The e-commerce giant announced on Wednesday that same-day delivery of perishable items, including meat and seafood, is now available in more than 1,000 cities, including Phoenix, Orlando, Raleigh, and Milwaukee. By the end of the year, the company plans to expand the service to more than 2,300 US cities, and by 2026 to even more cities.
“We are constantly innovating to make shopping for groceries easier, faster, and more affordable for our customers, especially Prime members,” said Doug Herrington, CEO of Worldwide Amazon Stores, in a press release.
He added that eligible customers can now “order milk along with electronics; oranges, apples, and potatoes along with a detective novel; and frozen pizza along with tools for their next home repair project” and have it all delivered to their door within hours.
This is part of Amazon‘s ongoing efforts to disrupt the lucrative $1 trillion food industry. The company acquired Whole Foods in 2017 and opened its first Amazon Fresh brick-and-mortar stores in 2020. The new expanded service now puts Amazon in even more direct competition with Walmart and other grocery delivery services such as Instacart. Shares of both companies fell after the announcement.
Prime members receive free same-day delivery on grocery orders over $25 in most cities. Orders below this amount can also be delivered on the same day for a fee of $2.99. Non-Prime members can also use this service for a flat fee of $12.99, regardless of the order amount.
Amazon says that early rollouts of the service in regions where it was already available showed how popular food products are among Prime customers. Strawberries regularly knock AirPods out of the top five most popular products, and bananas, Honeycrisp apples, limes, and avocados are among the most popular items in same-day grocery delivery orders.
The company first introduced same-day delivery services in 2015 and has since become an expert in logistics. To deliver fresh products, which can be very sensitive to temperature, Amazon relies on its specialized temperature-controlled network. The company says that every item undergoes a six-step quality check both upon arrival and before delivery in insulated bags.
Amazon claims that in 2024, it already earned $100 billion in gross profit from the sale of food and essential goods, excluding sales from Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh. According to Amazon, during the first three months of 2025, sales of essential goods, including food, grew more than twice as fast as all other categories in the US and accounted for one-third of all units sold.
