Amazon veteran joins Thrive Market C-suite

Online grocer Thrive Market has named a new chief merchandising officer.

April Lane will be responsible for the site’s merchandising, which spans food, home, health and beauty. She will also manage the Food Safety and Quality (FSQA) team, which oversees food quality, safety and regulatory compliance across all product categories, in addition to managing Thrive Market’s private label brands.

From 2022 until now, Lane served as chief e-commerce officer at Hearst Corporation. Previously, she spent more than a decade in merchandising and general management roles at Amazon, where she was most recently the general manager/director of their sports and outdoors business. She spent the majority of her time at Amazon scaling the Amazon Fresh business, including leading perishable food, private label, and Fresh pickup businesses until 2019.

“I’m thrilled to join Thrive Market on their mission to make high-quality and sustainable goods accessible for everyone,” said Lane. “After growing up on-and-off food stamps, I was introduced to organic, sustainably-raised food in college while working as a cashier at Whole Foods. That experience changed how I eat and ultimately drove me to create the first animal welfare standards for Amazon Fresh in 2017. Joining the executive team at Thrive Market feels like an incredible opportunity to make a much larger impact in an area I’m passionate about.”

Founded in 2024, Thrive operates on a membership-based model, and currently has more than 1.4 million members. The retailer carries a highly-curated catalog of organic and non-GMO products, and offers 90+ filters and values to allow customers to shop by diet and lifestyle. 

In 2024, Thrive became the first online-only retailer to accept SNAP EBT. By 2025, the e-tailer plans to become carbon negative and the world’s first climate-positive grocer.