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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Walmart

Walmart’s Jet.com Shuttering Fresh Food Delivery in NYC

Jet.com, which is owned by Walmart, is ceasing delivery of fresh groceries in New York City only a little more than a year after the service started.

Bloomberg first reported the story, writing:

The retailer will close a warehouse in the Bronx it was using to prepare orders and also let some drivers go, resulting in the loss of between 200 and 300 jobs, according to a person familiar with the decision. Jet — which will continue to sell dry groceries like cereal and other general merchandise — will inform customers of the news Friday and fulfill any existing orders already placed.

Jet’s move into fresh food delivery kicked off last year with a hyper-targeted focus on New York City. In addition to general fresh food, Jet also offered delivery of NYC-specific items from retailers like Bedford Cheese Shop, Orwashers Bakery and Just Bagels. (An interesting sidenote, around the same time as the Jet announcement, Walmart also announced it was acquiring Latin American online grocer, Cornershop. That deal also went bust after facing Mexican regulators).

But as Bloomberg reports, problems plagued Jet’s NYC service from the start with warehouse issues, product price fluctuations, hiked delivery fees and lots of items being out-of-stock.

Walmart acquired Jet.com for $3.3 billion in 2016 [–LINK?–]as part of an effort to expand its customer base and reach urban millennials. But a lot has changed since 2016, and even since 2017 when Jet launched the New York City delivery service.

Spurred on by Amazon getting into the grocery space, Walmart has been quick to expand its own grocery delivery and curbside pickup options independent of Jet. Walmart has been piloting automated micro-fulfillment for faster order assembly, is rolling out its Delivery Unlimited service to 1,400 stores nationwide this year, and is testing out in-home delivery.

And while Walmart lags behind Amazon is overall online grocery retail sales, research this year showed that Walmart shoppers spent more online per for groceries with Walmart than they were at Amazon.

Jet.com closing fresh food delivery in NYC wasn’t the first sign of its flagging importance to Walmart. Earlier this year Walmart conducted a sweeping overhaul of its Jet.com unit after it failed to meet expectations.

Walmart Officially Launches In-Home Delivery in Kansas City, Pittsburgh and Vero Beach

Online grocery shopping took another big step today… inside your house. Walmart officially launched its InHome Delivery service in the previously announced cities of Kansas City, MO; Pittsburg, PA; and Vero Beach, FLA.

For those unfamiliar, InHome uses a combination of smart locks and live streaming so Walmart delivery people can get inside your house (or garage) to drop off your groceries, and even put items in your fridge.

Customers in these select cities interested in trying out the service can go to InHome.Walmart.com to see if their address is eligible. If so, they select whether they want delivery in a kitchen or garage fridge and also need to buy a fifty dollar smart lock (which includes professional installation). Once the smart lock is set up, customers get unlimited deliveries for an introductory price of $19.95 per month (with a $30 minimum per basket).

When a delivery arrives, the customer is notified and then the delivery person gains access via the smart lock. The delivery people wear cameras that livestream their actions so shoppers can watch deliveries remotely on the Walmart app.

What Walmart didn’t address specifically in its post is how long this $19.95 introductory price will last, or how any change in price will square with other delivery options. Just last month, Walmart announced it was expanding its Delivery Unlimited service, which hands items to you at your door, nationwide for $98 a year or $12.95 a month. How much more will people pay to get their groceries put in the fridge while they are out?

While online grocery shopping is still a small percentage of overall grocery shopping, it’s definitely growing. Retailers like Walmart, Amazon, Target, and Kroger are all working on ways to make the process more fast and convenient. Robotic warehouses, micro-fulfillment, self-driving delivery vehicles are just a few ways supermarket chains are transforming how we get our groceries.

But is in-home delivery a bridge too far? I’m a bit older so the idea of letting a stranger into my home just to drop off food seems ridiculous. But we live in a time of letting strangers ride in our cars and sleep in our houses, so maybe it’s just a generational thing.

