I can't emphasize enough how food is a fundamentally different business in so many ways. First, to say the product is evaluated and experienced in a much more visceral way than most other industries is a
huge understatement.
Our bodies, like most other animals, dedicate so many resources and features to the quality detection and digestion of food and our second largest concentration of nerve cells exists in our gut. Eons before we could comparison shop, we and our evolutionary ancestors were foraging, testing and evaluating what we can eat. How we evaluate this product is based on an innate system that been shaped over countless years.
When you eat something bad, that nervous system goes out of its way to tell your brain not to eat that thing again. You may try to ignore it, but the brain has some pretty coercive methods to make sure you never forget what made you sick. For me, it turned me off goat cheese for about 5 years, even though I knew I had come down with a stomach bug. It didn't matter. My brain didn't give a shit. All it knows is I felt like shit after I ate goat cheese, so it's going to tell me to stay away from fucking goat cheese. (Fortunately, I can now enjoy it again.)
Needless to say, food borne illness is a huge concern with the industry because a handful of incidents (Think Chipotle) can have a devastating effect. Want to prevent it? You have two options:
The first option, you can go the preservation route with additives and refrigeration. This is what we did in the 20th century. We basically created conditions to make it hard for bacteria and pathogens to eat our food before we ate it. Either this meant you kept it cold, or you made it inedible. For example, one reason bleached white bread lasts longer than old fashioned sour dough recipes is because you've effectively stripped all the nutrients out of it. Old fashioned bread is nutrient rich. You can live off it. The bleached bread was so nutrient poor that people started suffering from malnutrition diseases like rickets until some clever person realized you can fortify bread with flower.
Needless to say, most preservation systems take away something. It could be nutrients, texture, flavor, or a host of other things.
The second option is to source fresh ingredients, handle it well, and eat it as soon as you can. This is what Chipotle tried to do and what virtually no other fast food joint tries to do because it requires organizational and operational disciple. The stakes are high and people have long memories when it comes to making people sick. Even as adults, once you've associated doody with someone or something, that stuff sticks in your head. I'm pretty sure when people started inventing verbal language, one of the first words that was uttered was something equivalent to the word "yucky".
Now that we've got that illness and yuckiness are a huge part of this industry, you have to remember that food is also an artistic expression and part of people's sense of identity, way more than most things you might buy on Amazon. We have holidays that celebrate food bounties. We use it to commune with friends and family. Explorers set out expeditions and discovered entire fucking continents because they wanted better access to spices to make their food taste better.
Food is trendy, the customers are fickle and easy to scare and they have long memories. As a company, you can't just stumble into that industry and make it work robots and good operations procedures. It takes inside knowledge and expertise that is cultivated by an organization. This is why it was important for Amazon to buy a company that worked hard to try to figure out how to procure and provide fresh, health conscious, and sustainable foods. They're buying Whole Food's reputation and expertise because they know reputation and expertise is everything in the food business.