Inside the remarkable rise of Amazon Freight

Source: Supply Chain Digital, “Inside the remarkable rise of Amazon Freight”, published [October 03, 2025]. Republished with permission.

For Amazon, building a vast logistics network was driven by necessity rather than ambition to enter the freight industry. The company’s partners simply weren’t scaling fast enough to meet Amazon end-customer needs, forcing the e-commerce giant to develop its own technology and acquire assets to bridge the gap.

Now, Amazon is sharing that hard-won expertise with businesses across Europe through Amazon Freight, a service that allows external shippers to tap into the same network that powers millions of Amazon deliveries.

For Chris Roe, Managing Director of Amazon Freight, this represents a natural evolution of capabilities built over years of solving complex logistics challenges.

“We’ve built this network over several years because our partners weren’t scaling fast enough for Amazon end-customer needs,” Chris explains.

“As a result, we’ve built technology. We bought assets that we’re now looking to share with customers.”

Amazon Freight launched in 2019 as a relatively young business within the Amazon ecosystem, but one built on decades of supply chain innovation. The service emerged from Amazon’s recognition that its internal logistics capabilities could solve problems for businesses far beyond its own operations.

Hasan Desuki, Commercial Director for Amazon Freight in Europe, describes how the service works in practice: “Amazon Freight externalises Amazon Logistics Network, which is an expansive network that runs across all of Europe with more than 400 facilities across fulfilment centres and delivery stations.

“Amazon Freight gives our shippers – which could be any businesses, whether working on Amazon or not – the opportunity to use this network to deliver and meet their supply chain needs.”

The company’s approach reflects Amazon’s broader philosophy of working backwards from customer needs.

Brianne McCarthy, Strategy Lead at Amazon Freight, whose team is responsible for understanding what customers require, emphasises this customer-centric approach.

“We want to be the most trusted freight partner and it has to be a partnership,” she says. “We want to be able to offer businesses in Europe access to the Amazon network in a really reliable, smart and transparent way.”

Amazon Freight’s strength in inbound shipping stems from the unique challenges the wider organisation has faced in managing its vast supplier network.

Unlike traditional retailers with curated product selections and limited suppliers, Amazon handles tens of millions of unique items from thousands of suppliers worldwide.

Chris, who spent 11 years in supermarket operations before joining Amazon, draws on this experience to explain the difference: “I worked for Aldi, the German discount retailer, and they are very good at supply chain. They are consistently able to operate with a very curated product selection and a very curated number of suppliers.

“Amazon is not like that. We’ve got tens of millions of unique items and thousands upon thousands of suppliers that are bringing that stock that our end customers want.”

This complexity has forced Amazon to develop sophisticated systems for translating between the physical retail world that business customers understand and the digital complexity required to serve Amazon’s vast marketplace.

Hasan adds that Amazon has also built expertise in pan-European operations, helping customers expand beyond their home markets: “Some of the businesses that we work with have got a single country base and they’re looking to expand across Europe, but they’re not used to working in that pan-European environment. We’ve been working in a pan-European environment for many years now.”

Technology sits at the heart of Amazon Freight’s strategy, reflecting Amazon’s identity as – fundamentally – a technology company.

The business operates according to Amazon’s “one-way and two-way doors” philosophy, which encourages experimentation with technologies that can be easily reversed while maintaining high standards for decisions with lasting consequences.

“We have a much lower bar for experimentation and technology is one of those,” Chris continues. “We have a start-scrappy, build-scalably way of working where, when we see the customer need and work backwards to see how we can solve it in a two-way door fashion, we’re happy to do something that gets us most of the way there but isn’t perfect.”

The approach has enabled Amazon Freight to implement machine learning and AI capabilities across its operations.

Hasan notes that pricing on the firm’s website is delivered courtesy of machine learning and Gen AI, meaning it changes in real time.

Meanwhile, Brianne goes on to emphasise that technology differentiation will be crucial for staying competitive: “The biggest way that we’re innovating is leaning into data and machine learning and AI capabilities. At the end of the day, we’re Amazon; we’re a tech company. We should be the best at this.”

Amazon Freight’s sustainability efforts reflect the company’s ambitious climate pledge to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2040 – a decade ahead of the Paris Agreement’s 2050 target.

The company had already achieved 100% renewable electricity across all Amazon operations, including data centres, by the end of 2023.

Chris acknowledges the significant challenge ahead: “If we are going to have a chance of hitting that very ambitious target, we have to experiment.”

The company is investing in battery electric vehicles, partnering with Daimler Benz on 500-kilometre range trucks and placing what Chris describes as “their biggest-ever order ever of battery electric vehicles for the European market”.

Beyond vehicles, Amazon Freight is addressing infrastructure challenges by open-sourcing its charging network planning tool, CHALLET.

“We recognised that, on our own, we will not get where we need to be,” says Chris. “As a result, we’ve open sourced the technology because it’s in everyone’s interest to have the right charging infrastructure.”

The company is also exploring intermodal solutions, with Chris noting that 25% of the carbon used for deliveries in Sweden is avoided by Amazon Freight’s use of intermodal solutions for next-day deliveries.

Amazon Freight’s customer base spans from small businesses with infrequent shipping needs to multinational corporations with complex supply chains across multiple nations.

Hasan elaborates: “Our customers today range between very small businesses that would have infrequent supply chain needs once every month or could be even less frequently, all the way to multinationals with expansive networks and supply chain requirements across geographies in Europe.”

The company has developed customised solutions that scale across this diverse customer base, working closely with account and operations teams to meet specific requirements while leveraging Amazon’s broader expertise.

Currently operating in the UK and Germany, Amazon Freight is preparing for significant expansion across Europe’s largest markets.

Brianne reveals that “France, Italy and Spain are next on deck” for expansion, representing what she describes as “a big, exciting milestone”.

The expansion is driven by customer demand, with Brianne noting: “We have customers who ask us all the time, ‘when are you going to be in these marketplaces? We want to work with you there’.”

Looking ahead, Chris sees tremendous potential in connecting different supply chains to create efficiencies across the network.

He cites the example of a customer that brews beer in Belgium and delivers it to Italian ski resorts, while another bottles mineral water in the Italian Alps for delivery to Belgian restaurants.

Chris enthuses: “If we can match the data of those different supply chains and share the goodness in a truly collaborative manner between each of those customers and with Amazon, we will lower the total network cost, increase sustainability, lower carbon and take more trucks off the road.”

For Amazon Freight, the opportunity for optimisation is substantial. Chris points to the fact one in three trucks on Dutch roads are currently running empty.

The challenge lies in building solutions that work not just for individual customers, but for the entire network – creating a more efficient, sustainable and collaborative freight ecosystem across Europe.

© Supply Chain Digital