Amazon hands over German fresh groceries to Rohlik

Just a week after announcing a collaboration with Czech online supermarket Knuspr (Rohlik), Amazon is ending its own fresh grocery delivery service in Germany.

In one month

The American e-commerce giant has announced it is going to end the delivery service on 14 December, stating a desire to simplify its grocery offering and focus on non-perishable products. The fact that Amazon, in seven years of trying in Germany, never got beyond the cities of Berlin, Hamburg and Munich is a testament to how hard cracking that market is.

The announcement of the discontinuation follows the news, last week, that Amazon was engaging in a partnership with online supermarket Knuspr, part of Czech retailer Rohlik. In Berlin, Amazon Prime members can have 15,000 fresh and local products delivered within three hours, other cities are to follow. Knuspr already has its own logistics, so nobody doubts its capacities to actually deliver on that promise.

For Amazon, it is nevertheless another disappointment in the food market. Apart from problems with its cashless ‘Just Walk Out’ technology and the closure of several Amazon Go shops in New York, the retail giant also pulled the plug on its Fresh delivery service in some regions in the United Kingdom this summer. As Gregor Ulitzka, President Europe at Ocado Solutions, said at the RetailDetail Omnichannel Congress 2024: online shopping is extremely complex – and (therefore) very difficult to get profitable.