite is alcoholic kombucha.

Adaptogenic, compostable coffee pods from Hong Kong

Hong Kong-based Beams Coffee combines the trends of gourmet coffee and adaptogens in its compostable pods. Adaptogens are plants and herbs that are supposed to help the body combat stressors, and Beams Coffee uses medicinal mushrooms like Cordyceps, Lion’s mane, Reishi, and Tremella. These mushrooms are paired with specialty coffee from Sydney and Melbourne and come in pods that are 95 percent sugarcane-based. The coffee pods are available in four varieties including beauty, mind, energy, and immunity, and are compatible with the Nespresso maker.

Food Tech News: Chefling Increases Personalization Offerings, More Whole Foods Go Dark

This weekend you might be trying out a new banana bread recipe, tackling a crossword or just leaving your house for some fresh air (with a mask, of course). We celebrate the small victories.

We also celebrate our weekly food tech news roundup! This edition has stories on Chefling’s new partnership with Edamam, Whole Foods continuing to go dark, Postmates’ new curbside pickup, and Impossible Foods’ upcoming cookbook. Enjoy!

Chefling teams up with Edamam for more personalization
Smart kitchen startup Chefling announced this week that it would work with Edamam, a nutrition analysis company, to improve its offerings. Chefling currently has an app that suggests recipes to users based on ingredients they have in their kitchen. Now it will use Edamam’s food and nutrition database to help better tailor said recipe suggestions based on lifestyle and diet, such as keto, gluten-free and vegan. 

Photo: Impossible Foods

Impossible Foods to unveil cookbook
Plant-based meat company Impossible Foods has opened preorders for its cookbook, which will debut on June 16. The cookbook has 40 recipes from well-known chefs, like Michael Symon and Traci Des Jardins, all featuring Impossible’s “bleeding” meatless beef. The book will retail for $21.82 on Amazon and $3 of each sale will be donated to No Kid Hungry.

Photo: Whole Foods

Whole Foods marches forward with “dark” stores
This week Whole Foods opened its sixth “dark” store since the pandemic in Chicago (h/t GroceryDive). To meet unprecedented demand for online groceries, Whole Foods has been converting its locations to delivery-only stores, also known as “dark” stores. Some of these locations had not yet been opened to the public, while others have transformed to allow some foot traffic while reserving most space for delivery grocery fulfillment. 

Postmates introduces curbside pickup
On-demand delivery service Postmates announced this week that it was instituting curbside pickup. The new service is meant to help businesses who are reopening navigate the bumps and serve consumers who might be hesitant to go inside the store. To use the feature, sellers can turn on the curbside pickup option from their Postmates dashboard. Consumers can then “Check In” to let the merchant know they’re outside. Postmates is also making the curbside pickup option available for their own delivery drivers.

Want to Sign Up for Amazon or Whole Foods Grocery Delivery or Pickup? You’ll Have to Wait(list)

Grocery delivery has been a lifeline for those unable to visit supermarkets in person and those just trying to flatten the viral curve. But there’s been a rush to grocery e-commerce, and if you’re just now trying it out, there’s a good chance that you’re gonna have to get in a virtual line.

Amazon announced today that it is instituting a waitlist for new online Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods customers. From a blog post outlining a number of changes the company was making in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic:

We are temporarily asking new Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods Market delivery and pickup customers to sign up for an invitation to use online grocery delivery and pickup. We’re increasing capacity each week and will invite new customers to shop every week.

Also in that announcement was the news that Amazon’s Woodland Hills, CA location, which was to be the first of its full-on supermarket locations, was opening as an online only order fulfillment center. Thankfully, that location appears to have robots to help with order processing.

Amazon isn’t the only company struggling to meet the crush of new demand in online grocery. Eater reported last week that FreshDirect and Instacart customers in NYC were staying up all night to try and get delivery slots. Grocery Dive wrote today that some ShopRite customers are being placed in virtual waiting rooms before they can shop (Ocado and Morrison’s shoppers in the UK face similar situations). And anecdotally speaking, my local Safeway’s delivery is full through the rest of this week, with no option to schedule beyond that.

All this is to say that grocery retailers, even the big ones, are having a hard time with all this craziness. Though they are all hiring like crazy, the infrastructure just wasn’t in place to handle years’ worth of growth in a matter of weeks. Hopefully, grocery retailers will be able to get their processes all ironed out so people will be able to get their food, while keeping all those store and delivery workers safe.

In the meantime, if you’re an existing Amazon/Whole Foods online customer, you can try this free downloadable tool that alerts you when delivery slots from the company opens up.

