Walmart is pushing into restaurant delivery. Its first goal: Getting you a sub sandwich on demand.
The big box retailer has been delivering meals from Subway restaurants located in Walmart stores for about a month, said Tracy Poulliot, vice president of e-commerce and marketing at Walmart. The retailer aims to have the delivery option live at all 1,400 Subways within Walmart stores by late July.
Business Insider first reported that Walmart was testing restaurant delivery.
Customers can place Subway orders for express delivery on their own using the Walmart app, the company said. In testing, though, many customers combined restaurant orders with groceries and last-minute items that they need into a single order, Poulliot said.
"We're seeing a lot of customers purchase their Subway meals in addition to their groceries," she told reporters Thursday at the company's headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas.
Walmart has spent years building its delivery business. The big box retailer now offers delivery in hours — or minutes — on everything from bananas to garden hoses from its 4,600 stores in the US. It uses a mix of independent contractors who work through Walmart's Spark delivery app and store employees to pick orders and deliver them to customers' homes.
Subway has had locations within Walmart stores for about 20 years, Damien Harmon, president of Subway North America, said in a video shown during Thursday's presentation.
Harmon relayed the experience of one Subway franchisee that operates restaurants within several Walmart locations, who said the delivery option is "a new avenue for growth and gives us another way to meet our customers where they are."
Executives on Thursday left the door open to expanding Walmart's restaurant delivery.
It's considering an integration with Sparky, Walmart's AI shopping assistant, which would allow customers to place restaurant orders with a simple AI prompt, Poulliot said.
Other national restaurants, such as Dunkin' Donuts and McDonald's, as well as regional chains such as California-based Wienerschnitzel, also have locations in some Walmart stores.
Walmart also sees a path to expand the delivery service to restaurants beyond its stores, said Greg Cathey, Walmart's senior vice president of digital fulfillment transformation.
"You can draw a circle around most Walmart stores, and almost all quick-service restaurant brands are located within five miles," he said.
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Dominick Reuter is a senior retail reporter for Business Insider, primarily covering Walmart, Target, and Costco. His stories tend to focus on issues and trends that affect employees and customers.Prior to joining BI in 2019, Dominick worked for more than a decade as an independent photojournalist covering a wide range of stories for global wire services and newspapers, including Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, and Agence France-Presse.Dominick studied photojournalism at Boston University and later earned a Masters in business and economics journalism from Columbia University.If you're an employee or customer with a story to share, please contact me via email or text/call/Signal at 646-768-4750.
Alex Bitter is a senior retail reporter covering the gig economy, food, and retail. His work focuses major gig delivery and ride-hailing apps, including Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, and Walmart's Spark. He is interested in everything from what it's like to work on the apps to the companies' business strategies.Some of his recent stories feature gig workers who have been deactivated on the apps, DoorDash hiring traditional employees to make deliveries, gig workers' use of bots, and gig work expanding into new professions, such as nursing.Alex has also written about Aldi's US expansion, Starbucks' turnaround efforts, and the fallout from Kraft-Heinz's budget cutting. Convenience store chain Sheetz ended its "smile policy" after his reporting.Before joining Insider in September 2020, he wrote about consumer and retail companies for S&P Global Market Intelligence. He's a graduate of the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa and grew up on the Big Island.Alex lives in the Washington, DC, area, where you can find him studying ancient coins or searching for Civil War artifacts with his metal detector in his free time.Got a tip? Reach out at [email protected] or via encrypted messaging app Signal at +1 (808) 854-4501.
