Amazon’s Whole Foods to triple shelf space for vertical farmer Bowery
At Bowery’s indoor farms, arugula, baby butter and other leafy green varieties grow in stacked rows from floor to ceiling. The company also sells rotating offerings, called Farmer’s Selection, based on the season.
Melissa Repko | CNBC
Bowery, a vertical farming company that grows crops indoors, is getting more shelf space at Amazon‘s Whole Foods, with a deal to triple the stores stocking its salad kits. Currently, Bowery’s salad kits and a selection of greens are carried at 50 Whole Foods Market stores in the Northeast. The expansion will increase the store count to 150 Whole Foods Market locations in the North Atlantic, Mid-Atlantic, and Northeast.
Bowery first broke into the market with a variety of leafy greens, but in September of last year it began marketing ready-to-eat salad kits.
“Demand for ready-to-eat, planet-positive meals is booming,” said Matt Williams, Bowery’s chief sales officer in a statement announcing the deal.
Three flavors of salad kits including Zesty Caesar, Avocado Ranch, and Balsamic Vinaigrette, will be available. The company is adding a compostable fork to the salad kits, and the deal with Whole Foods includes an expanded presence of its core products, including basil, baby romaine lettuce, baby butter, crispy leaf and baby kale.
Bowery, which ranked No. 46 on the 2023 CNBC Disruptor 50 list, currently sells its greens and salad kits through e-commerce and at over 1,900 stores. It claims to be the largest U.S. vertical farming company and has distribution deals with national food retailers including Walmart, Giant, Albertsons, Shoprite and specialty independents like DeCicco & Sons, Westside Market and Brooklyn Fare. Its products are also sold through distributors like Baldor and Four Seasons, and e-commerce grocer FreshDirect.
Last week, Bowery announced an expansion for its salad kits with Amazon Fresh, the retail giant’s online and physical grocery store (with operations in nine states) that offers same-day delivery and pickup in select locations for Prime members. According to a Bowery spokesperson, the Amazon Fresh deal will expand its product availability up and down the East Coast, including the Southeast and Florida, with distribution ramping up in the next few weeks from Virginia to Tennessee, North Carolina (including Charlotte), the Atlanta region, and within Florida, Jacksonville and Miami.
The deal comes amid challenges for both vertical farming and Amazon’s efforts to expand its grocery footprint.
Amazon closed several of its Fresh supermarkets and Go convenience store locations identified as “low growth potential” earlier this year, and as part of a larger cost-cutting strategy by the company. The store closures resulted in a $720 million impairment charge. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said on a February earnings call that the retailer was pausing expansion of Fresh stores to examine the business, and as Amazon searched for a store format that resonated with customers and “where we like the economics.”
“When we do find that equation, we will expand it more expansively,” Jassy said.
The vertical farming industry, meanwhile, has been under pressure, like many formerly high-flying, heavily VC-funded startup niches. AeroFarms and Appharvest, companies in the indoor farming space, both recently filed for bankruptcy, the latter just on Monday. According to PitchBook, through the first quarter of 2023, vertical farming deals declined by 91% year-over-year.
Oracle CEO Safra Catz speaks at the FII PRIORITY Summit in Miami Beach, Florida, on Feb. 20, 2025.
Joe Raedle | Getty Images
Oracle shares jumped more than 5% after a recent filing showed a cloud deal that would add over $30 billion annually.
CEO Safra Catz is slated to share the deal news at a company meeting Monday, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The revenues are expected to start hitting in the 2028 fiscal year.
“Oracle is off to a strong start in FY26,” Catz is expected to say, according to the filing. “Our MultiCloud database revenue continues to grow at over 100%, and we signed multiple large cloud services agreements including one that is expected to contribute more than $30 billion in annual revenue starting in FY28.”
The deals revealed Monday by Catz will not affect the company’s 2026 guidance, according to the filing.
U.S. President Donald Trump announced on April 4 that he would again postpone enforcement of a law banning TikTok unless its Chinese owner ByteDance divests from the platform.
Vcg | Visual China Group | Getty Images
U.S. President Donald Trump told Fox News in an interview aired on Sunday that he has a group of “very wealthy people” ready to buy TikTok, whose identities he can reveal in about two weeks.
Trump added that the deal will probably need Beijing’s approval to move forward, but said “I think President Xi will probably do it,” in reference to China’s leader Xi Jinping.
The president made the off-the-cuff remarks while discussing the possibility of another pause of his “reciprocal” tariffs on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo.”
Tiktok’s fate in the U.S. has been in doubt since the approval of a law in 2024 that sought to ban the platform unless its Chinese owner, ByteDance, divested from it. The legislation was driven by concerns that the Chinese government could manipulate content and access sensitive data from American users.
Earlier this month, Trump extended the deadline for ByteDance to divest from the platform’s U.S. business. It was his third extension since the Supreme Court upheld the TikTok law just a few days before Trump’s second presidential inauguration in January. The new deadline is Sept. 17.
The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, of PAFACA, had originally been set to take effect on Jan. 19, after which app store operators and internet service providers would be penalized for supporting TikTok.
TikTok went dark in the U.S. ahead of the original deadline, but was restored after Trump provided it with assurances on the extension.
Trump, who credited the app with boosting his support among young voters in the last presidential election, has maintained that he would like to see the platform stay afloat under new ownership.
Potential buyers that have voiced interest in the app include Trump insiders such as Oracle’s Larry Ellison to firms like AppLovin and Perplexity AI.
However, it’s unclear if ByteDance would be willing to sell the company. Any potential divestiture is likely to require approval from the Chinese government.
A deal that would have spun off TikTok’s U.S. operations and allowed ByteDance to retain a minority position had been in the works in April, but was derailed by the announcement of Donald Trump’s tariffs on China, Reuters reported that month.
The president previously floated a proposal for American stakeholders to buy the company and then sell a 50% stake to the U.S. government as part of a joint venture.
Experts have previously told CNBC that any potential deal could face legal challenges in the U.S., depending on whether it complies with PAFACA.
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