Amazon is Just Getting Started

The food industry yawned when Amazon first launched, and then yawned again when Amazon Fresh launched in 2013, when many said it was little more than another Webvan. Those days and sentiments are clearly over. 

This company knows food and how to launch. Before its meal kits were announced last month , the company spent lots of time understanding the biz with selling partners Tyson and Martha Stewart’s kits, and made their own offerings even better. 

Techcrunch has uncovered yet another Amazon trademark that may well push cellular agriculture into the mainstream a lot sooner than Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods could even dream about. 

To be clear, it found 110 trademarks related to food filed by Amazon Technologies. The company has, according to the Techcrunch report, around 10 trademarks filed related to the phrase “single cow burger” which refers to a current offering from Amazon: Wagyu beef burgers made from grass-fed cattle raised on a farm in California.   

Now this is just conjecture, but with the amount of trademark filings around burgers, and the hacking mentality of Amazon, is it that far a stretch to imagine that it could either buy one of these competitors or launch its own cellular-ag startup? Why not? 

If Amazon’s food history is any indication, there is nothing from farm to fork that is beyond its reach, and for a company that wants to own the grocery space, and the people in those generations that are food-focused, integrating the supply chain – especially with the foods and beverages of tomorrow – makes a lot of sense.