Amazon Fresh

Dash Carts are shopping carts with a touchscreen, barcode scanner, cameras, and various sensors to count items placed and removed from the cart, allowing customers to skip conventional checkouts. The customer scans a QR code from their Amazon app to link their Amazon account so their purchase can be billed through the payment method linked in their Amazon account. The cart also has a weight sensor to weigh produce priced by weight.

Some Amazon Fresh stores used "grab and go" or "Just Walk Out" technology similar to that in Amazon Go stores, which tracks what customers take and place back. It allows customers to skip conventional checkouts while also eliminating the need to use Dash Carts. While presented to customers as an automated process, it relied on an India-based team of over 1,000 human reviewers to verify checkout accuracy. By the time they closed, there were no Amazon Fresh stores that use both "grab and go" and Dash Carts.

In April 2024, Amazon confirmed that the Just Walk Out technology would be phased out in favor of using Dash Carts at all U.S. Amazon Fresh locations. Amazon still plans to sell the Just Walk Out technology to other businesses, primarily smaller format stores.

Also in April 2024, Amazon began offering Dash Carts to other supermarkets, beginning with a small number of Price Chopper and McKeever's Market locations located in Kansas and Missouri. The objective was to turn the technology into a service business. It follows Amazon selling the Just Walk Out technology to other businesses in March 2020.

Due to criticism regarding Amazon Go stores not accepting cash, some Amazon Fresh stores also have checkout lanes for customers who want to pay with cash or do not have an Amazon account.

Locations

The first Amazon Fresh grocery store opened to the public on September 17, 2020, in the Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. By July 2022 Amazon Fresh had 38 locations in the states of California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Maryland, Washington, Washington, D.C., and New York/New Jersey. On March 4, 2021, the first Amazon Fresh store in Europe was opened, in the Ealing Broadway Centre shopping mall in Ealing, West London, and by June 2022, Amazon Fresh had 17 locations in London, UK.

On November 17, 2022, it was reported that the development of all upcoming Amazon Fresh grocery stores had been indefinitely paused “pending evaluation of the operation.” In February 2023, two Amazon Fresh storefronts that had not yet opened in Brookfield and Westport Connecticut were abandoned and sold to Big Y Supermarket. In July 2023 three London locations were closed, including the first to be opened. The company continued to state that it would continue to grow despite the closures and underwhelming sales figures. Since 2023, more Amazon Fresh locations have begun to open. In September 2025, Amazon announced all 19 UK locations would close by the end of 2025 after less than five years of operation, with five locations being converted into Whole foods stores. In February 2026, it was announced that Tesco had acquired five former Amazon Fresh stores in London, which are due to reopen as Tesco Express branches.

Product lines

Amazon Fresh sold grocery items and a subset of items from the main Amazon.com storefront. Items ordered through Amazon Fresh were available for home delivery on the same day or the next day, depending on the time of the order and the availability of delivery slots.

Amazon Fresh operated independently of Whole Foods Market, which is also owned by Amazon. They had separate facilities and separate inventories that they sell. Market research from Amazon showed that customers at Amazon Fresh tended to have lower incomes and were more likely to be Hispanic or particularly Asian than customers of Whole Foods.