All 19 UK Amazon Fresh bricks-and-mortar stores to be shut down, with five converted to Whole Foods locations, as company shifts focus
Amazon is to close all its Fresh supermarkets in the UK, only four years after it entered the market.
The company said it would be shifting its focus to faster online delivery of groceries, including perishable items.
The company said all 19 Fresh stores would be closed following a “thorough evaluation of business operations” and the “very substantial” growth opportunities in online delivery.
Retail experiment
Five of the stores are to be converted to Whole Foods locations, the high-end supermarket chain Amazon purchased for $13.7 billion (£10bn) in 2017.
Amazon Fresh began in 2007 as a delivery service for groceries, before expanding to physical stores in 2020, with the first concept location located in Los Angeles.
The first location outside the US opened in London the following year.
About half of the total Fresh locations, including some in the UK use till-less “Just Walk Out” technology that is also employed in Amazon Go convenience stores, which uses cameras and other technology to allow people to pick up the items they want, with the items automatically billed to their accounts.
Other locations use Dash Carts, which are shopping trolleys with touchscreens, barcode scanners and sensors to detect items placed in and removed from the trolleys, similarly allowing shoppers to avoid tills.
Amazon has recently slowed expansion of Fresh and Go stores in the US, while placing more emphasis on the sale of everyday items within its online delivery grocery business.
The company said it plans to offer same-day delivery of groceries, including perishable items, in the UK beginning in 2026.
Online emphasis
Amazon also offers online delivery partnerships in the UK with Morrisons, Co-op Iceland and Gopuff and said it was seeing strong demand for those offerings.
In 2022 Amazon said it would close all 68 of its bricks-and-mortar bookstores, pop-up stores and 4-star stores in the US and the UK in order to focus on its Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh physical stores.
The 4-star stores, one of Amazon’s retail experiments, attempted to mesh Amazon’s in-store and offline operations by featuring top-selling products from its online operation.