Walmart Customers Focus on Meal Solutions not Menu’s

Consumers are dynamic not static and Walmart is not an early adopter when it comes to meals and meal components. Walmart exceled at supply chain optimization, suburban duplication, marketing messaging, it missed the mark on consumers meal prep simplification aka meals and meal components preference over ingredients to cook from scratch. 

According to Steven Johnson Grocerant Guru® at Tacoma, WA based Foodservice Solutions® time starved consumers are migrating to grocerant niche Ready-2-Eat and Heat-N-Eat fresh prepared meals from every retail channel not just grocery stores when it comes to What’s for Dinner.

Let’s Look at some recent numbers:

 

1. Recent Grocerant ScoreCards found 82.3% of consumers don’t know what’s for dinner at Noon, and 61.8 %don’t know what’ s for dinner at 4PM.
2. Roughly 63.7% of consumers purchase prepared food items from a retail location at least three times a month.
3. 79.6% all dinners have at least 1 grocerant niche Ready-2-Eat and Heat-N-Eat meal component and 66.6% have two meal components per day.
4. When asked if they wanted to cook dinner from scratch or assemble dinner from fresh meal components 91.3 % of Gen Z chose assemble from Fresh Prepared Meal Components and Millennials 83.4% chose meal components.
5. Seventy-three percent of retail prepared food purchases are taken to go
6. 88.2 % of consumers prefer hand held food over sit down meals with a knife and fork

 

So, last week Walmart in a press release stated that its hot rotisserie chicken is now available for same-day delivery. Previously, shoppers could only order cold chicken for delivery.

Walmart was quoted saying, “We’ve optimized our operations to add more delivery slots and availability, which allows Walmart to deliver our hot rotisserie chicken the same day for its customers,”

In case you did not know, Walmart, the country’s largest food retailer, said it sells 103 rotisserie chickens every minute, with shoppers in the Southern U.S. buying the most birds.

A hot rotisserie chicken from a Chicago Walmart was selling for $6.97 last Wednesday. Delivery is free for Walmart+ participants, who pay a membership fee of $98 a year, on orders of at least $35. Non-members pay $7.95 per order.

Walmart also last week launched a new digital recipe hub where shoppers can select a recipe and add all the ingredients to their online cart. Paprika Chicken & Rice Bake, for example, has 10 ingredients (including salt and pepper) and costs $21.35 to prepare for five servings, according to the recipe site.

Regular readers of this blog know that Walmart is stuck in the middle of the grocery channel after the success of companies the ilk of Aldi, WinCo, and Lidl have found success with competitive pricing and fresh food discovery.

Walmart has lowered prices on popular items, through October 15, along with offering meal solutions and curated shopping lists to “feed the whole family for less than $6.”

Recipes include Salsa Poached Eggs and Grilled Avocado Salad, both for under $6, and dishes such as Gardein Chick’n Wraps (less than $12) or Pork & Mango Salad (less than $16).

Walmart is the world’s largest retailer, with more than 10,500 stores and 2.1 million employees in 19 countries. The question readers of this blog will be asking who will win in the middle Walmart or Kroger/Albertsons? Or could it be that Aldi and Lidl will outlast even Walmart.

Invite Foodservice Solutions® to complete a Grocerant ScoreCard, or for product positioning or placement assistance, or call our Grocerant Guru®.  Since 1991 Foodservice Solutions® of Tacoma, WA.