Amazon Launches Private-Label Food Line

Amazon has recently launched a new private-label food and beverage line as part of its continuing push into the grocery and private-label spaces. Called Wickedly Prime, the new food label is now available exclusively to customers with an Amazon Prime membership.

The Wickedly Prime web page reads, “We are Wickedly Prime, and our passion to experience and share the best flavors on earth has inspired us to create a new line of distinctive food and beverages, available exclusively to Amazon Prime members.”

Amazon has been rolling out private-label food and beverage products under the radar for Prime customers since June of this year, including its Happy Belly brand coffee and its private-label baby food called Mama Bear. Additionally, Amazon sells household goods and other items under the Amazon Basics and Amazon Elements brands.

As of now, the Wickedly Prime page lists soft-shell almonds, a few types of tortilla chips, popcorn and some prepared meal ideas from the offerings such as chicken pad thai nachos and an hors d’oeuvres portion of a snack mix. No word yet on whether Wickedly Prime brand items will be up for sale once Amazon Go — the online retailer’s big push into the brick-and-mortar grocery business — opens to the public in the coming months, starting with the flagship Seattle location in January 2017. Wickedly Prime items are currently available on Amazon, AmazonFresh and PrimePantry.

Internal documents from Amazon reportedly revealed that the online retail giant expects to open as many as 2,000 of its brick-and-mortar grocery stores in the U.S. over the next 10 years — figures which Amazon denies.

Amazon’s continued push into the food space has legacy grocers sweating, thinking about what the online retailer had previously done to book sales. Twenty years ago, 100 percent of book sales happened in a bookstore. Today, that stands at a little more than 50 percent and falling — with most of those online sales going to Amazon.