InHome may not be for me, but I’m curious if any of you will try it. If you’re InHome curious in Kansas City, Pittsburgh or Vero Beach and try it out — drop us a line to let us know how it goes!

Walmart Rolling Out its “Delivery Unlimited” Grocery Service Across the Country

Walmart announced today that it will be expanding its $98 “Delivery Unlimited” grocery delivery service to 1,400 of its stores later this fall, and will reach more than 50 percent of the U.S. by the end of the year.

The Delivery Unlimited program lets customers pay $98 a year or $12.95 monthly to get unlimited Walmart grocery delivery orders without paying the $9.95 delivery fee per order. A pilot of the program launched earlier this year in Houston, Miami, Salt Lake City and Tampa and will now expand to the 200 metro areas where Walmart’s grocery delivery is available.

Online grocery shopping is still a small fraction of the overall grocery shopping market. A recent survey from Gallup showed that 81 percent of Americans “never” order their groceries online. But that stat actually represented year-over-year growth in online grocery shopping, especially among families with kids under 18.

This growth is the reason all the major retailers are investing in ways to facilitate and expedite online grocery shopping. Target offers a similar delivery subscription through its Shipt service, and Amazon, of course, has its Prime membership.

Walmart partners with a number of different grocery delivery services including Deliv, DoorDash, Point Pickup, Skipcart, AxleHire, and Roadie. Additionally, Walmart launched its own delivery service called Spark towards the end of last year.

And if you can’t be home when your groceries are delivered, Walmart will be happy to upsell you on its Walmart InHome service where delivery people bring your groceries into your house when you’re out and place them in your fridge (with your permission, and livestreamed so you can watch). Though that service is online trialing in Kansas City, MO, Pittsburgh, PA and Vero Beach, FLA.

Walmart already leads the pack in online grocery shopping, and by expanding its Delivery Unlimited the company is poised to extend that lead.

BuzzFeed Tasty and Walmart Serve Up Shoppable Recipes

If you’ve ever been inspired by one of those seemingly simple, overhead cooking videos produced by BuzzFeed’s Tasty but then were crestfallen because you didn’t have all the ingredients, you’re in luck! Walmart announced today that it is bringing shoppable recipes to the Tasty platform, deepening the relationship between the two companies.

Right now, the shoppable recipes features works with the Tasty iOS app. Once a user finds a recipe they want to make they can view the list of ingredients and tap the “Add items to your grocery bag” button, which redirects them to either the Walmart Grocery app or online store.

The “shoppable” part of the recipes is being powered by Northfork‘s software, which provides a white label platform for grocery retailers. The app maps a user’s location to the nearest Walmart and is tied into that’s store’s inventory to ensure that customers can get all the ingredients necessary. The app even lets users swap out items based on quantity needed or dietary, nutritional or brand preferences. Once purchased, the groceries can be scheduled for delivery or pickup as early as that same day.

Walmart’s relationship with Tasty goes back to December of 2017 when the two entered into an e-commerce agreement to sell the basic cookware and utensils needed to make Tasty dishes. In March of last year, that relationship expanded when the two partnered to sell an exclusive line of Tasty branded cookware. Shoppable recipes seemed like the logical next step in their relationship.

Tasty has been relatively quiet lately; the last we heard from them was in October of 2018 when Cuisinart launched a version of the Tasty OneTop cooktop. Adding to any mystery about what is going on with Tasty is the fact that it was announced last week that Ben Kaufman, who provided BuzzFeed’s quote for the Walmart press announcement, was stepping down from his role as BuzzFeed’s Chief Marketing Officer. As Variety reported at the time: “During [Kaufman’s] tenure at the digital-media company, he helped develop the Tasty line of products for Walmart and the Goodful brand at Macy’s.” Kaufman will now focus on the BuzzFeed Camp retail stores.

Regardless, the shoppable recipe sector continues apace. Samsung bought shoppable recipe site Whisk in March of this year, and just today, Mealthy announced it had equity crowdfunded $1.07 million for its full-stack consumer solution for shoppable recipes, guided cooking and kitchen appliances.