Amazon Echo Buds Will Tell You Where to Find Tomatoes in Whole Foods

It had been rumored that Amazon was going to announce a set of earbuds at its big media event today yesterday. But I don’t think anyone guessed that those earbuds would tell you where to find tomatoes at your local Whole Foods.

The Amazon Echo Buds let you wirelessly listen to music and take calls, and also feature noise reduction and hand-free access to Alexa (they also work with Siri and Google Assistant). The Echo Buds are available for pre-order today for $129 and will be available at the end of next month.

Normally we wouldn’t write about earbuds, but during the demo on-stage yesterday, Amazon showed the Echo Buds doing two food techy things: First they were used to find out if a local Whole Foods had canned tomatoes in stock, and then they showed us how Alexa can tell you where those tomatoes are inside the store (e.g. “aisle 6”).

Aside from being neat — and useful — it also points to how Amazon is folding Whole Foods more directly into its other products, and how Alexa is getting more contextual. The device is no longer just handing out information but providing real-world guidance on a granular level. You can imagine Alexa not just guiding you to one item, but if you tell it that you are making lasagne, the Echo Buds could guide you through a store, giving you the fastest route to pick up all the necessary ingredients.

Of course, this guidance only applies to Whole Foods at the moment, so you’re out of luck if you shop at Kroger or Albertsons. And even then, the in-store location within Whole Foods is limited because for now, you have to select a Whole Foods location that Alexa then taps into. So you can’t wander into any Whole Foods to get guidance, you have to be in the one you picked.

Still, we know that Amazon has been experimenting with Amazon Go store-like cashierless checkout technology at bigger stores. That system involves lots of cameras and computer vision, so it’s aware of inventory levels and product placement in-stores. If Amazon rolls that system out to all of its Whole Foods, Alexa will be able to “see” into those stores to provide more precise location information (“halfway down aisle 6, top shelf”).

That’s still a ways away but listen up, with the Echo Buds, Alexa is coming with you, wherever you are.

Watch Out, Beyond Meat? U.K.’s Meatless Farm is Heading to U.S. Whole Foods

Beyond Meat might have some competition coming in from across the pond.

Today news broke that Meatless Farm, a startup based in Leeds, U.K., will sell its products in U.S. Whole Foods stores for six months starting this summer. Founded in 2017, Meatless Farms makes plant-based burgers, ground “beef,” and sausages out of a mixture of pea, rice and soy protein. It currently sells its products in retailers in the U.K., Canada, the UAE, Sweden and Hong Kong.

Shares of Beyond Meat fell as much as 10 percent after the news got out. Clearly potential investors were worried about a new plant-based meat competitor swooping in and threatening Beyond’s retail foothold.

However, I’m not so sure Beyond has anything to worry about. Purely judging from the photos, Meatless Farm’s products don’t have the same trompe l’oeil qualities as Beyond’s beef-like burger patties. They also don’t have the same name recognition.

Most importantly, though, the plant-based meat market is not a zero-sum game. Beyond Meat’s retail success (and Impossible’s production struggles) go to show that consumer’s demand for alternative proteins is not a fleeting trend — it’s here to stay.

While Meatless Farm will certainly benefit from Beyond Meat’s work to take plant-based meat mainstream, the British startup is so small and new that I doubt it will steal any significant portion of their sales. Eventually, as more and more companies start to wake up to the alternative protein trend, the plant-based meat category will start to become pretty saturated. Then Beyond might start to sweat.

Or, you know, when Impossible hits retail shelves later this year.

Newsletter: Nigella Lawson’s Instagram Competitor and the Coolest Foodtech Startups at Y Combinator

This is the post version of our weekly newsletter. If you’d like to get the Weekly Spoon in your inbox, you can subscribe here.

If you’re a food tech polymath — interested in a little of this, a little of that — then this was your week.

First and foremost: We’ve got your food celebrity fix. This week the Food Network fangirl in me was excited to hear that chef/cookbook author Nigella Lawson has launched a new app that helps food-lovers take better pics of their meals. We might have an Instagram competitor on our hands! Called FOODIM, the app is currently only available in the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand. But I for one can’t wait to download it and see if it can make my avocado toast (sorry, millennial) look better than my go-to Instagram Ludwig filter.


via GIPHY

Speaking of new and exciting ventures, Y Combinator recently released the lineup for its 2019 Winter cohort: a whopping 200 companies. We sifted through the list to pick out the 10 food tech startups you should know, from a smart coffee scale to autonomous advertising robots.

We were especially excited to see Shiok Meats included in the list. The company is the first cell-based meat company to be accepted into the coveted accelerator, which means that cellular agriculture is heading towards the mainstream — or at least more investment.

