Product Profile: Walmart Grocery
INDUSTRY
food
Category
food/grocery delivery services
product Profiled
online grocery shopping and delivery, pickup services from Walmart
H-Score
48
ranked 9th of 25 within the food industry
ranked 38th of 76 overall
product description
Walmart offers online shopping, ordering, delivery and pickup of groceries from Walmart stores and clubs.
product use
Customers use the Walmart app or the Walmart website to browse grocery items, build a shopping cart and select whether they wish to have their groceries delivered or if they prefer to pick them up.
who’s affected
Walmart grocery delivery and pickup is available throughout the country. Their stores and clubs are within 10 miles of 90% of the US population. They offer payment using SNAP/EBT cards for people who receive food assistance in 49 states and are participating in a pilot project to facilitate ordering and payment for the federal Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program using EBT cards.(1)
influence on health-related behaviors
EATING
slight positive influence
Walmart’s grocery service facilitates the purchase of grocery items and thus its impact on the healthfulness of its customers' diets is largely dependent on the choices that the customers make and its influence on those choices.
Broadly speaking, grocery shopping leads to more home-cooked meals, which, in general, have been shown to be healthier than meals eaten out or ordered from restaurants.(2-6) People who cook at home more frequently also tend to have diets that have higher compliance with dietary guidelines.(7)
In Building H’s consumer research, over 90% of users of online grocery delivery services (not specific to Walmart) said that their groceries were healthier (68%) or as healthy as (23%) takeout or delivery meals.(8)
Walmart organizes its online storefront into food categories, which it features on its homepage (or home screen in the app). Just as the organization and presentation of items in a physical supermarket can influence shopper behavior, Walmart’s choices about what to display most prominently can also influence behavior. At the time of review, Walmart offers recommended items, grouped in rows, that appear to vary seasonally and presents a fixed menu of categories that, depending on whether one uses the app or the website, includes either Fresh Produce” or “Fresh Food” first, followed by “Snacks,” Frozen Food” and “Beverages.” Walmart includes a “Healthy Snacks” section in its “Featured Shops” list, along with an “Everyday Meals” section that includes mostly prepared meals. Prepared meals are typically less healthy than meals cooked at home with fresh ingredients, but generally more healthy than restaurant food.(9)
Walmart facilitates home cooking by offering an integrated recipe service where users can automatically add all of the ingredients from a recipe into their carts.(10)
Walmart enables users to filter their searches using a number of popular dietary categories, including vegan, vegetarian, high protein, high fiber, organic and more. It has a “Great for You” labeling program, where it adds an icon to grocery items that meet rigorous nutritional criteria,(11) but it does not appear that users can search for or filter their results based on this label.(12)
Online grocery delivery services can promote healthier shopping choices and promote access to healthier foods in transportation-scarce and low-resource areas.(13)
- Work across the industry to pursue options to rate the healthfulness of individual food items and then integrate those ratings throughout the user experience.
- Enable users to express preferences for how healthy they want their diet to be; align recommendations with those preferences; and provide users with feedback on how well their choices are supporting those preferences.
PHYSICAL ACTVITY
neutral to slight negative influence
While Walmart’s grocery service promotes home cooking, it also potentially deters customers from the physical activity associated with grocery shopping. Instacart allows customers to shop while sedentary, which can be detrimental to physical health. Note that users of online grocery delivery services typically continue to shop in person to some degree as well, so the effect is a reduction, rather than a substitution, in in-person grocery shopping. In Building H’s consumer research, nearly half (47%) of users of grocery delivery services (not specific to Walmart) also shopped in person more than twice a month.(14)
On the other hand, assuming that the grocery shopping leads to home cooking, cooking a meal certainly involves more physical activity than preparing ready-to-eat or takeout/delivery meals.
- Consider setting pickup (vs. delivery) to be the default option, subject to conditions such as distance, weather and individual abilities.
- Promote the pickup option as an alternative prior to finalizing a delivery order.