And it looks like Walmart and Tasty will have more announcements to come as today’s shoppable recipe press release says “This feature is the first of many upgrades to the Tasty app that will continue to deepen Tasty’s partnership with Walmart and sweeten the shopping experience for the Tasty audience.”

This Chart Explains Why Grocers are Investing in Logistics and Delivery

We write a lot about automation in the grocery industry. Kroger is building out robot-driven smart warehouses and self-driving delivery. Albertsons is testing out micro-fulfillment centers. Walmart is trying out, well, all of the above. If you’ve ever wondered why retailers are investing so much in logistics and fulfillment, the answer is summed up nicely in the following blog post from data analytics firm Second Measure (h/t TechCrunch):

Most Americans regularly shop at just one or two grocery stores, so it’s not surprising that most online grocery shoppers also stick with their favorite service. This is in contrast to the meal delivery industry, where diners frequently hop between apps to get the broadest selection of restaurants.

With the exception of Instacart, no grocery delivery company shared more than 9 percent of another company’s customers in the second quarter of 2019.

Second Measure even provided this handy chart to illustrate how for grocers, maintaining loyalty is the name of the game.

Second Measure also found that 12 percent of grocery shoppers have tried online grocery shopping, and that number is up from 9 percent from June 2018. These results echo other recent market surveys showing that the number of online grocery shoppers is growing.

If grocery shoppers are loyal, and more of them will be shopping for their groceries online, then retailers who want to retain their customers over the coming years need to invest now in logistical systems to fulfill those orders. Hence automated warehouses and micro-fulfillment centers in the backs of stores. As those processes are automated, they can be tied into other investments grocers are making around delivery and curbside pickup. The faster a grocer can get you your order in a manner that fits your schedule (delivery or pickup), the more likely they can keep your business.

Walmart seems to be off to a good start. Second Measure also found that Walmart has already taken a big lead in online grocery shopping. As of June of this year, the mega retailer had 62 percent more online grocery customers than its closest competitor, Instacart.

It’s said that dominance perpetuates itself, in the case of Walmart and online grocery shopping, that certainly seems to be shaping up to be the case.

The “Middle Mile” in Food Delivery is Just Beginning

Perhaps the future of getting food and other goods delivered to your door isn’t actually in getting them to your door. A Walmart corporate blog post announcing the test of a new initiative with self-driving vehicle startup, Gatik, is the latest in this trend of moving goods between business locations. (hat tip to Grocery Dive)

Walmart’s post explained how it will pilot this self-driving vehicle program with Gatik:

In March, Arkansas passed legislation allowing for autonomous vehicles to operate in the state. With the help of Gatik, we’re making sure we stay on the cutting edge of grocery pickup by testing an autonomous vehicle to move customer orders on a two-mile route in Bentonville between two of our stores. We aim to learn more about the logistics of adding autonomous vehicles into our online grocery ecosystem, operation process changes and more opportunities to incorporate this emerging technology.

Gatik’s trucks will just be moving goods between stores along this “middle-mile” to get goods closer to your home, but not all the way there. Bloomberg reported on the promise of this middle-mile earlier this summer, writing:

As the buzz about human-carting robo-taxis starts to short-circuit, an unheralded segment of the driverless future is taking shape and showing promise: goods-moving robo-vans. Rather than serving up hot pizza pies or deploying headless robots to carry groceries to the doorstep, robo-vans travel on fixed routes from warehouse to warehouse or to a smaller pickup point, transporting packages to get them closer, but not all the way, to consumers.

Walmart is just the latest to explore the middle mile for getting people their stuff. When Uber unveiled its drone delivery program, one thing that stood out was the fact that drones wouldn’t fly burgers to people’s homes. Rather, drones would land at some kind of hub where Uber drivers would pick up the order and take it the last mile to people’s homes.

