Adam Levy, The Motley Fool, March 9, 2018
Walmart (NYSE: WMT) has high expectations for its e-commerce business in 2018. The company maintained its guidance for 40% online sales growth for the full year, even when fourth-quarter results came in well below that benchmark. Management is particularly confident that its investments in online grocery ordering will spur the growth of its online sales.
One such investment is in meal kits -- semi-prepared packages of food with everything needed to make a recipe at home. Blue Apron (NYSE: APRN) was the pioneering force in delivering meal kits in the United States, but it's recently been surpassed by German competitor HelloFresh. Both appear to be in trouble as Walmart enters the market, planning to provide meal kits for online ordering and pickup at over 2,000 of its stores across the country by the end of 2018.
Walmart operates over 3,500 Supercenters in the U.S., and most of them have some prepared foods for sale, which means they're already set up to prepare and package meal kits.
Which means that Walmart can bring a meal-kit product to market and scale it extremely quickly. It's testing the meal kits with just 250 stores, but plans to expand the program to every online grocery pickup location by the end of the year.
It can then pass those savings onto customers -- Walmart has priced the meal kits between $8 and $15 for two servings. Meanwhile, Blue Apron costs about $11 per serving.
More:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/walmart-getting-serious-meal-kits-122100851.html