Though they’ll be decamping to Silicon Valley for Y Combinator, Shiok Meats is actually based in Southeast Asia — which is where we (and others) are predicting cultured meat will first come to market. I took a deep dive this week into the reasons cell-based meat will first be available in Asia, not Silicon Valley. TL;DR: keep your eyes trained on Hong Kong, people.

Another company in the latest Y Combinator batch is creating a homemade-meal sharing marketplace. Shef is like AirBnB but for home-cooked meals. In the U.S., peer-to-peer home cooking networks are relatively new. In fact, they only became legal a few months ago with the passage of the law AB 626 in California.

In India, however, the home chef marketplace is already pretty hot. This week Chris profiled FoodCloud, a platform connecting home cooks with nearby hungry diners. Guess who’s using it to make a killing? Grandmas.

In other news:

  • Starbuck’s announced it will invest an eye-popping $100 million into a new venture fund to help incubate new up-and-coming food and retail tech startups.
  • The founder and ex-COO of Blue Apron launched a new venture aimed at reversing climate change through regenerative agriculture, starting with heritage chickens.
  • Amazon meal kits made their long-anticipated move into Whole Foods, which will give the e-commerce company another sales channel and more of their absolute favorite thing: data.

Finally — are you in San Francisco? (Or do you want an excuse for a quick trip?) Join us at ArticulATE, our one-day conference on all things food robotics and automation! This week we did a Q&A with Ryan Tuohy of Starship Technologies — the company that makes the wee food delivery rover bots — to get a taste of how automation will shape the future of food delivery. Snag your tickets today to hear him as well as speakers from Google, Sony, Albertson’s and more. Use code NEWSLETTER10 for a 10% discount!

Will Your Amazon Retrieval Robot Pick Up Your Groceries from the Amazon Store?

There’s a scene in Being John Malkovich where the titular character crawls through a portal inside his own head. The result is a crazy world filled with “Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich” ad infinitum.

That’s kind of how I feel whenever I write about Amazon: the company is everywhere, launching so many things. Now comes word from The Wall Street Journal that Amazon is planning on launching “dozens” of its own grocery stores. These aren’t new Whole Foods locations; they would be Amazon grocery stores.

It’s important to note that this idea could never come to fruition. It’s based on “people familiar with the matter” and Amazon tries a lot of things, some of them stick, some Dash, err, don’t. There could any number of reasons for Amazon to launch its own grocery stores — if it’s one thing Amazon likes, it’s control — but let’s assume that Amazon grocery stores are going to happen and spend our Sunday morning doing a quick thought experiment to tie some Amazon threads together.

This may border on red-string conspiracy, but here are some things that we know so far:

  • Amazon’s raison d’etre is to remove friction from the shopping experience. Two-day shipping, voice shopping, in-trunk delivery, in-garage delivery, in-home delivery. All aim to get you your packages faster, so you subsequently buy more stuff.
  • As The Journal notes, Whole Foods doesn’t carry foods with artificial colors, sweeteners, preservatives or stuff like that. Ever tried to buy a plain ole can of Coke at Whole Foods?
  • While Amazon killed off the plastic Dash buttons last week, the company still has its Dash Replenishment system and virtual Dash buttons to facilitate easier restocking of household items.
  • Amazon has been learning how to do brick and mortar retail. It operates a number of Amazon store locations, has owned Whole Foods for a year and a half, and is rapidly expanding it’s Amazon Go Stores. Amazon Go locations in particular are interesting because Amazon builds them from the ground up to do cashierless checkout.
  • Amazon has gotten into the robot delivery business with the launch of its Scout.
  • The Spoon uncovered a patent that was issued to Amazon for an autonomous ground vehicle (AGV). Unlike other delivery robots, this robot would live in your garage (or whatever) and venture out to get your packages from a nearby delivery truck or some other fulfillment type mechanism.
  • Amazon invested in Plant Prefab, a company that makes prefab houses.

Wow. Amazon does have a lot going on. So let’s bring all this together.

The Journal reports that Amazon is eyeing locations that are 35,000 sq. feet for its new stores — half the size of a normal grocery store. If Amazon builds out its own locations it can carry whatever junk it wants, thereby not sullying the Whole Foods brand. But more importantly, with only half the square footage, the Amazon store could carry only the junk you want. Well, you and your neighbors. Amazon’s algorithms will be able to predict what items a particular area wants and how much of it and stock just that.

Building out its own half-sized stores would also make it easier for Amazon to architect them from the ground up to be cashierless. And since they are bigger than a Go store, they could hold more items and better serve as a type of delivery fulfillment center.

