Chances are you’ve seen that Amazon meat logo from Whole Foods screaming across the internet.
Whole Foods’ staff designed those meat logos on their own — Amazon didn’t tell them to
Hamburger Neue.
Rani Molla was a senior correspondent at Vox and has been focusing her reporting on the future of work. She has covered business and technology for more than a decade — often in charts — including at Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal.
Here’s how it came about.
First off, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos didn’t commission an LA Whole Foods meat department to sculpt an Amazon logo out of ground beef to commemorate its $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods. That would have been the ultimate in Amazon branding.
We called the Whole Foods meat department at the Playa Vista, Calif., location to find out how they did it. An employee in the meat department said “one of the managers” thought it would be fun to stamp the Amazon logo into meat. No one at Whole Foods corporate or Amazon suggested it.
So, one of the meat guys* used a paper cutout of the Amazon logo as a guide for how to mold the meat into the shape of the logo. It was probably hand-formed, so you could argue it was in keeping with the Whole Foods ethos of local, organic, no-machine-made goodness.
Whole Foods did do plenty of other (official) promotion for Amazon’s Whole Foods merger, including deep price cuts on popular items and displays of its Echo speakers, but the meat font was all meat-counter ingenuity. So, bravo, Playa Vista Whole Foods, for providing the internet a moment of meat merger entertainment.
We also reached out to Amazon for comment.
* The meat guys at the counter answered our questions, but they didn’t want to be identified by name.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
See More:
