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Tag: perishable items

  • Amazon delivered 8 billion items to its US Prime members in less than 2 days last year

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    Amazon (AMZN) announced Tuesday that its Prime members in the US received 8 billion items on the same day or next day last year, up 30% from 2024, as the company continues to double down on speeding up delivery times across its network.

    “We focus on savings, convenience, and entertainment as the cornerstones of the Prime program, and so convenience has to go up and up as expectations go up and up,” Jamil Ghani, VP of Amazon Prime, told Yahoo Finance.

    Globally, 13 billion items were received in less than two days by Prime members.

    Amazon said that for its US Prime deliveries, half of the items delivered in less than two days were groceries or household essentials. The company said members saved $550, on average, on shipping costs.

    In 2025, Amazon invested $4 billion to expand its same-day and next-day delivery to 4,000 smaller cities, towns, and rural communities. Last week, the company announced plans to close its Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go stores to focus on delivery services and expanding Whole Foods, which Amazon acquired in 2017.

    The company is continuing to step up its investments in faster delivery as Walmart (WMT) continues to pour money into its own delivery network, which the retailer says is able to reach 93% of US households for same-day delivery.

    Amazon expanded its same-day delivery service for perishable goods to over 5,000 US cities, with plans to expand in 2026. In 2025, the company delivered 70% more items in less than a day.

    “Think about those buildings that we’ve now built, and we’ve retrofitted them with all the lessons we’ve learned, most importantly, from Whole Foods, about how to have a seamless, high-quality, freshness-guaranteed supply chain experience for perishable items,” Ghani told Yahoo Finance.

    The company also expanded its same-day delivery network for its pharmacy business; in 2018, Amazon acquired PillPack in a bold move into the pharmacy space.

    Ghani said AI has also served as the “latest enabler” to increase delivery speeds, particularly in its pharmacy segment. Ghani said Amazon was able to cut processing time for patients by 90% compared to the pharmacy industry benchmark by removing the wait times, syncing data, and expediting document reviews.

    On its third quarter earnings call, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said being able to deliver more perishable groceries was the physical delivery opportunity he was “most excited about.”

    “We started with a few markets about a year ago, and we were really taken aback at the adoption,” Jassy added.

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  • GE’s new Smart Refrigerator automates grocery shopping with a barcode scanner and Instacart

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    Smart fridges are a dime a dozen at CES, and LG and Samsung have thoroughly explored what’s possible when you connect your fridge to the internet or slap a touchscreen on the front. The new GE Profile Smart Refrigerator with Kitchen Assistant GE is announcing ahead of CES 2026 doesn’t reinvent the wheel in that regard, but it does include a first: a built-in barcode scanner for adding items to your shopping list.

    GE’s “Scan-to-List” feature uses the barcode scanner to quickly (and precisely) add items to a shareable shopping list in GE’s SmartHQ app. You can refer to that list while you’re shopping in person, or sync it  with Instacart and have it delivered, eliminating the need to go grocery shopping entirely. Inside the fridge, GE also includes a flush-mount LED bar with a built-in camera that can deliver “real-time, on-demand snapshots of crisper drawers, focusing on the most costly and perishable items.” This “FridgeFocus” feature is supposed to prevent you from overbuying perishable produce that you might already have, by letting you see which perishables might go bad first.

    GE’s fridge is stainless steel and has a built-in touchscreen display. (GE)

    On top of those smart features, the GE Profile Smart Refrigerator has a four-door stainless steel design, with door-in-door storage and an adjustable temperature drawer. The fridge also has an 8-inch touchscreen display for viewing recipes or the current weather conditions, and microphones for accepting voice commands. When you’re dispensing water, the fridge’s water dispenser is supposed to be smart enough to fill a container with the exact right amount of water using built-in sensors, too.

    The GE Profile Smart Refrigerator with Kitchen Assistant will be available from GE and select retailers starting in April 2026 for a suggested MSRP of $4,899.

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    Ian Carlos Campbell

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