Walmart Canada makes a move to up personalization online

Walmart Canada has made its first acquisition since the pandemic, building up its e-commerce capabilities that offers a more personalized experience.

The retailer will acquire Foodmaestro, a Toronto-based data platform that serves retailers and CPGs across Europe and North America, turning large amounts of data into usable attributes.  The platform delivers transparency and rich digital experiences for customers focused on health and diet and offers customized content activation, such as meal planning, per the company

The integration aims to enhance Walmart Canada's e-commerce experience, allowing Walmart Canada to highlight safe products for those with food allergies or healthier options for people living with diabetes and other personalized shopping services.

"We are very excited to welcome Foodmaestro to the Walmart Canada family," said Horacio Barbeito, president and CEO, Walmart Canada. "Together we will continue elevating the online experience for our customers by sharing knowledge, investing in resources, people and product transparency. This enhancement to our online experience will allow our customers to make healthier personalized choices, which helps them live better."

Foodmaestro's digital platform processes over 14 million product attributes, 300,000 search requests and 6 million product validations in real-time each day. The service helps retailers who want to differentiate customer experience and deepen relationships with customers through enriched dietary information. Foodmaestro also enables its clients to provide their customers with greater product transparency and trusted information-beyond the label, through SmartLabel.  

"Having spent the past several years pioneering digital transparency and helping shoppers around the world to find the right foods, we are thrilled to have been invited to join a family as prestigious as Walmart," said Jaed Khan, founder and CEO, Foodmaestro. "We have worked with Walmart for almost four years now and this investment signals Walmart's continued commitment and increased focus to help provide consumers with the transparency they need to make informed decisions about the products they buy. We are tremendously excited about the future."

Acquiring Foodmaestro will deepen Walmart Canada's talent by bringing in the Foodmaestro experts, including engineers and health and wellness talent. 

"The acquisition of this talented team of experts from Foodmaestro is a big part of our transformation at Walmart Canada," said John Bayliss, EVP, chief transformation officer. "I am energized by what the future brings with our talented team of engineers and health and wellness resources working together to make the online experience even better for our customers."