Walmart has teamed up with media company Meredith for a cross-platform partnership designed to help customers plan and prepare meals faster and more easily through AI-powered meal planning, shoppable recipes, visual search, chatbots and more.
Under the new partnership, customers will be able to shop for Walmart products across content from Meredith’s portfolio of publications, including Allrecipes, Better Homes & Gardens, PARENTS, EatingWell and REAL SIMPLE.
Research from Meredith indicates that consumers are craving cooking inspiration, with the publisher predicting that views of “Meal Plans”-related articles and plans will be up 30% across its sites in 2021 versus last year.
This isn’t Walmart’s first foray into shoppable content — earlier this year, the retailer teamed up with So Yummy for a shoppable content campaign tied to the food competition show Unbox’d.
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“We know that customers today are increasingly looking to shop in the moment, both on and off our platforms,” said Sarah Henry, Senior Director of Content and Influencer Marketing at Walmart in a statement. “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.”
“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,” said Corbin de Rubertis, SVP of Innovation at Meredith in a statement.
Walmart’s partnership with Meredith also will feature a suite of custom proprietary tools and content, including:
- Meredith’s content taxonomy and predictive insights — which include concept demand curves and consumer decision frameworks — will be paired with Walmart’s API technology to match millions of products with consumers in real time, at scale;
- Visual search technology will enable consumers to take photos of ingredients they have on hand and receive meal suggestions that incorporate those ingredients;
- A shoppable ‘bookazine’ filled with editor-curated recipes to offer consumers a tangible example of the partnership and the possibilities of shoppable content. Allrecipes 30 Minute Meals will be available in September exclusively at Walmart stores;
- A voice-activated experience through “Allrecipes Action for Google Assistant.” Customers with an Assistant-enabled smart speaker or smart display, like Nest Hub, just have to say “Hey Google, talk to Allrecipes,” and they can search for a recipe by ingredient, keyword or dish name. Meredith’s natural language processing and machine learning technology will then give a personalized suggestion for a complete meal solution available at Walmart for pickup and delivery; and
- A social commerce promotion, in which popular Allrecipes videos become shoppable via Walmart with ads on TikTok. Consumers simply tap the “Shop Now” button in the TikTok video to load all of the ingredients into a digital shopping cart on Walmart.