Sleeping
neutral to slight positive influence
Travel time has been shown to have a negative relationship to sleep time, so the service could improve sleep for users to the extent it cuts down on trips to the grocery store and time spent shopping.(15)
Additionally, if Walmart’s grocery service cuts down on stress related to grocery shopping in-person (travel, finding groceries in-store, time crunches, etc), it could also reduce stress-related decreases in sleep quality.(16)
Engaging Socially
neutral to slight negative influence
Walmart’s grocery service allows customers to stay at home while shopping, unless they opt for grocery pickup. As such, the service likely reduces the casual social interactions associated with trips to grocery stores. In Building H’s consumer research, 54% of shoppers (not specific to Walmart) rated these interactions positively, as compared with 9% rating them negatively.(17)
Walmart does offer a grocery category called “For Entertaining,” that suggests items for entertaining groups of people.(18)
- Experiment with “preferred shopper” service to foster relationships between customers and shoppers.
- Encourage and train shoppers to interact with customers, treating the interaction as important social contact.
- Pursue opportunities for encouraging use of the pickup option (see above).
Getting Outdoors
slight negative influence
To the degree that its service cuts down on trips to grocery stores and supermarkets, Walmart’s grocery service could potentially reduce time spent outdoors.
- Pursue opportunities for encouraging use of the pickup option (see above).
Notes
Safer, Healthier Food & Other Products. Walmart website, accessed November 22, 2023.
Julia Wolfson and Sara Bleich. Is Cooking at Home Associated with Better Diet Quality or Weight-Loss Intention? Public Health Nutrition, Volume 18, Supplement 8 June 2015 , pp. 1397-1406.
Junxiu Liu et al. Quality of Meals Consumed by US Adults at Full-Service and Fast-Food Restaurants, 2003–2016: Persistent Low Quality and Widening Disparities. The Journal of Nutrition, Volume 150, Issue 4, April 2020, pp. 873–883.
R. An. Fast-food and full-service restaurant consumption and daily energy and nutrient intakes in US adults. European Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Volume 70 (2016), pp. 97–103.
Sharon Kirkpatrick et al. Fast-food menu offerings vary in dietary quality, but are consistently poor. Public Health Nutrition. Volume 17, Issue 4 (2014), pp. 924–31.
Lisa Powell and Binh Nguyen. Fast-food and full-service restaurant consumption among children and adolescents: effect on energy, beverage, and nutrient intake. JAMA Pediatrics. Volume 167, Issue 1 (January 2013), pp. 14–20.
Arpita Tiwari et al. Cooking at Home: A Strategy to Comply With U.S. Dietary Guidelines at No Extra Cost. American Journal of Preventive Medicine. Volume 52, Issue 5 (May 2017), pp.616–24.
Steve Downs. A Survey of Modern Life: Food; Delivery Apps, Meal Kits, Groceries and Cooking Dinner. Building H on Medium. January 20, 2022.
Angela Fertig et al. Compared to Pre-prepared Meals, Fully and Partly Home-Cooked Meals in Diverse Families with Young Children Are More Likely to Include Nutritious Ingredients. Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. February 11, 2019
Walmart website, accessed November 22, 2023.
Great for You. Walmart website, accessed November 22, 2023.
Walmart website, accessed November 22, 2023.
Tawanna R. Dillahunt et al. Online Grocery Delivery Services: An Opportunity to Address Food Disparities in Transportation-scarce Areas. CHI 2019, May 4–9, 2019, Glasgow, Scotland, UK
Downs (2022).
Matthias Basner et al. American Time Use Survey: Sleep Time and Its Relationship to Waking Activities. Sleep, Volume 30, Issue 9, September 2007, pp. 1085–1095.
Torbjörn Åkerstedt et al. Predicting sleep quality from stress and prior sleep – A study of day-to-day covariation across six weeks. Sleep Medicine, Volume 13, Issue 6, June 2012, Pages 674-679.
Downs (2022).
Walmart website, accessed November 22, 2023.