Walmart Has Discovered the Real Power of Grocery — Getting America to Come Back
By ISN Editorial Staff | International Supermarket News edited by Riad Beladi
Walmart’s grocery story is becoming much more interesting than simply being the largest player in the American food market.
The real value of grocery may be what happens between one shopping trip and the next.
Consumers need milk, eggs, fresh food, drinks and everyday essentials repeatedly. That gives Walmart something many retailers spend enormous amounts of money trying to create: a reason for millions of customers to return week after week.
Recent analysis puts food and beverages at roughly 60% of Walmart’s retail business, while its share of US food-and-beverage spending has reached around 21%.
ISN Investigates: Walmart’s grocery advantage may not simply be about selling more food. It may be about creating a continuous customer relationship that reaches into almost every part of the Walmart ecosystem.
A grocery visit can become a Walmart+ relationship, a pharmacy visit, an online order, an advertising opportunity or a marketplace purchase. The food aisle becomes the starting point rather than the final destination.
And this is where Walmart’s data strategy becomes particularly interesting.
Walmart Data Ventures is developing Scintilla into a broader commerce intelligence platform, giving suppliers a more integrated view of their Walmart business. The system is designed to connect customer behaviour, business performance and store-level information, with AI helping identify changes and opportunities faster.
Walmart says the next stage is to move from insight to action. If a product is at risk of going out of stock in 50 stores, for example, Scintilla is being designed to help move directly from identifying the problem towards replenishment. Its in-store capabilities are also being developed to give supplier representatives data and recommendations while they are actually in stores.
This could change the relationship between a supermarket and its suppliers.
Traditionally, the retailer sold the shelf and the supplier studied the result. Walmart is increasingly building a system where the retailer can see what is happening across the shelf, understand the customer signals behind it and then give suppliers tools to respond.
That is a much bigger development than another grocery market-share battle.
ISN believes Walmart’s emerging advantage could be the combination of frequency and intelligence: grocery brings the customer back, while data increasingly tells Walmart and its suppliers what to do when that customer arrives.
The supermarket may therefore be evolving from a place where people buy food into a continuously updated commercial system — with the grocery basket providing the connection.
