Brief:

• Walmart partnered with BuzzFeed on shoppable recipes that let customers buy ingredients seen in the digital publisher's Tasty cooking videos. Viewers can add entire ingredients lists to Walmart's online shopping cart with one click in Tasty's iOS app, which offers a searchable library of 4,000 demonstration videos, the grocery retailer announced.
• After filling their digital shopping carts with ingredients, customers can order the items for home delivery or curbside pickup from thousands of Walmart stores nationwide. They can also swap out ingredients or remove items they already have before completing the purchase.
• The Tasty app directs shoppers to the Walmart grocery app or mobile website, which has geo-specific features that map a product's availability to the user's closest store. Walmart and BuzzFeed worked with technology developer Northfork to integrate Walmart's mobile site and app with Tasty's recipe content, per the announcement.

Insight:

Walmart's collaboration with BuzzFeed aims to create a seamless mobile experience for consumers who find inspiration from Tasty cooking videos and seek the convenience of online ordering for pickup or delivery. More than two-thirds of BuzzFeed's audience has made a Tasty recipe, the announcement noted, pointing to the large group of consumers who tune into the online video programming and may be interested in fresh ways to ease their shopping journey through a mobile device.

The integration between the Tasty app and Walmart's platform deepens the retailer's relationship with BuzzFeed. The companies last year formed a licensing pact that spurred the sale of more than 4 million Tasty-branded kitchen products. BuzzFeed and Walmart plan to expand the partnership to sell Tasty-branded licensed products in the party supplies, dry grocery, deli and frozen meats departments, according to the announcement, suggesting that consumers are responding positively to the deeper relationship between the established companies.

Such licensing deals can be significant moneymakers for publishers like BuzzFeed that have sought to build out other lines of revenue amid greater competition for ad dollars.

As Walmart seeks new ways to pivot from Amazon's growing threat in the grocery business, a collaboration with BuzzFeed's Tasty brand appears to be a strategic move to appeal to mobile shoppers. Like Walmart, traditional grocers have introduced digital services to let consumers shop by recipe, expediting the shopping journey from inspiration to checkout.

Smart kitchen app Innit in April partnered with more than 30 U.S. retailers including Walmart, Kroger, Safeway and Target to sell groceries based on ingredients. The Innit Personalized Shoppable Recipes app lets people make customizable meal kits with ingredients based on their dietary preferences. The same month, ShopRite partnered with digital recipe network Chicory to let shoppers order ingredients from its 3.6 million recipes for pickup or delivery.