Stephenie Landry, an Amazon vice president who launched and runs the company’s Prime Now express delivery service, has taken on the oversight of two additional Amazon delivery businesses, Recode has learned.
Amazon has combined the leadership of Prime Now and Amazon Fresh under one rising-star executive
VP Stephenie Landry has been running Prime Now since its 2014 launch.
Kevork Djansezian / Getty
Jason Del Rey has been a business journalist for 15 years and has covered Amazon, Walmart, and the e-commerce industry for the last decade. He was a senior correspondent at Vox.
Landry recently became the business leader for Amazon Fresh, the company’s oldest grocery delivery offering, as well as Amazon Restaurants, its restaurant-delivery service.
“If you look around this facility, you’re going to see a lot of everyday items — food and consumables,” Landry told Recode in a short interview at Amazon’s Prime Now delivery hub in New York City on Thursday morning. “Amazon Fresh sells the same types of products but a much greater variety. And so both of them have a lot of synergies and it makes sense to think about them jointly.”
At the same time, Landry appeared to throw cold water on the idea that this consolidation in leadership might signal Amazon’s plans to fold the Fresh business into Prime Now or vice versa — an idea that floated around grocery industry circles after Amazon recently scaled back its Amazon Fresh business in some markets.
“If you think about the physical world, there are lots of different ways that consumers shop for products,” she said, providing reasoning for running multiple, separate delivery businesses that include selections of groceries and food.
“And so I actually think that we’re going to have lots of different ways to get food to customers,” she added. “But behind the scenes it makes sense to develop as many efficiencies as possible.”
Landry joined Amazon in 2004 and was a founding team member of Amazon Fresh, which first launched in 2007. That service costs $14.99 a month on top of Prime’s $99 annual fee and offers a large selection of perishable and packaged foods for delivery within a day of ordering.
Landry later served as technical adviser — or “shadow” — to Jeff Wilke, the CEO of Amazon’s worldwide consumer business.
Since overseeing its launch three years ago, Landry has led the expansion of the Prime Now service to more than 30 U.S. cities and more than 50 markets in total globally. Prime Now lets Prime members buy from a limited selection of goods from Amazon and local retailers and get orders delivered for free within two hours, or for $7.99 for one-hour delivery.
Ian Freed, the vice president previously responsible for the Amazon Restaurants business, left the company earlier this year. It’s not clear what Ben Hartman, the Amazon vice president who previously oversaw Amazon Fresh, is up to now.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
