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Amazon delivers pasta, pickles, and popcorn with Prime Pantry

The massive Internet retailer launches a new service that lets users buy as many dry good items as they can fit in one large box for the flat delivery fee of $5.99.

Dara Kerr Former senior reporter
Dara Kerr was a senior reporter for CNET covering the on-demand economy and tech culture. She grew up in Colorado, went to school in New York City and can never remember how to pronounce gif.
Dara Kerr
2 min read

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Amazon's Prime Pantry Web site. Screenshot by Dara Kerr/CNET

Bringing home delivery to a new level, Amazon launched its dry goods grocery delivery service on Wednesday dubbed Prime Pantry. The service lets Prime customers get boxes full of snacks, beverages, cleaning supplies, and more sent to their doorsteps.

The way the service works is customers can select items to buy from Amazon's Prime Pantry Web site -- such as dog food, laundry detergent, potato chips, and hand lotion -- and Amazon will fill a box and send it to the customer's home. Each box comes with a $5.99 flat delivery fee no matter how many items customers buy.

"As you shop, you see that each Pantry item tells you what percentage of a Pantry box it fills based on its size and weight," the company writes on its Web site. "Pantry boxes are large and can hold up to 45 pounds or four cubic feet of household products. As you check items off your list, we continuously track and show you how full your box is."

The Seattle-based company already offers a fresh grocery delivery service called AmazonFresh, which offers more than 500,000 different items for free same-day and early morning delivery. After tinkering with the local delivery service for five years in its hometown of Seattle, Amazon launched the fresh grocery service in Los Angeles last June and expanded to San Francisco in December.

Prime Pantry is a bit different since it deals with non-perishable foods. News of the service first leaked in December, when it was reported that about 2,000 products typically found at warehouse clubs Costco and Sam's Club would become available on Amazon. Non-bulk-sized items are now also available with Prime Pantry.

The move to delivery of dry goods is expected to give Amazon a greater piece of the consumer packaged goods (CPG) market, which is estimated to be worth roughly $850 billion. While the majority of spending still occurs in brick-and-mortar stores, Amazon could firmly plant its feet in this sector as more retail continues to move online.