And that fulfillment center option is handy because if you, the shopper, don’t want to go to the store, no worries! You can order groceries online for delivery or pickup. And thanks to Alexa and/or Dash, Amazon at some point will know what groceries you need and when and can either dispatch a Scout robot to you, or call your AGV to come retrieve your groceries from the delivery vans making its rounds.

Who knows, perhaps Amazon is gaining enough building knowledge from Plant Prefab to make a sort of doggie door for your AGV, which would finally get Amazon deliveries inside your house.

On a long enough timeline, it’s easy to imagine Amazon doing anything (lord knows what they are working on that we don’t know about yet). But more immediately, it has all the pieces in place to make the notion of its own grocery stores more compelling than just another place to buy your bag of groceries. Perhaps they’d be the kind of place John Malkovich likes to shop.

Report: Amazon Building More Whole Foods, Will There Be Room for Robot Fulfillment?

Never let it be said that Amazon slows down, even during the holidays. The Wall Street Journal reports that Bezos’ behemoth has plans to add more Whole Food stores across the country so its two-hour grocery delivery service can reach even more people.

If true–The Journal’s story is based on “people familiar with the plans”–the news isn’t terribly surprising. Amazon is very competitive and has a history of sacrificing profitability for aggressive growth. A Progressive Grocer report earlier this year ranked Amazon as the eighth largest grocer in the U.S. And although Amazon is the leader in online grocery sales, a recent report from Brick Meets Click shows that shoppers spend way less with Amazon than they do with other grocery retailers.

Walmart, the largest grocer in the U.S. has 4,700 American locations, and the company says it has a store within 10 miles of 90 percent of the population. Walmart was on track to make same day delivery available to 40 percent of the U.S. population by the end of this year, and has a goal to make it available to 60 percent by the end of next year.

Whole Foods, on the other hand, has 470 locations (including in the U.K. and Canada) with two-hour delivery available to Amazon Prime members in 63 cities. So you can see how Amazon is playing catch up here. The question is how they will catch up, and that’s not just about the number of stores.

Part of The Journal story says that some of the spaces Amazon is looking at are slightly larger than the average Whole Foods locations, with the extra space being use for delivery and pickup. Does this mean that Amazon could be jumping on the in-store robot fulfillment center bandwagon?

Albertsons, Ahold Delhaize and Walmart are building out robot fulfillment centers in their stores to facilitate super-fast online grocery order fulfillment (Kroger is building out dedicated standalone robot warehouses). Amazon is already big into robotics in its warehouses, and started experimenting with half hour grocery pickup in select Whole Foods. For a company dedicated to efficiency and speed, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see some sort of automation being built into new locations from the ground up.

Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods in 2017 scared and catalyzed the grocery industry into spending money and innovating throughout 2018. If Amazon is ramping up its geographical presence, and it seems likely it will, buckle up because 2019 is going to be a wild ride for everyone in the grocery game.

June Oven Update Integrates Whole Foods, New UI with Expanded Instructions

June announced today that its eponymous smart oven will now automatically cook certain foods from Whole Foods in a move that evolves the appliance into more of an all around smart cooking platform.

Available today via an over-the-air-update, all June Ovens will now sport a Whole Foods icon on the touchscreen menu. At first there will be thirty available pre-set Cook Programs that will automatically cook various Whole Foods products including items from its 365 Everday line of frozen foods as well as some prepared fresh food like salmon with lemon thyme rub. In a phone interview, June Co-Founder and CEO, Matt Van Horn said that the June cameras will recognize some items, but if it doesn’t, users can navigate to the item via the June Whole Foods app.

Amazon’s Alexa Fund invested in June at the start of this year, and facilitated the meeting between the oven maker and Amazon subsidiary Whole Foods.

The partnership is actually quite interesting for a couple of reasons. First, through Whole Foods, June has created a food supply chain pipeline without having to build one. Other countertop appliances like the Tovala, Suvie and Brava are marrying their devices with food subscriptions. Yes, you don’t have to use their meals, but they are part of the value proposition. Consumer choice then, becomes more constrained, and those hardware companies then have to manage an entirely different line of business.

Through Whole Foods, June doesn’t need to worry about a food supply chain and can focus on its product only. June users have access to an entire grocery store (for the most part) for loads of flexibility for food that can be cooked with just a few screen taps. Because the June is connected, it will constantly be updated with new products making what you buy from Whole Foods easy to cook.

