An Amazon whistleblower claimed the online retail giant used extraordinary tactics to uncover insider secrets at Trader Joe’s and copy its best-selling snacks.
A former Trader Joe’s executive claimed she was hired by the tech giant while working on a new private label food brand, Wickedly Prime. Wall Street Journal reported.
She told the outlet that she had not been told what project she would be working on when she interviewed for the job in 2015, but that she was hounded for information as soon as she arrived.
She claimed that during her first week she was ushered into a conference room at its Seattle-based headquarters that was filled with Trader Joe’s snacks and even had brown paper covering windows and doors to ensure secrecy.
The recruit alleged that she later learned that she had been hired to help the company determine which of Trader Joe’s 200 most popular products they should try to copy.
An Amazon whistleblower has revealed how Amazon tried to take down Trader Joe’s by copying the supermarket chain’s biggest snacks.
The tech giant hired a former Trader Joe’s executive while working on a new private label food brand, Wickedly Prime.
Amazon hired a top manager from Trader Joe’s snacks sector, but the recruit was not told what project she would be working on when she was interviewed in 2015.
Trader Joe’s has gained a cult following over the years and is known for creating unusual but incredibly popular products, like its Philly Cheesesteak Baos and Cinnamon Bun Spread, that fly off the shelves.
However, the grocer is notoriously secretive when it comes to sales data and does not offer online shopping, making it harder for rivals to track its best-selling products.
The Wall Street Journal reported that the former Trader Joe’s executive hired by Amazon attempted to deflect insider information requests for months.
Finally, his manager asked him to send all the documents he had kept from his time at the supermarket to another colleague on the team.
One of these documents was an Excel spreadsheet that detailed Trader Joe’s top-ranked items nationally over the course of a week, including the number of units sold per item during that time period, according to the outlet.
Her manager also reportedly demanded that she share Trader Joe’s margins for each product and reprimanded her when she refused.
A passerby who witnessed the encounter recalled that the manager shouted, “you have to give us the details,” at which point the new recruit burst into tears.
Amazon planned to replicate the 200 best-selling items at Trader Joe’s, a supermarket chain that has amassed a cult following.
For six months, the manager hounded the recruit for insider information about Trader Joe’s best-selling product.
Finally, his manager asked him to send all the documents he had from his time at Trader Joe’s to another colleague on the team.
The team supposedly analyzed the proprietary data to try to determine which products they should replicate.
But another Amazon employee saw what was happening and reported it to the legal department, the Wall Street Journal reported.
After further investigation, the team of employees pressuring the recruit was fired, despite their claims that their actions had been motivated by pressure from superiors.
An Amazon spokesperson told the outlet: “We do not tolerate misuse of confidential proprietary information, and we thoroughly investigate any reports of employees doing so and take action, up to and including termination.”
Meanwhile, a separate investigation by the Wall Street Journal He alleged that Amazon was also secretly gathering information on other rivals.
Big River Services International sells about $1 million a year in products through e-commerce marketplaces, including eBay, Shopify, Walmart and Amazon, under brands such as Rapid Cascade and Svea Bliss.
But in fact, Big River is owned by Amazon and was launched as part of a plan called ‘Project Curiosity’ in 2015 to gather information on competitors.
Data-seeking ploys would go as far as team members attending rivals’ seller conferences and meeting with competitors who identified themselves only as employees of Big River Services, not Amazon, the outlet reported.
Big River Services International sells about $1 million a year in products through e-commerce marketplaces, including eBay, Shopify, Walmart and Amazon, under brands such as Rapid Cascade and Svea Bliss, but is owned by Amazon.
Big River Services employees also reportedly went to great lengths to keep their identity hidden, using non-Amazon email addresses, for example.
In case his true identity was discovered, an internal crisis management document advised employees to say: “We make a variety of products available to customers through various subsidiaries and online channels.”