Walmart, Meredith Team for In-the-Moment Meal Planning

For Millennial moms heading once more into the breach of dinnertime, Walmart and media mega-player Meredith Corp. want to lend a hand.

A new cross-platform partnership between the Bentonville, Ark.-based retailer and Des Moines, Iowa-based Meredith—publisher of Real Simple and Allrecipes in addition to legacy brands Better Homes & Gardens and Southern Living—will seize on AI and first-party data to create more-personalized shoppable recipes and meal suggestions for Walmart customers and Meredith online audiences.

What that will look like in practice is, for example, visual search technology that lets consumers take photos of ingredients they have on hand and get recipe suggestions that incorporate those ingredients, as well as Allrecipes TikTok videos where viewers can select "Shop Now" to add all ingredients to a Walmart digital shopping cart.

Consumers also can use a Google Assistant-enabled smart speaker to search for an Allrecipes recipe by name, keyword or ingredient, with Allrecipes then offering meal suggestions available for pickup or delivery from Walmart. In addition, Walmart stores this month will debut "Allrecipes 30 Minute Meals," a "shoppable bookazine" of editor-selected recipes that also highlights the new meal-planning/shopping tools available from Meredith and Walmart.

See also: What Pandemic-Weary Grocery Shoppers Want Right Now

"We know that customers today are increasingly looking to shop in the moment, both on and off our platforms," Sarah Henry, senior director of content and influencer marketing at Walmart, said 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."

The pairing, which the partners tout as playing off Meredith's food-content expertise and "hyper-local consumer insights" and Walmart's expansive consumer reach and treasure trove of data as the country's biggest grocer, "will help families prepare meals they’ll love and get them on the table faster,” added Corbin de Rubertis, senior vice president of Innovation at Meredith.

Last month, Walmart reported that U.S. online sales in the second fiscal quarter were up 6% year over year and 103% on a two-year stack. Walmart Inc. raised the company's full-year comp guidance on better-than-expected sales powered by higher traffic and grocery share gains during the quarter.