Amazon has discontinued ‘Pantry’ service

Amazon Pantry had begun as an alternative to the traditional supermarket

Six years after launching Amazon Pantry, Amazon has discontinued the popular service. Originally known as Prime Pantry, the option initially charged customers in the continental US a flat $5.99 shipping fee for a box that could be filled with up to 45 pounds of nonperishable groceries and household goods.

It had begun as an alternative to the traditional supermarket but had started to compete with other Amazon offerings – the Jeff Bezos-owned firm took over Whole Foods and launched its own Amazon Fresh grocery stores.

Amazon is still selling canned goods, pasta, cereal, detergent and other staples through the main Prime website.

After a US rollout, the service was made available in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, India and the UK, where items were supplied by the British supermarket chain Morrisons.

At the time, many of the items in Pantry weren’t available on the main Amazon site because they were individual size, not bulk.

A limited and ever-changing-variety of good were available—including, according to Amazon, ‘soft drinks and bottled water, a new range of paper and laundry products in popular pack sizes, single boxes of breakfast cereal, potato chips, convenience-sized personal care products and more.’

Since then, though, it has become increasingly aggressive about dominating the grocery industry, both online and brick-and-mortar.

Amazon purchased Whole Foods in 2017 for a reported $13.7 billion, giving it nearly 450 physical locations.

It now offers Whole Foods delivery service for Amazon Prime members in more than 2,000 U.S. cities.

In 2018, Amazon transformed the Pantry program into a monthly $5 subscription service that allowed Prime members an unlimited number of orders over $40.