- In 2016, Amazon launched Wickedly Prime, a private label brand to compete with Trader Joe's.
- The company has hired a former senior manager in Trader Joe's snack division, according to WSJ.
- The employee was chased for data on Trader Joe's best-selling snacks and the margins on each product.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the Amazon team that was developing the online giant's private-label food brand, Wikidolly Prime, has told a former senior manager at Trader Joe's that the company was not working with the popular grocer. The company said it repeatedly pressed for data that would help it compete with the US.
In 2016, Amazon launched Wickedly Prime, which sells an assortment of foods and snacks like roasted cashews and garlic mustard aioli. This project is just one of the few ways Amazon is entering the food space.
According to the magazine, Amazon had a model, Trader Joe's, that it wanted to recreate with Wickedly Prime.
So the company hired a former senior manager in the snack food division of a grocery store. According to the magazine, only after she was hired was she told that her role would be to help create Amazon's private label product line.
According to the report, Amazon wanted to replicate the top 200 items sold at Trader Joe's. Because this data was not readily available, Amazon managers repeatedly harassed a former Trader Joe's employee (who was not named in the Journal article) over data on the store's popular products for six months.
Ultimately, the former Trader Joe's employee was asked by a manager to hand over emails and documents he had saved from his time at the grocery store, and he surrendered the requested data, according to the report.
Amazon managers also requested data from former Trader Joe's employees about the margins on each product. She refused, and the manager yelled at her employee, the paper said.
“All you have to do is give us the data!” the manager yelled, according to a person who witnessed the exchange and recalled it to the newspaper.
Amazon's team quickly distributed data on Trader Joe's best-selling products and looked at how it could be used, the magazine reported. But another employee soon reported Trader Joe's use of the data to Amazon's legal department.
The employee who accessed the data was ultimately fired, according to the report.
An Amazon spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment sent over the weekend.
“We do not tolerate the misuse of confidential information and we thoroughly investigate reports of such behavior by our employees and take action, up to and including termination,” an Amazon spokesperson said.
A former Trader Joe's employee's experience reveals an inside look at Amazon. A broader, more aggressive effort to compete with other grocery stores.
As Amazon prepared to launch its food and household products line around 2015, it filed for trademark protection for more than 20 product categories, from coffee and pasta to razors and cleaners.
Amazon also acquired Whole Foods in 2017, rapidly cutting costs at the grocery store and losing almost 10% of Trader Joe's customers to Whole Foods.
The online retailer opened its first brick-and-mortar Amazon Fresh grocery store three years later.
Trader Joe's has established a cult following among customers, in part because it has developed snacks and food products through private labels. However, a recent investigation by food publication Taste claims that the popular grocer may be copying products from smaller food brands.
A Trader Joe's spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment sent over the weekend.