But for the June hardware itself, the addition of Whole Foods as an icon built into the June makes the oven more like an iPhone. More like a platform. It’s easy to see how June’s touchscreen will make room for additional partners over time.

Whole Foods isn’t the only new feature that’s part of the June software update. The company is also releasing a new UI that includes additional cooking information. My big complaint about the June was the dearth of instructions, which left me guessing sometimes about next steps (like how long to rest a steak). We got a sneak peek at the new June UI earlier this summer, and the update is now live.

Amazon Boosts Minimum Wage to $15, Will it Have a Halo Effect on its Grocery Business?

Amazon announced today that it is raising its minimum wage to $15 an hour for all of its full-time, part-time, temporary and seasonal employees, including workers at Whole Foods. In all, Amazon’s pay raise impacts 250,000 full-time and 100,000 seasonal employees. The pay increase takes effect on November 1.

The move comes at a time when Amazon is facing increased pressure over pay disparity at the company. Senator Bernie Sanders even introduced the Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies (or “Stop B.E.Z.O.S.” bill), that would have added a tax on large companies equal to the value of the public benefits their employees receive.

Amazon is also facing mounting pressure internally from Whole Foods employees who are not happy with the changes its new owner brought to the grocery chain. Workers there are trying to unionize amid complaints of reduced headcount and increased work with inadequate pay.

In addition to being a good thing for a company that has been valued at $1 trillion dollars to do, and a way to potentially get the government off its back, Amazon’s move — and all the subsequent news coverage — could also provide a nice halo effect when it comes to the company’s public perception.

Amazon is locked in a multi-front battle to be your grocer of choice against the likes of Target and Walmart. As CNBC notes, Target has announced plans to raise its employees’ wages to $15 an hour by 2020, and Walmart only plans to raise its minimum wage to $11 per hour.

Immediately leapfrogging the competition gives it a hiring advantage (the company plans to open up 3,000 Go stores across the country by 2021), but it could also ease any guilty consciences people might have with buying groceries at Amazon, whether from Whole Foods or Amazon Fresh. If people know the company is paying a higher wage, it untangles, at least a little bit, some of the ethical quandaries shoppers might have.

Whole Foods Added to Amazon Prime Day, Which is Now 36 Hours

Experiencing Amazon Prime Day this year will be like entering some Star Trek-ian alternate dimension of deep discounts, as the company is expanding it through both time and space. Amazon announced today that its big bargain bash will begin on July 16th at noon Pacific Time and last for 36 hours (up from 30 last year). And this year, it will move beyond the screen and into the real world with the inclusion of Whole Foods.

For the uninitiated, Amazon Prime Day is a play by the retailer to get people to flock to its site throughout the day to watch a steady stream of products they don’t want or need get marked down. (We recommend following The Wirecutter, which monitors the deals all day and alerts you to the genuinely good offers.) While the sale starts in earnest later this month, some Prime deals are already available on Amazon products like the Echo Show and for services like Amazon Music and Audible.

But for our purposes here at The Spoon, we are watching to see how Whole Foods, which Amazon acquired last year, will fit into the mix. Prime members already get free two-hour delivery and member-only discounts. According to the press release, on Prime Day Prime members will get an “additional 10 percent off hundreds of sale items throughout Whole Foods Market stores, and deep discounts on select popular products.”

All of this is important to consider as Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods cast a giant shadow over the entire grocery sector. Rivals like Walmart, Krogers and Albertsons have been forced to make their own partnerships and investments in delivery and logistics to try and fend off Amazon.

But Whole Foods isn’t just about selling food for Amazon; it’s also a venue for selling Amazon Prime memberships (which is already at 100 million subscribers). Adding Prime members fosters more loyalty and begets more sales at Whole Foods (and on Amazon), discouraging customers from shopping elsewhere. Additionally, Whole Foods stores serve as pop-up locations for Amazon to showcase its own technology, like the Echo line of Alex voice assistants… which can be used to shop for groceries by just talking. Or Amazon can use it to educate people about Amazon Ring smart doorbells and Amazon Key in-home or in-trunk delivery.

Further out, driving people to Whole Foods locations allows Amazon to collect even more data about its customers and their purchasing habits, which can be used and monetized through its various divisions. One also has to imagine it can surreptitiously take advantage of said data to further its futuristic cashier-less store technology.

The counter to all this, is how will the traditional Whole Foods customer react to this new dimension of Amazoninification? Will they be turned off by all the tech and Prime messaging?

And while in its own dimension Star Trek had its Prime Directive to not interfere with the development of civilizations, Amazon’s Prime Day is poised to keep growing until it becomes the basis for our new civilization.

We’re kidding.

We hope.