News Roundup: Walmart Taps Salesforce, New Age Eats Sells Pilot Facility
Walmart Partners With Salesforce To Juice Delivery Sales
On Thursday, Walmart announced it has signed a deal with Salesforce to help the retail giant boost digital sales of its GoLocal delivery service. The partnership is expected to go live in the spring and will also benefit Walmart’s curbside delivery service, Store Assist.
Both Walmart Commerce Technologies Store Assist local fulfillment app and Walmart GoLocal local delivery solutions will be available to retailers through Salesforce’s AppExchange. The partnership will provide a better customer experience for “Buy Online and Pick Up In-Store” purchases for Store Assist. Salesforce’s platform will also make managing same-day deliveries for retailers more efficient and is expected to drive profitability for the GoLocal program.
“Through this partnership, retailers can leverage the same innovative and scalable technologies that power Walmart’s pickup and delivery experiences,” said Anshu Bhardwaj, SVP technology strategy and commercialization at Walmart Global Technology. “Together with Salesforce, retailers can scale their business and deliver the personalized, convenient experiences shoppers expect.”
Launched in August 2021, GoLocal is Walmart’s “white-label, delivery-as-a-service offering for businesses,” according to the company’s website. It was conceived as a way to cater to Walmart clients during the pandemic who needed the additional convenience of the retailer’s custom delivery infrastructure.
New Age Eats Selling Pilot Facility
Cell-cultured meat company New Age Eats announced last week that it would be selling its 90% completed, food pilot manufacturing facility in Alameda, California. Founder Brian Spears posted the news on LinkedIn saying that “plans change” and the company was “walking away from significant investment because, well, we have to.”
The startup food tech company announced the building of the 20,000 sq. ft. pilot manufacturing facility in September 2021 after netting $25M in Series A funding round. At the time, the production facility was expected to be operational by fall 2022. In the post, Spears said the company would “take the best offer in the next few weeks!”
New Age has not released any other details of what this might mean for the future of the company. Spears told NOSH that he would presently not be able to provide any other details on the decision.
Initially launched as New Age Meats in 2018 as a hybrid plant-based and cell-cultured protein company focused on animal-free pork, the company rebranded last summer dropping the “m” and adding the tagline “The Joy of Pig.”
Beyond Meat Loses Another Executive
After over four years with the company, longtime Beyond Meat branding executive Beth Moskowitz announced that her last day at the plant-based meat maker was Wednesday, according to an internal company memo.
Moskowitz joined the company in late 2018 as chief creative officer and was later named chief brand officer in early 2021, according to her LinkedIn profile.
“I look forward to returning to my roots as an investor, advisor, and creative partner, but most importantly, the opportunity to be totally present for the many milestones my family will celebrate in 2023 and the coming years,” she wrote in a company email first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
The company told NOSH that it had “hired a marketing executive to lead our global marketing efforts who will begin early February.” Moskowitz did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
The news comes after a difficult 2022 for the plant-based meat maker where multiple executives left the company.
In September, the company was forced to suspend and later let go of its COO Doug Ramsey after Ramsey allegedly bit another man’s nose after a college football game. Days later, Beyond’s chief supply chain officer announced he was leaving the company.
The alt meat company also fought a lawsuit filed by co-manufacturing partner Don Lee Farms in 2022 as well as a slew of class action cases over products’ purported nutritional value. On the company’s third quarter earnings call in November, Beyond Meat CEO Ethan Brown addressed the company’s plummeting sales saying he would be taking “aggressive measures” to return the company to more positive earnings results. The company share price has lost over three-quarters of its value in the last year.
