Walmart Offers Snapchat AR Lens to Encourage Healthy Food Choices

The collaborative trifecta being launched by Walmart lets mobile users find recipes and make meals with just the ingredients they have at home in their refrigerators and pantries, as well as allows them to order supplementary products directly from Walmart directly through the app. Called “Snap Scan & Shop,” the novel lens lets any consumer with Snapchat installed on their phone point their camera to scan the food they have available and then taps the library of healthy recipes on cooking site Allrecipes to come up with suggestions. 

If consumers are missing items,  Snapchat’s innovative computer vision-powered and shoppable AR lens also connects shoppers to recommendations on where to buy the necessary healthy ingredients from Walmart. The tool offers a glimpse of the next generation of not just at-home cooking, but at-home shopping, and comes as Walmart continues its efforts to grow its e-commerce sales and successfully compete with other retailers like Amazon. The meal and recipe solution can engage with shoppers at any point along their meal preparation journey, and provide a suite of hybrid assistance capabilities, from inspiration to instruction to shoppability. 

Social shopping and social commerce in general is a rapidly growing landscape, and through this collaborative activation with Meredith’s Allrecipes and Snapchat Walmart hopes to take advantage of social commerce’s unique ability to shorten the distance between inspiration and purchase for consumers. Millennial and Gen Z consumers in particular, famously known for being glued to their connected devices and smartphones, will make up 62% of global social commerce spending within three years according to a study by Accenture. Popular platforms such as TikTok, Pinterest, Instagram, and yes, Snapchat, are powering this explosive growth by adding and integrating more and more tools to enable a seamless and native commerce experience in their apps. 

Advances in Image recognition are just one piece of the puzzle as retailers seek to meet consumers across more touchpoints and platforms to drive an ever-more convenient shopping experience. It isn’t the first time Walmart has dipped into shoppable food media either. Last year, as covered by PSFK, the retailer partnered with Kraft-Heinz and Eko for a series of shoppable cooking videos. The initiatives are all a part of the brand’s overall strategy of providings its impressive customer base with technology-forward solutions for healthy and convenient eating. 

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This article originally appeared in the PSFK iQ report, Reframing The Store As A Health & Wellness Experience.