Walmart Partners With Meredith for High-Tech Meal Planning
Walmart has entered a cross-platform partnership with Meredith Corporation aimed at helping families plan meals through AI-powered meal planning, shoppable recipes, visual search, chatbots, and more.
The partnership pairs media company Meredith’s expertise in food content, hyper-local consumer insights and proprietary technology platform with Walmart’s wide customer reach, omnichannel presence, product assortment, and delivery options.
The latest strategic addition to Walmart’s e-commerce grocery business will offer consumers shoppable ad experiences, in which shoppers can meal plan and add recipe ingredients directly to their Walmart online grocery cart for pickup or delivery. Customers will be able to shop for Walmart products across Meredith’s portfolio: Allrecipes, Better Homes & Gardens, PARENTS, EatingWell and REAL SIMPLE.
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The combination of inspiring content and commerce means to takes the guesswork out of meal planning for busy families. Meredith predicts that views of “Meal Plans”-related articles and plans will be up 30% across its sites in 2021 versus last year.
“Finding ways to help our customers live a little better each day is at the heart of everything we do, and that includes helping them shop more quickly and conveniently for affordable, high-quality products,” said Sarah Henry, senior director of content and influencer marketing at Walmart. “We know that customers today are increasingly looking to shop in the moment, both on and off our platforms. We are focused on meeting customers where they are discovering inspirational content and enhance the customer experience. This partnership with Meredith is an innovative way we can seamlessly help our customers while putting much-needed time back in their day.”
Walmart and Meredith's Retail Technolgy
The partnership features a suite of custom, proprietary tools and content. Meredith’s content taxonomy and predictive insights, including concept demand curves and consumer decision frameworks, alongside Walmart’s API technology, match millions of products with consumers in real-time at scale.
Visual search technology also enables consumers to take photos of ingredients they have on hand and receive meal suggestions that incorporate those ingredients. Additionally, a voice-activated experience through Allrecipes Action for Google Assistant will allow for grocery shopping. With an Assistant-enabled smart speaker or smart display, like Nest Hub, shoppers can say “Hey Google, talk to Allrecipes” and search for a recipe by ingredient, keyword or dish name. Meredith’s natural language processing and machine learning technology give a personalized suggestion for a complete meal solution available at Walmart for pickup & delivery.
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The partnership will also launch the first-ever shoppable bookazine filled with editor-curated recipes with “Allrecipes 30 Minute Meals.” Available for sale in September exclusively at Walmart stores, the bookazine will provide another opportunity to bring the shoppable experience to life for consumers, increasing awareness and adoption of the shoppable tools.
Meredith and Walmart have launched a social commerce promotion for the launch, in which popular Allrecipes videos become shoppable via Walmart with ads on TikTok. Consumers can tap the “Shop Now” call-to-action button in the TikTok video to load all of the ingredients into a digital shopping cart on Walmart.
“This wide-ranging partnership with Walmart includes first-party data-driven ‘Make It Easy’ and ‘Kid Foodology’ programs, which reimagine the shopping experience with highly personalized content and ad experiences that deliver unparalleled value every step of the way. As children go back to school, parents return to the office and the fall season takes shape, Meredith and Walmart will help families prepare meals they’ll love and get them on the table faster,” said Corbin de Rubertis, senior vice president of Innovation at Meredith.