- Amazon whistleblower reveals company’s plan to copy Trader Joe’s
- Senior Trader Joe’s manager claimed she was hired for inside information
- The legal team fired the employee who pressured her to submit documents.
An Amazon whistleblower has exposed Trader Joe’s internal secrets, claiming the online retail giant used unusual tactics to copy its best-selling snacks.
A former Trader Joe’s executive claimed he was hired by the tech giant to work on a new private label food brand called Wickedly Prime, The Wall Street Journal reported.
She told the outlet that she was not told what kind of project she would be working on when she interviewed in 2015, but that she was asked for information as soon as she arrived.
During her first week, she was ushered into a conference room at the Seattle-based company’s headquarters filled with Trader Joe’s snacks and covered with brown paper on the windows and doors to ensure confidentiality. He claimed it was covered.
The new employee claimed he later learned that he had been hired to help the company consider which of Trader Joe’s 200 most popular products to copy.
Trader Joe’s has gained a cult following over the years, and is known for creating unusual yet incredibly popular items that fly off the shelves, like Philly Cheesesteak Baos and Cinnamon Bun Spread.
But the grocer is notoriously secretive about its sales data and doesn’t offer online shopping, making it difficult for competitors to track its best-selling items.
The Wall Street Journal reported that a former Trader Joe’s executive hired by Amazon spent months trying to fend off requests for inside information.
Eventually, her manager requested that another colleague on her team send the documents she had kept from when she was at the grocery store.
One of those documents, the store said, was an Excel spreadsheet detailing Trader Joe’s’ top-ranked products nationwide over a one-week period, including the number of units sold for each item during that period.
Her manager also reportedly asked her to share Trader Joe’s margin on each product and reprimanded her when she refused.
A bystander who witnessed the encounter recalled the manager yelling, “You have to hand over the data,” at which point the new employee burst into tears.
The team is said to have combed through proprietary data to consider which products should be replicated.
However, another Amazon employee witnessed the incident and reported it to the legal department, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Upon further investigation, the team of employees who pressured the new employee were fired, even though they claimed their actions were caused by pressure exerted from upper management.
An Amazon spokesperson told the media: “We do not tolerate the misuse of proprietary and confidential information, and we thoroughly investigate reports of such behavior by our employees and take action, up to and including termination. I will take lessons.”
Meanwhile, a separate investigation by the Wall Street Journal claimed that Amazon was also secretly collecting information about other rivals.
Big River Services International sells approximately $1 million worth of products annually under brand names such as Rapid Cascade and Svea Bliss through e-commerce marketplaces such as eBay, Shopify, Walmart, and Amazon.
But Big River is actually owned by Amazon and was launched in 2015 as part of a plan called “Project Curiosity” to gather intelligence about its competitors.
The ploy to find data could go as far as team members identifying themselves only as employees of Big River Services, not Amazon, attending rival seller conferences and meeting with competitors. The same media reported that.
Big River Services employees also reportedly made every effort to hide their identities, including using non-Amazon email addresses.
If their true identities were revealed, internal crisis management documents advised employees to say, “We provide a variety of products to our customers through numerous subsidiaries and online channels.”
