Walmart Leverages Contextual Commerce With Cooking App Grocery Partnership

Walmart is bearing down on its shoppable grocery content strategy. Cooking app SideChef announced on Tuesday (Aug. 10) that it is partnering with the retailer to release a series of five shoppable recipes targeted at families that will have less time to grocery shop as children return to schools.

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The Background

Walmart has been a leader in shoppable grocery content for some time now. In addition to static, shoppable recipes, the company has also created shoppable recipe videos with celebrity hosts for adults and interactive, shoppable, food-based activities for children. Plus, last month the retailer created an augmented reality (AR) experience for children, bringing characters from Netflix’s food-focused Hidden World of Waffles + Mochi series into grocery aisles.

Read more: Walmart AR Brings Michelle Obama’s Netflix ‘Waffles’ To Store Aisles

Additionally, with concern for the Delta variant looming, many restaurants are struggling to fill their tables. By combining recipe browsing and grocery shopping into one routine, Walmart has the opportunity to guide cautious consumers away from restaurants and into its eCommerce channels.

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What Consumers Are Saying

A PYMNTS census-balanced survey of over 5,000 U.S. consumers published in the report, “The Bring-It-To-Me Economy: How Online Marketplaces And Aggregators Drive Omnichannel Commerce,” created in collaboration with Carat by Fiserv, finds that 57 percent of shoppers now order groceries online, including more than two-thirds of Gen Z shoppers and bridge millennials and 63 percent of millennials. Plus, 46 percent of consumers across age groups are buying more groceries online than they were before the pandemic.

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What Experts Are Saying

Online grocery sales have taken a dip this summer as mobility has increased, but demand is expected to return to its peak in the near future and keep growing in years ahead.

“I have this theory … that people were really looking to just get out of home and start shopping in the store, but they got into the stores, and suddenly it wasn’t that appealing,” Stor.ai CEO Orlee Tal told PYMNTS in a June interview. “So I think that maybe some of these people are reverting back to those habits of buying digitally, and … grocers will have to start investing in the digitization of the store.”

See also: Stor.ai CEO: Sticking The Landing Keeps eGrocery Customers Coming Back

To make the most of this turn back to eCommerce, leading grocers will find ways to embed their offerings into consumers’ usual cooking content browsing routines.

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“Recipe content has always been incredibly shoppable,” Jason Young, president of digital shopper marketing platform Chicory, told PYMNTS in an interview. “We now have the pipes all connected so that you can go very directly from content like recipes into transactional moments. But if you look at recipes historically, they’ve always been a point of inspiration, a point of kicking off the food shopping process.”