This week on 3-Minute Insights, Lainie is joined by Terry Clear, director of Replenishment and Sales Insights at 8th & Walton. The topic is a recent study by Numerator showing that Walmart continues to dominate the grocery industry.
Lainie: Welcome, Terry.
Terry: Hey, Lainie.
Lainie: Walmart clearly remains the leader in the grocery market despite efforts by all of its competitors. What does this tell us about where Walmart is focusing right now, and what should suppliers be paying attention to?
Terry: Walmart is wanting to enable shoppers to make their grocery—and I’ll include wellness—purchases by means other than simply going to the store. So we have home delivery, grocery pickup, and a lot of those shopping trips are now enabled through a screen, whether it’s a desktop or an app. As a result, it’s more important for suppliers to have good data quality and strong product images, because a higher and higher percentage of those grocery purchases are being made digitally rather than physically.
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Lainie: Walmart is, as you mentioned, rolling out a lot of new technology, including RFID for fresh food, same-day delivery for refrigerated items, and even medications. How do you think these changes will impact what Walmart expects from its suppliers?
Terry: Walmart’s going to continue to roll out additional RFID tag requirements, and it’s important for suppliers to stay informed. Anything that’s cold chain—including refrigerated medicines, meat, seafood—needs to meet these requirements. Suppliers need to know what data is required to be embedded in the tag, and these requirements will continue to evolve over time. This will enable things like cold chain compliance all the way to a home delivery, so that the tag can validate that the medicine or food was compliant from start to finish.
Lainie: Do you have any specific tips as we’re concluding for suppliers who are paying attention to Walmart’s edge in grocery and want to be a part of it?
Terry: Lean into all of the data attributes for your items. Make sure your items are discoverable, have strong images, and include what are called mod images. That helps the order filler, when delivering to a store, identify your item on the shelf and ensure the correct item is picked. When thinking about attributes, consider discoverability in the context of AI conversational search—think beyond simple SEO and towards making your product easy to find through more natural search methods.
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