Zume Pizza operates in a similar fashion. Sifting through its vast amounts of data, Zume knows how many pizzas, and what types of pizza to make on a given night for any given geographic area it serves. Zume then pre-makes (not pre-cooks) those pizzas and sends them out in mobile kitchens parked in designated areas. As orders come in, pizzas are cooked and drivers come and pick up pizzas to take to people’s homes.

Amazon, being Amazon, is looking to bridge the middle-mile with the last mile. Spoon Founder Mike Wolf uncovered a patent this year for an autonomous Amazon robot that would live in people’s homes and automatically go and fetch packages delivered to a centralized pickup center.

The fact that big players like Walmart, Amazon and Uber are all looking at this type of two-step delivery logistics shows that we are at the beginning of the middle-mile, not the end.

Walmart, Target and Kroger Make Moves to Deliver Your Groceries Faster

Ever since Amazon bought Whole Foods in 2017, grocery chains big and small have upped their technology game to make sure they aren’t crushed by Bezos’ behemoth. The result has been more options than ever for grocery shopping, pickup and delivery.

This battle is far from over, and in the last week alone, grocery giants Walmart, Target and Kroger have made moves suggesting the fight has only just warmed up.

At the end of last week, TechCrunch uncovered Walmart’s Delivery Unlimited subscription service. For $98 a year, customers can order groceries for delivery without having to pay the $9.95 delivery fee.

Meanwhile, Target last week announced it was expanding same-day delivery for more than 65,000 items on Target.com for a flat fee of $9.99 per order. Customers must have a Shipt account (Target owns Shipt), which costs $99 per year.

Not to be outdone, Supermarket News reports Kroger has been quietly testing out a new service in its hometown of Cincinnati, OH called Kroger Rush that will deliver groceries in a half hour. Users must download the Kroger Rush app and pay a $5.95 fee per order, and the service seems to be aimed at people who want to order lunch or dinner online at the last minute. If that weren’t enough Kroger also broke ground on its first Ocado-powered smart shed, also in Cincinnati, which will use robots to facilitate faster grocery fulfillment and delivery.

For its part, Amazon has been relatively quiet lately in terms of hard announcements (well, if you don’t count its plans to launch a drone delivery service “within months”). The latest grocery rumblings we heard from the Seattle tech giant were around a possible Amazon-branded grocery store chain, though nothing official has been announced.

The bigger point in all of this is that grocery retailers are pushing innovation faster than ever. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that both Walmart and Kroger made our list of Food Tech 25 list of Companies Creating the Future of Food in 2019.

Perhaps things are heating up because it’s the start of summer (pardon the pun), and with kids home from school, more groceries are needed around the house. Whatever the reason, the big players are accelerating their friction-free shopping experiences that will bring food to your front door faster than ever.

Editor Roundtable Podcast: We Have Opinions on Tiny Dishwashers & Beyond Burgers

In case you didn’t already know, The Spoon team has lots of opinions. As you might guess, those opinions are especially pronounced when it comes to food and kitchen gadgets.

And so we decided to get together and get some things off our chest on this Editor Roundtable edition of the Food Tech Show.

Here’s what we talked about:

In addition to lots of opinions, we also share sound effects (or at least I do).

As always, please subscribe, play (and rate!) the podcast in Apple podcasts (or your favorite pod player), download direct or just click play below.

Now That They’re in Grocery Stores, Has the Robot Backlash Begun?

Both Walmart and Ahold Delhaize expanded their use of robots this year. However, according to two big news stories in less than a week, their entry into the workforce is off to a rocky start. Is the grocery industry in for a robo-backlash, and what that will mean for the automation in that sector?

In theory, robots are supposed to take over the manual and repetitive tasks, like taking inventory, scrubbing floors or spotting spills and messes. This, in turn, frees up humans for higher-level tasks and the time to engage in more customer service. To this end, in January, Ahold Delhaize ordered 500 Marty robots for its GIANT/MARTIN’S and Stop & Shop stores, and in April, Walmart expanded its use of in-store robots to 1,500 locations. But at least initially, the theory of robots being efficient helpers is running into some harsh realities.

