Walmart Canada plans to acquire Foodmaestro, a Toronto-based digital start-up that will offer customers more choice, transparency and personalised content when they shop online.

Foodmaestro is a data platform serving retailers and consumer package goods companies across Europe and North America with the capability to turn data into usable attributes. The platform delivers transparency and digital experiences for customers focused on health and diet and offers customised content activation, such as meal planning.

The integration is part of enhancing Walmart Canada’s ecommerce experience as it transforms to be an omnichannel retailer. This acquisition would allow Walmart to offer more personalisation capability for its customers, such as highlighting safe products for those with food allergies or healthier options for people living with diabetes.

“We are very excited to welcome Foodmaestro to the Walmart Canada family,” said Horacio Barbeito, CEO of 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 personalised choices, which helps them live better.”

Foodmaestro’s digital platform processes over 14 million product attributes, 300,000 search requests and six 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, CEO of 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’s talent bench 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, Walmart executive vice president. “I am energised 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.”

This is Walmart Canada’s first acquisition since the pandemic.

Walmart Canada operates a chain of more than 400 stores nationwide serving 1.5 million customers each day. Its online store is visited by more than 1.5 million customers daily. With more than 100,000 staff, Walmart is one of Canada’s largest employers.

Foodmaestro is a data platform that enables retailers to execute digital strategies in support of increasing food transparency and empowering healthier eating. It enriches data to drive meaningful connections between CPGs, retailers and consumers to provide customers a simple, personalised shopping experience.

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