While some of the pundits focus on the customer experience, most of them consider the grocery supply chain to be at the heart of Amazon’s strategy for buying Whole Foods. Perhaps Whole Foods brings supply chain capabilities to Amazon that it has struggled to implement for itself? “Amazon, with its massive regional distribution centers that are often larger than shopping malls, could cut out most wholesalers.”The Whole Foods supply chain, however, is far from monolithic. The rest of Whole Foods products, namely the bulk of its nonrefrigerated packaged goods, it obtains through a traditional natural foods supply chain intermediary, United Natural Foods, Inc. (UNFI). “Food delivery services on the whole are considerably more logistically complex.”The Missing LinkPerhaps Amazon’s challenge isn’t to make Whole Foods’ supply chain more like Amazon’s, but rather vice-versa – warts and all.

Source: Forbes June 23, 2017 18:56 UTC