Last Thursday, The Washington Post ran the story “As Walmart turns to robots, it’s the human workers who feel like machines.” In it, The Post chronicled some of the issues the bots have been having in stores including breaking down, functioning erratically, freaking out shoppers and frustrating employees. As The Post writes, it seems like robots are creating the very problem they are supposed to be fixing:

But the rise of the machines has had an unexpected side effect: Their jobs, some workers said, have never felt more robotic. By incentivizing hyper-efficiency, the machines have deprived the employees of tasks they used to find enjoyable. Some also feel like their most important assignment now is to train and babysit their often inscrutable robot colleagues.

Then today, less than a week after The Post story, comes a story from The New Food Economy titled “Stop & Shop now has big, goofy-looking robots patrolling its aisles. What, exactly, is the goal?” It too, talked of its “Marty” robots malfunctioning, having limited functionality to begin with (something we noted at the time of the announcement), and creeping out customers (perhaps because Stop & Shop gave the robots giant googly eyes).

Some of these potential missteps in implementing robots could be because we are still in version 1.0 of this automation experiment, and there seems to be a mismatch between the customer expectations, robot design, and the tasks being handed over to robots.

The robots being used in the front of store (fulfillment robots in the back of house are a different story) are industrial looking. They are tall, cold and utilitarian in design, and move about in a very, well, robotic manner. Shoppers aren’t used to sharing aisles with an indifferent machine that is beaming a light to scan shelves for missing inventory or just watching the floor (with giant googly eyes) to see if anyone has made a mess. The Marty robot, we should note, doesn’t clean up any mess; it just stops and points them out for humans to deal with.

One has to wonder just how long-term these problems with robots will be. There’s a raft of startups looking to retrofit stores with banks of high-tech cameras in the ceiling to facilitate cashierless checkout. These cameras, aided by computer vision and machine learning, could easily take over spotting empty shelves and alerting staff about spills without the need for a robot roving the store. Walmart already debuted this type of invisible inventory management at its IRL store in NY in April.

This eye in the sky approach alleviates any creepy factor associated with bumping into a giant robot as you pick out a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, but it also has you shopping in a surveillance supermarket. As for employee issues, this is why Albertsons brings labor unions to the table at the very start of any automation discussion.

In addition to this being a story about busted robots, this is also a story about change. As the saying goes, the only thing people hate more than change is things staying the same. The way we shop for groceries is undergoing and will continue to undergo big changes in the coming year. Robots will be a part of that, and there will be problems that arise. It will be up to the retailers to figure out the right balance to avoid a robot-driven backlash.

Walmart Launches In-Fridge Delivery, Will Shoppers Let Them In?

Today, Walmart announced Walmart InHome, a new service today that not only delivers your groceries but also puts them into your fridge while you’re away.

InHome will be available this fall for 1 million customers across Kansas City, MO, Pittsburgh, PA and Vero Beach, FLA (Florida gets everything). Walmart shoppers at participating stores will be able to select the InHome delivery when they place an order. Delivery people will be granted access through a homeowner’s existing smart home/lock set up. The Walmart delivery people will also be wearing connected cameras, and will livestream their delivery, which the customer can watch on the Walmart app.

There are some things Walmart didn’t call out specifically with today’s announcement. We don’t know how much an InHome delivery fee will be as opposed to standard delivery. And Walmart said the delivery drivers would undergo an “extensive training program,” but didn’t mention anything specifically about background checks. And the company didn’t say whether the livestream of the driver includes audio or two way communication.

This isn’t the first time Walmart has tried to go from grocery aisle to home fridge. About two years ago, the company partnered with smart lock maker August and third-party delivery provider Deliv for an in-home delivery service, but that obviously didn’t pan out as people can now use whatever smart locks they have to grant home access.

