Jason Buechel, the man who’s tasked with energizing Amazon’s grocery business

The first was gardening. Buechel grew up in rural Wisconsin, the eldest of five children in a family where food was a constant presence — his father was a cheesemaker, his grandparents ran a dairy farm and most meals featured a symphony of vegetables the family grew themselves. “I was a typical Cheesehead,” Buechel told Modern Retail.

By the time he was 7 years old, he was, by his own admission, “the geeky kid” coaxing vegetables out of the soil and entering them in the county fair. He pushed himself to grow something new every year.

His other main interest was computers. He landed his first job in the seventh grade, doing computer support for the local school district. He eventually went to study information science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he graduated in 1999. From there, he went into business consulting. His first client was a grocer. It was in this role that Buechel said he first honed his skills in grocery retail. 

As he put it, “That, for me, was just a lot of fun.” It was the part of retail that resonated most with his lifelong connection to produce and cooking. But the grocery business also challenged him. The category’s razor-thin margins, perishable inventory and intricate supply chains made it, in his view, “arguably the hardest segment of retail,” and therefore the most rewarding to help improve. That ultimately paved the way for his move to Whole Foods, where he’d already been a loyal shopper for more than a decade. He joined the Austin, Texas-based natural food store as the company’s Chief Information Officer in 2013.

In this role, he oversaw the organic grocer’s digital business, including building Whole Foods’s  pickup and delivery operations “from scratch.” By the time Amazon acquired the upscale grocer for $13.7 billion in 2017, Buechel had worked his way up to the Chief Operating Officer role and was then-Whole Foods CEO John Mackey’s right-hand man. When Mackey, who was also the company’s co-founder, retired in 2022, he tapped Buechel to take over, telling employees in a memo that “Jason was my personal choice to replace me.”

All told, Buechel has carried those twin interests — food and technology — into every chapter of his career. And now it sits at the center of his biggest role yet. At the beginning of this year, Amazon put the Whole Foods CEO in charge of its worldwide grocery business, which includes sales from Amazon.com, Amazon Fresh grocery stores and Amazon Go cashierless convenience stores. 

How Buechel steers Amazon’s sprawling grocery division will help determine whether the company can finally gain meaningful traction in a category that has eluded it for nearly two decades. Despite heavy investment — from Amazon Fresh stores to online delivery experiments — the business has struggled to achieve the scale and cohesion that define Amazon’s most successful ventures. Now, Buechel is expected to unify a fragmented portfolio and prove that Amazon can build a grocery model that is both profitable and unmistakably Amazonian.

Cracking the grocery code

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos famously told rivals, “Your margin is my opportunity.” It’s an aphorism that encapsulates Amazon’s core strategy of focusing on low prices and high sales volume, even at the expense of high profits, to gain market share. Given this, it’s fair to wonder: Why has Amazon been so dead set on dominating the grocery aisle, where margins are razor-thin? 

For Amazon, grocery is a massive opportunity: Americans spend hundreds of billions on food each year. And yet, even though grocery is consistently the largest retail category, it remains a holdout in the age of online shopping. Groceries are a roughly $1.61 trillion dollar business in the U.S., but the vast majority of those purchases happen in stores, per eMarketer. Less than 14% of U.S. grocery sales happened online in 2024.

In an interview, Buechel laid out why grocery matters so much to Amazon. “Being one of the most habitual retail segments, we feel it’s important for our ability to serve our customers in this space,” he said. “We know when customers especially make their first perishable purchase on Amazon, they spend more within Amazon.com because we’ve naturally made it easier to get everything you need.”

In other words, if Amazon can crack the code of grocery, that would give Amazon a deeper foothold in customers’ everyday routines and pull more of their spending into the “Everything Store.”

But despite Amazon’s commanding share of e-commerce — the company captures 40% of online spending in the U.S. — grocery has remained a difficult puzzle for the retail giant to solve. Over the past 20 years, Amazon has tested one grocery idea after another, learning from each attempt while confronting how challenging the category can be.

“They’ve tried everything from their own grocery store, big format, small format, automated, organic, non-organic, and they haven’t been able to really unlock it,” said Sucharita Kodali, a principal analyst at Forrester. “They’re continuing to experiment and test and see if they can find some formula that can generate value.”

Amazon’s first foray into groceries began with the launch of its online delivery service Amazon Fresh as a beta in Seattle in 2007, initially offering non-perishable goods and later expanding to fresh items. Later, Amazon also introduced a rapid-delivery service called Prime Now, aimed at delivering essential items within two hours. The standalone service was eventually shut down in 2021 and integrated into the main Amazon shopping platform. 

