How Bezos’s grocery shopping shakes up an USD800b industry

Since its founding 23 years ago, Amazon.com Inc. has upended the business of selling books, music and just about everything else we consume – except food. 

Not anymore. In one fell swoop, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos charged into the supermarket business with the USD13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods.

The surprise deal shakes up the $800 billion grocery sector – and the broader retail industry itself – by marrying Amazon’s vast scale and digital prowess with Whole Foods Market Inc.’s 460 stores and fresh-food distribution network. 

The acquisition threatens traditional grocers such as Kroger Co., which were already reeling from food deflation and encroachment from new competitors like German discounters Aldi and Lidl. Shares of rivals took a hit. The deal will likely spur other companies to defend themselves with their own buying sprees, consolidating the fragmented industry of feeding Americans.

“This is a game changer,” Zachary Fadem, an analyst at Wells Fargo & Co., said. “It’s a warning shot for the food retail industry that competition likely heightens on top of an already challenging backdrop.”

The deal comes after Seattle-based Amazon spent nearly a decade trying to find a way into the fresh-food delivery business through various endeavors, without much success. None other than John Mackey, Whole Foods chief executive officer, once predicted that Amazon’s quest for grocery deliveries would be “Amazon’s Waterloo.”

Now, Bezos will be Mackey’s boss, and the combination of those two pioneers could upend the staid supermarket business. Amazon’s various forays into selling groceries – Amazon Fresh, Amazon Pantry, Prime Now – will get a boost from Whole Foods’s store network and its loyal, affluent customer base.

Only about 1 to 2 percent of the industry has moved online, although that figure was expected to rise to 6 percent over the next five years because millennial consumers are almost twice as likely to purchase groceries on the web, according to Stifel Nicolaus & Co. analyst Marc Astrachan.

Amazon’s ownership will also likely result in lower prices at Whole Foods, whose expensive products like $30 emu eggs earned it the nickname “Whole Paycheck.” That could force other supermarkets to follow or lose customers, Astrachan said.

“Amazon has been in the food business for over 10 years and to now come to the conclusion that it needs physical brick-and-mortar stores is a pretty big deal,” Jefferies analyst Dan Binder said in a note. “Amazon gains expertise in grocery and organics in particular.”

That development challenges big-box retailers Wal-Mart Stores Inc. – the biggest grocer in the United States – and Target Corp., whose food business has floundered of late.

Wal-Mart, which upended the grocery sector itself when it decided to add food to its general-merchandise stores in the late 1980s, has thus far parried Amazon’s advances. It paid $3.3 billion last year for online marketplace Jet.com and offers curbside pickup of online grocery orders in more than 600 of its 4,700 U.S. stores. Overall, the company’s U.S. online sales rose 63 percent last quarter.

Wal-Mart, Target or others could respond with their own bids for Whole Foods, or for other food retailers such as Sprouts Farmers Market Inc., which is now “100 percent in play,” according to Gordon Haskett analyst Chuck Grom. Sprouts didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Amazon’s takeout price of $42 a share undervalues Whole Foods’ prospects and powerful brand, according to Rupesh Parikh, an analyst for Oppenheimer & Co. “There could be some money left on the table,” he said in a note to clients.

For now, Bezos has yet to disclose his plan for Whole Foods. Amazon held no press conference or analyst call, and the release announcing the deal was a scant 221 words long.

“Investors, analysts, competitors and suppliers are left guessing what Amazon may do,” Binder, the Jefferies analyst, said. Bloomberg