Amazon's Whole Foods to cut hundreds of corporate roles
Whole Foods is cutting several hundred jobs to simplify its stores.
FILE – The Whole Foods Market Logo is shown in front of a Cambridge, Massachusetts store on Wednesday, July 14th, 2021. Amazon-owned Whole Foods will cut several hundred jobs in order to streamline its operations. The executive team of the company sent a memo to its employees on Thursday, April 20th, 2023. According to the memo, the grocery store plans to reduce the number of regions from nine to six.
Charles Krupa/AP
Amazon-owned Whole Foods announced it will cut several hundred jobs to streamline the operations of the grocery chain.
According to an executive memo sent Thursday to Whole Foods employees, the company will make changes to regional and global support staff over the next two month.
A spokesperson for Whole Foods confirmed that the layoffs would be part of this shift, and they will affect less than 0.5 percent of the total company workforce.
Whole Foods will reduce its nine regional offices to six. It will also create an operations team for the entire company and transfer some store support services to a single group.
In a memo, the executive team of the company wrote: 'We often speak about how important it is to simplify our work and improve how we operate as we grow.' We've made significant progress in these areas with previous organizational and operational changes. 'As the grocery industry continues its rapid evolution, and we, like all retailers, have faced challenges such as the COVID-19 Pandemic and the continued economic uncertainty, we are now aware that we must continue to build upon these changes.
Whole Foods has said that it won't be closing any stores or reducing its distribution role.
Amazon purchased Whole Foods for $13.7 billion in 2017, as part of an effort to expand their grocery business. These efforts have not been without a hitch.
As part of its periodic review of its grocery portfolio, the company announced in February that it would close some Amazon Fresh supermarkets as well as Go convenience stores. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote to shareholders in a letter last week that 'Whole Foods' is on a promising path. However, to make a bigger impact on physical groceries, the company must find a format for mass grocery which we think is worth expanding widely.