Whole Foods to cut hundreds of corporate positions

Hundreds of corporate-level positions will be eliminated at Whole Foods Market, according to an internal memo from the Amazon-owned grocer that was shared with Winsight Grocery Business late Thursday.

The grocer also plans to reduce the number of regions that oversee its more than 500 stores to six from nine. The cuts will not result in store closures or any layoffs of employees not working at the corporate level, the company said.

“We are evolving our operating structure and making adjustments to some corporate teams, so we can better support our stores as Whole Foods Market continues to grow and expand its reach to serve more customers,” a Whole Foods Market spokesperson said in an email to WGB.

While it is uncertain how many corporate roles precisely will be impacted by the job cuts, the company spokesperson added that they “will result in a headcount reduction of less than half of one percent of our total workforce across the company.”

“I want to reiterate that we are not eliminating any jobs of store or distribution center-level Team Members—these changes are limited in scope to corporate roles,” the spokesperson said. 

They added that Whole Foods currently has roughly 50 new stores planned over the next few years, and the company plans to “maintain a pipeline of closer to 100 stores in development, allowing us to open 30 or more stores each year.”

The internal memo, released to employees Thursday, said the changes aim to “further simplify our operations, make processes easier, and improve how we support our stores.”

“To achieve this, we will evolve our operating structure and make a few changes to certain Global and Regional Support teams over the next two months,” the memo continued. “We see great opportunity to advance our impact on the world, and these changes will help us fully capture that opportunity.” 

The proposed changes noted in the memo include:

Whole Foods said it was "committed to supporting" all workers impacted by the layoffs. 

The layoff announcement comes about a week after Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told shareholders that the company continues to invest in Whole Foods "while also making changes to drive better profitability.”  

“Whole Foods is on an encouraging path, but to have a larger impact on physical grocery, we must find a mass grocery format that we believe is worth expanding broadly,” Jassy wrote. “Amazon Fresh is the brand we’ve been experimenting with for a few years, and we’re working hard to identify and build the right mass grocery format for Amazon scale. Grocery is a big growth opportunity for Amazon.”