Walmart already brings groceries, prescriptions, and household basics to your door in as little as 30 minutes. Now it will throw in lunch via a new food-delivery service. Starting this month, customers can add a freshly made Subway sandwich to their Walmart delivery order—the first restaurant meal the retailer has folded into its same-day service.
Customers in select markets can now order a Subway meal directly through the Walmart app or Walmart.com and have it arrive in as little as 30 minutes—on its own or tucked alongside the groceries, prescriptions, and household staples that are already available through the retailer’s Express Delivery service. This marks Walmart’s first restaurant integration inside Express Delivery, and if it succeeds, it could expand to include food from other restaurant chains.
The rollout is live in select stores across Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas, and Walmart says it will expand to roughly 1,400 locations by the end of the summer. Orders carry a flat Express Delivery fee, which is $10 for Walmart+ members and roughly $20 for nonmembers. Subway’s prices match its in-restaurant menus.
The average shopper, Walmart estimates, makes around 21 meal decisions a week. “Sometimes they want more convenient options than are available even within our stores today, especially for delivery,” says Tracy Poulliot, EVP of eCommerce and Marketing for Walmart U.S.
Subway makes sense as Walmart’s first restaurant partner. It’s Walmart’s largest in-store restaurant tenant, with a relationship dating back to 2004 and more than 1,400 counters operating inside Walmart stores. “It was just a natural partnership and starting point for us on this journey,” Poulliot says. “Together we serve millions of customers across the U.S.” Orders are made fresh at those in-store locations—the same Subway you’d pass while walking through the retail giant’s front doors—and then picked up and dispatched with the rest of a customer’s Walmart run.
How AI makes the 30-minute sandwich possible
Getting a hot sandwich to a customer’s door in half an hour is no small feat. A sandwich that’s assembled too early goes soggy; a delivery driver who arrives before the food is ready wastes precious time.
But Walmart, which has spent years building out its delivery operations, is confident that it can get the timing right. “Our driver network and our last-mile delivery capabilities are scaled nationally, and we’ve been doing this for long enough that we’ve been able to refine the experience,” Poulliot says.
The company is now using artificial intelligence to fine-tune the system further. For restaurant orders specifically, Walmart is using AI-powered technology to “coordinate prep times for the restaurants, how long those orders will take to pick up, [and] how long the delivery will take to bring to the consumer,” Poulliot explains. This ensures that the sandwich is made, bagged, and on its way at the right moment.
This new restaurant-delivery option marries Walmart’s delivery knowledge with Subway’s understanding of how to keep food fresh in transit. “When we combine those two ecosystems of data together, we’re able to make really informed decisions,” Poulliot says. And they’re able to make them quickly: The company moved from concept to launch in about nine months.
Taking aim at the delivery giants
The launch nudges Walmart into a business dominated by DoorDash and Uber Eats, and it deepens the retailer’s rivalry with Amazon, which offers a free Grubhub+ membership as a perk for Prime subscribers.
Walmart is approaching the category from a different starting point. It isn’t building a restaurant marketplace so much as adding prepared food onto its existing app, which already delivers a wide variety of products. (Its $10 minimum delivery fee means that most people will use the Subway meal service in conjunction with other orders they’re placing.)
Customers who shop via the app, Poulliot says, will see Subway surface on the homepage or as a “contextual nudge” mid-order. In pilots, early demand has been strong, she says.
If this experiment works, Walmart may consider partnering with other restaurants. Poulliot declined to commit to specific partners but left the door open. “We have additional tenant locations that we plan to expand to over time,” she says. “What we do [with] locations outside our stores is really going to be driven by how our customers respond.”
If Walmart can move hot food across the last mile as reliably as it moves a gallon of milk, it won’t just be competing with DoorDash and Uber Eats—it will have turned its 4,600 stores into a delivery network that’s hard for any company (Amazon included) to match.