Amazon signaled just how serious it was about grocery in 2017 when it spent nearly $14 billion to acquire Whole Foods, which now has more than 500 locations. Amazon also operates its Amazon Fresh stores, borrowing the name from its e-grocery service. Launched in 2020, the format leans more on big-name brands like Doritos and Pepsi rather than Whole Foods’s premium assortment.

Amazon Fresh itself has gone through an array of changes, including shuttering stores, replacing the cashierless technology system Just Walk Out for tech-infused shopping carts called “Dash Carts,” and even adding Krispy Kreme doughnuts and coffee stations. 

Then there’s Amazon Go cashierless convenience stores, along with Amazon’s new, smaller-format Whole Foods concept called Daily Shop, aimed at urban neighborhoods. With a pared-down selection compared to a full-size Whole Foods, the store is built for grab-and-go errands.

For Amazon, it’s all about finding the right formula. “One of our goals is always, as we do something new, to make sure we are learning and understanding from the customer side,” Buechel said. “We’re always starting to plan on what the evolution of that concept would be, or even new concepts that we might bring forth.” 

Despite Amazon’s grocery investments, the company still captures only a sliver of overall U.S. grocery spending, according to data from Numerator, which counts food and beverage sales but not alcohol and nonfood items. As of September, Walmart claims 21% of overall grocery spending, while Kroger captures 8.5%. Amazon and Whole Foods, on the other hand, each have 1.6% of the market. 

Excluding Whole Foods Market and Amazon Fresh, Amazon is one of the largest grocers, with over $100 billion in gross sales, according to the company. Since the 2017 acquisition, Whole Foods has seen over 40% sales growth, an Amazon spokesperson told Modern Retail. But that still lags behind the growth rates reported by some of Amazon’s other divisions. In the third quarter alone, for example, Amazon said its AWS revenue increased 20% to $33 billion.

Although some of Amazon’s past grocery initiatives have struggled to gain traction, CEO Andy Jassy has voiced support for the company’s current endeavors. During Amazon’s most recent earnings call in October, Jassy highlighted one of Buechel’s key initiatives since he took over Amazon’s grocery business: a same-day service rolling out to 1,000 U.S. cities that lets customers buy perishables and non-grocery items together in one order. Jassy told investors it was one of the latest grocery programs “we are most excited about.”

Still, Buechel knows there’s plenty of work to do.

Buechel has moved with a sense of urgency in his first 11 months on the job. He has taken steps to bring the Whole Foods and Fresh grocery businesses closer together, combining Whole Foods corporate and frontline staff with the rest of Amazon. He has also introduced a new leadership team, debuted a private-label line, tested 30-minute delivery and experimented with Whole Foods store formats.

When Buechel stepped up to take on Amazon’s worldwide grocery business, he felt a sense of déjà vu. Transitioning into his new role reminded him of his first weeks as CEO of Whole Foods three years prior, when he began to learn about other areas of the organic grocer’s business, such as real estate, store design and the construction process. “I really felt that, 30 days in, I was learning more than I had in a long time,” Buechel said about his new role. 

Buechel’s first priority was to see for himself how Amazon’s grocery business works in different parts of the world. Amazon, for instance, operates Amazon Fresh in countries like the U.K., Germany, Japan, Singapore and India. Buechel spent much of his first 11 months “visiting and interacting with all of our different stakeholders, from our teams globally … in Asia and in Europe [to] some of our grocery partners,” he said. 

The enormity of Buechel’s task — energizing Amazon’s sprawling grocery business — is not lost on him. “A big part is making sure that we operate as one unified team,” Buechel said of his first 11 months on the job. “We’ve been taking on very aggressive goals [so] we can support this for our customers in the fastest way possible.”

One of those aggressive goals is expanding Amazon’s new same-day perishable grocery delivery service to 2,300 U.S. cities by the end of 2025. The company announced Wednesday that it has officially met this target. Amazon’s “everyday essentials” business is already a dominant player in nonperishable items like paper towels and batteries. But Amazon’s latest delivery experiments suggest it can sell more of the fresh staples, like bananas or avocados, that shoppers most associate with “grocery.” Nine of the top 10 best-selling items for same-day delivery are now perishables, according to Amazon, “which is a sign that shoppers are responding to this,” said Sky Canaves, a principal retail analyst at eMarketer.

