Whole Foods groceries are no longer available on Instacart.
On Thursday, Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta announced the news in a blog post. He said that the company had ended its partnership with Amazon-owned grocery chain Whole Foods and that the service would be slowly phased out over the coming months.
“We expect to ramp down all remaining Whole Foods in-store shopping operations in preparation for Whole Foods to fully exit our marketplace in the coming months,” he said.
There are 1,415 in-store Instacart shoppers who work specifically on Whole Foods deliveries, picking groceries in its stores. These workers will be directly impacted by the change and for 243 of them, it will mean losing their job picking food at Whole Foods from 10 February 2019.
“For our in-store Whole Foods shoppers who are personally impacted by this news, we’re deeply committed to being transparent about what this means for you and plan to share any updates with you as they become available,” Mehta said.
He continued: “We expect to be able to place more than 75% of all our impacted in-store Whole Foods shoppers in new in-store shopper jobs at another retailer in their area. For our remaining impacted shoppers, we are committed to doing everything we can to support you.”
Instacart’s partnership with Whole Foods has come into question since the grocery chain was acquired by Amazon in June 2017. Before this, Instacart had a deal to exclusively deliver its produce around the US.
Read more: Instacart’s CEO describes the moment he discovered Amazon was stealing its Whole Foods business
When the news broke, industry experts were left wondering what would happen to the five-year contract that it had signed with Whole Foods in early 2016 and was only a year-and-a-half in to.
“There’s no longer room for Instacart at Whole Foods,” Guru Hariharan, a former Amazon executive and CEO of Boomerang Commerce, which helps brand manufacturers sell to Amazon told Bloomberg in March. “It’s only a matter of time before Instacart is edged out completely.”
Bloomberg reported that Instacart shoppers at a store in San Francisco were having to prepare deliveries in the corridors after being pushed out of designated packing areas by Amazon’s own delivery staff.
In November, Instacart announced that it would be cutting its membership fees, which made it a more affordable delivery option than Amazon for Whole Foods produce.