Walmart’s persistence however, comes at a time when its arch rival, Amazon, is trying to make deliveries into your home as well with its Key program. Rather than having drivers wear cameras, Amazon works with a series of approved smart locks and connected cameras to stream deliveries. Perhaps seeing that people were squeamish about letting strangers into their homes, Amazon has also launched delivery into a shopper’s garage (one step removed from the actual house), as well as into car trunks.

The question remains, however, for both Amazon and Walmart, exactly how many people will let strangers in their house (even while livestreamed) and into their fridge.

Walmart Canada Debuts New “Fast Lane” Checkout Option

Oh, Canada, your newest Walmart “Urban Supercentre Concept” in Toronto will feature a host of new retail concepts including a “Fast Lane” version of cashierless checkout for people using the My Walmart app.

According to a press announcement sent out this week, this new Walmart Supercentre lets shoppers use the My Walmart app to scan items as they shop. When they are ready to check out, shoppers go to the Fast Lane and scan a barcode on the app and their credit card on file is automatically charged. The store will have additional associates on hand to help, and, presumably, make sure you aren’t stealing anything.

This isn’t Walmart’s first bout with cashierless checkout. As Grocery Dive notes, last year the retailer had tried expanding its version of “Scan & Go” to 125 stores in the U.S., but later ditched the program because people weren’t using it and the technology didn’t scale. Elsewhere in the Walmart universe, it’s subsidiary Sam’s Club launched a Sam’s Club Now store at the end of last year that required the Scan & Go app to shop there.

More recently, Walmart launched its IRL store in Levittown, NY, which is outfitted with banks of cameras and high-tech sensors to monitor inventory in real time. While IRL didn’t launch with cashierless checkout, the fact that Walmart invested so much in computer vision capabilities for the store suggests that type of functionality isn’t too far away.

Walmart’s moves come at a time when cashierless checkout is heating up. In addition to Amazon Go, which pioneered the field (and was forced into accepting cash), there are a number of well-funded startups looking to retrofit grocery stores with cashierless checkout capabilities.

While cashierless checkout is still a ways away from being mainstream, Walmart isn’t sitting idly by (its proactive nature is one of the reasons we named the company to our Food Tech 25 list). Scan & Go feels like an intermediary step, but it’s a step in the right direction towards our inevitably cashierless checkout future.

Walmart Unveils New AI-Powered Store to Monitor Inventory (But No Cashierless Checkout)

Walmart officially took the wraps off its new high-tech store today, which features thousands of cameras powering computer vision and an AI platform that monitors in-store inventory in real time.

Located in the Levittown, NY Walmart store, the Intelligent Retail Lab (IRL)(har, har) sounds a lot like Amazon Go–lots of cameras built into the store constantly monitoring products on the shelves–but there are some key differences.

First, Walmart’s computer vision application is just for inventory management, so no cashierless checkout for now. Instead, the cameras watch when an item is gone from a shelf and notify a worker to replenish the item quickly. According to the AP, which got a look at the store, the cameras can also detect spills and sees when shopping carts are running low.

Second, Walmart is already running IRL at scale. The New York store is 50,000 square feet, compared to the roughly 2,000 – 3,000 square feet of Amazon Go stores. The difference, though, as noted earlier, is that while IRL may be able to monitor inventory on shelves at scale, it’s not doing cashierless payments…yet. Walmart told the AP that it’s not currently using the technology to track movements of shoppers or for facial recognition, though it’s hard to imagine Walmart developing and deploying all this technology just to make sure there isn’t a gap in the Cheerios display.

Walmart’s launch of IRL will probably turn up the heat on rival grocers to implement their own such systems so they can achieve similar efficiencies. Thankfully, there are a ton of startups like Trigo Vision, Grabango, Standard Cognition and AWM looking to outfit stores with banks of cameras and AI for cashierless checkout and inventory management.

IRL also comes just weeks after Walmart announced it was expanding its use of shelf scanning robots to manage inventory. Those robots seem to be more of a stopgap measure as Walmart works out any bugs IRL encounters as it runs IRL (in real life).

Regardless, IRL, with all its high-tech cameras and AI gives us a (computer) vision into the retailer’s future.