One of the biggest challenges still facing Amazon’s grocery business is unifying the shopping experience for customers. The company runs multiple grocery banners, with varying value propositions, fees and shopping experiences.

“It’s a fragmented experience with all the different offerings: Amazon.com, Amazon Fresh and then Whole Foods, which are still distinct experiences from a shopping perspective,” Canaves said. “It’s a little confusing,” she added.

In a June note to employees, Buechel described the broader initiative to streamline operations and enhance connectivity across teams at Whole Foods, Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go as “One Grocery,” Business Insider reported at the time. 

“This next chapter in our journey will challenge us to think and work differently before we truly see the long-term benefits, and I know we will rise to the occasion,” Buechel wrote.

‘Early innings’

According to the people who have worked with him, one of Buechel’s strengths is his even-keeled leadership style. 

Stephenie Landry, who worked at Amazon for nearly two decades, first met Buechel not long after Amazon acquired Whole Foods in 2017. At the time, she was a senior leader in Amazon’s grocery division, who oversaw the launch and operation of the company’s Prime Now delivery service. When Amazon bought Whole Foods, the blockbuster deal marked the tech giant’s biggest splash in the grocery industry, and Landry was tasked with bringing Whole Foods stores onto Amazon’s digital platform, boosting Whole Foods’s pickup and delivery services, and lowering prices to attract customers, including special perks for Prime members.  

With Buechel — then Whole Foods’s COO — helping her, the agenda felt far less daunting. “The thing that I really remember is just feeling really confident in [Jason] taking care of Whole Foods,” said Landry, who described him as trustworthy, calm, capable and thoughtful. “I felt really assured by having that type of a person on the team managing such an important new part of our business.”

By the end of 2019, Landry became the head of Amazon’s U.S. grocery business, with Jason reporting to her. And then, the pandemic hit. 

“We were facing a worldwide [pandemic] that really, really deeply impacted the grocery industry,” Landry said. “From then on, our relationship became ultra-focused on: How do we figure out what needs to happen right now to help customers and help our employees be safe?”

Buechel’s ability to keep calm under pressure came in handy at a time when Amazon’s e-grocery business practically exploded overnight as quarantined consumers ordered food online rather than venture into stores. At the height of pandemic lockdowns in 2020, Amazon’s online grocery sales tripled, the company said at the time. 

Suddenly, Amazon and Whole Foods had a laundry list of tasks to tackle: converting Whole Foods stores into “dark stores,” or fulfillment centers, implementing temperature checks, distributing masks and gloves, and more. 

During this time and beyond, Buechel proved “to be a very calm, poised and thoughtful leader,” Landry said. He’s “hard-working, focused, hands-on and not someone who shies away from getting into the details of a problem,” she added. 

That problem-solving mentality of Buechel’s helps explain why the powers that be at Amazon tapped him to oversee the company’s expansive grocery business. Under Jassy, whose CEO tenure has been defined by stringent cost-cutting measures across Amazon’s organization, senior leaders like Buechel are on a mission to streamline operations and eliminate inefficiencies. 

Jassy’s directive to reduce costs has helped pass along savings to customers, Buechel said. “Within the Whole Foods Market side, we’ve reduced prices on over 25% of the items in the last 18 months, and we’ve nearly doubled the number of promotions,” he said. 

Still, to make inroads in the grocery category, Amazon faces stiff competition from not only incumbents like Walmart, but also e-commerce delivery upstarts like Instacart. On Monday, Instacart announced it would offer its app, including checkout, within ChatGPT, making it the latest retail company to partner with the AI startup. Amazon, for its part, hasn’t announced any partnerships with third-party AI companies. Instead, the tech giant is laser-focused on creating its own AI products, like its chatbot Rufus. 

Like any true tech nerd, Buechel said he’s optimistic about the role AI will play in beefing up Amazon’s grocery business. For example, Amazon has plans to use AI to better tailor the selection of products at individual stores. He said that even stores located just minutes apart can have vastly different shopping patterns, and AI can help Amazon adjust everything from pack sizes to prepared foods to meet those hyperlocal needs.

“We’ve actually been building AI tooling that can allow us to look at this at a specific store level and help not only optimize the selection, but figure out how we can support this on the supply chain side,” he said.

On the customer side, Buechel envisions AI creating a more interactive and personalized shopping experience. Buechel said that, one day, Amazon customers will be able to upload pictures of meals to Rufus, and the chatbot will be able to come up with a recipe list. As he put it, “Within Amazon, there are just some fun things we’re already starting to build, and it’s really, really the early innings.”