Bit by bit, Whole Foods gets an Amazon touch

It has been six months since Amazon took over Whole Foods, a $13.4 billion deal that made the internet retailer a major player in the world of brick-and-mortar retailing. For the most part, the 470 stores are still the same upscale, expensive healthy food emporiums that they have always been.

Amazon has grander ambitions as well. The company’s executives are busy devising ways to connect its Prime membership program, which offers benefits like fast and free shipping and video streaming, with the stores.

The company has said that Prime will eventually become the Whole Foods customer rewards program. It recently took a baby step in the direction of weaving together Prime and Whole Foods by giving Prime members 5 percent back on Whole Foods purchases made with an Amazonbranded Visa card. Whole Foods has signs about the offer all over its checkout stands.

Some of the changes Amazon has made are experiments limited to a few locations. Others, like price cuts on grocery staples, are widespread and a sign of more to come, its executives say.

“We’re determined to make healthy and organic food affordable for everyone,” Jeff Wilke, chief executive of Amazon’s worldwide consumer business, has said.

Here are a handful of notable changes Amazon has made to Whole Foods so far.

Home delivery: In February, Amazon allowed people to buy thousands of different items from Whole Foods and have them delivered by Prime Now, a speedy Amazon delivery service that uses contractor drivers in their personal cars. The service, available only for Amazon Prime members, offers free two-hour delivery of orders and one-hour delivery for $7.99 on orders over $35. (Driver tips are optional.)

Amazon introduced Prime Now delivery for Whole Foods stores in Austin, Texas; Cincinnati; Dallas and Virginia Beach, Va. The company said it would expand the service to rest of the country this year.

Price cuts: A few days before Amazon completed its acquisition of Whole Foods, it announced a series of price cuts on grocery items, a move to change the perception of the chain as “Whole Paycheck.”

Still, much of the selection in Whole Foods stores still carries premium price tags. “We’ve done quite a bit,” Brooke Buchanan, a spokeswoman for the market, said. “There’s still so much more we have planned.”

Gadgets: The most conspicuous sign of Amazon’s agenda inside Whole Foods is the kiosks containing Amazon electronics that now lurk near store aisles. Not far from the Honeycrisp apples and bulk bins of granola, shoppers can now pick up an Echo, Fire TV or Kindle.

In a handful of Whole Foods stores, including in Denver and Chicago, Amazon has opened big electronics stands called pop-up shops, which are staffed by Amazon employees who can answer questions about the devices.

Amazon order pickup: For years, Amazon has been installing banks of lockers inside and around supermarkets and other buildings, giving people who order items on Amazon a secure place to pick up their packages.

Since the Whole Foods deal closed, Amazon has put its lockers inside all of the chain’s stores.

Private label foods: So far, much of the changes have gone in one direction: injecting a little Amazon into Whole Foods. But there is a little Whole Foods getting added to Amazon, too.

Amazon has sought to bolster Whole Foods by making the chain’s private label products available. Amazon even dedicated an area of its automated convenience store in Seattle, Amazon Go, to Whole Foods private-label goods.