Walmart Welcomes Partnership with Gobble, Introduces New Meal Kit Line
BENTONVILLE, AR - I think a modern-day rendition of a well-loved Shakespeare quote would be this: “If meal kits be the food of love, sell on.” Let’s face it, meal kits have taken our industry by storm, for better or for worse, and Walmart is the latest retailer to reckon with this boom. The retail chain is teaming up with Gobble Meal Kits to provide the meal kit provider’s products through Walmart’s e-commerce site.
“With more than 75 million items on Walmart.com, we continue to look for new options to offer customers. This includes specialty food items like the meal delivery kits by Gobble, farm fresh crates and snack boxes that give customers convenient options to plan and prepare meals,” a corporate spokesperson for Walmart shared with Fortune via email.
About 50 percent of Gobble’s customers are between 35 and 44 years old, while 25 percent of Blue Apron’s customers are in that same age group, according to a Fortune article. The news source relays that Gobble’s strategy is to focus on busy parents by taking time to find out what they need, instead of promoting rapid growth.
Prior to its recent partnership with Gobble, though, Walmart offered Sun Basket, Takeout Kit, and Home Chef meal kit options for customers to try the companies’ offerings without subscribing. When its e-commerce sales declined in the last quarter of 2017, Walmart’s stock took the biggest tumble it had in decades February of this year. Walmart’s partnership with Gobble, then, is a strategic way to boost online engagement and increase sales.
“I have applied the same efficiencies, process engineering, and intelligent automation to Gobble as I did when I managed the supply chain at Walmart,” Steve Robinson, Gobble’s Vice President of Supply Chain and Operations—and the previous Vice President of Supply Chain at Walmart—explained to Fortune in an email. “It is phenomenal to see my past and present teams now working together.”
The race is on between Amazon and Walmart. As to who will reign as the biggest retailer, the news source shares that, last year, 40 cents of every dollar spent online went to Amazon. With the addition of the new meal kit service online, will Walmart be able to push back against Amazon’s continued success? AndNowUKnow will keep you updated with the latest.
