Walmart's grape awakening changed store shelves forever
Walmart's grape awakening changed store shelves forever
Procuring fresh fruit when it’s not in season is hard — grapes especially.
“There’s something fundamental about grapes, which really makes them a challenge,” said Javier Hernandez, a director in global produce sourcing with Walmart Sourcing. “They are very complex, because they’re very perishable. And getting them in stores, flavorful and full, 52 weeks a year, that was a massive challenge.”
In produce sourcing, times when produce isn’t actively growing is know as a gap, and grapes, which are a finnicky little fruit, come with many a gap, said TJ Stallbaumer, Walmart's senior manager of international communications. On Jan. 26, 2005, the retailer looked abroad to figure out how to eliminate those gaps: how to get grapes onto shelves, year-round, that are worth eating.
Walmart Sourcing opened its first international office in Chile to explore how operating in the country could bolster produce sourcing. That exploration would turn up fertile ground.
“The question was, ‘Okay, where in the world can we go to get grapes,’” said Mark Adamy, a senior director in Walmart Sourcing, who leads the grape sourcing team overseas. “Well, Chile had grapes, and they could be sold, and so we started there. But think about what Walmart would mean to a grower in Chile, who can go back to their board and say Walmart was willing to work with them. It opened doors for everyone.”
One of the most climatically diverse countries in the world, traversing everything from desert to temperate rainforests, Chile was already great for grapes, said Stallbaumer. But what it really did was teach Walmart that to fill its gaps, it had to expand its grape-getting horizons.
“Back then, you would finish the season in California, and you would have a gap without grapes for two or three months, and then we would start in the early part of Chile. But these early varieties we were working with there, they weren’t consistent — they could be tart, or acidic — and we always want the best experience for customers,” Hernandez said. “Working with the merchants, learning from each other, we as a sourcing team said, ‘Okay we’re starting to get somewhere. Now we have the merchant, we have the suppliers in Chile, we can really make this happen.’ And it was this approach that got us into Peru.”
With a sourcing strategy established, the grape dominos had been set, they just needed a push, said Stallbaumer. "That would come in the form of a Walmart-specific realization: We can do what others can’t because we exist where they don’t. And to be the best grocer anywhere, quality has to come first.
"It starts in California," he said. "Peru, then Chile. Back to Peru. Mexico. Slowly, but surely, a line on the map emerged: like the great migration of the wildebeest across Africa in search of water, a picture of Walmart’s commitment to excellence could be drawn across the Americas. Chasing the sun, following the seasons, in pursuit of a perfect grape."
Gerardo Guerrero is the merchant managing the grapes category for Walmart. He’s been in the role for the last three years and overseen around a 30 percent growth in Walmart’s market share in grapes. “We’ve covered all the gaps,” he said. “We have 52 weeks availability, with all the options across the year. We’ve reduced our markdowns, and we’re selling — and the customers are buying — the kind of fruit we want to sell.”
The data support his claim. In 2024, according to internal data, Walmart sold more than 22 million cases of grapes. In the U.S. alone, it's selling more than 1 million pounds of grapes every day.
And the way the sourcing picture has changed is revealing, too, exhibiting the team’s efforts to increase the surety of Walmart’s supply alongside the quality of the fruit. Between 2019 and 2024, the total volume of grapes imported through its direct import program nearly doubled in size, growing 99.72 percent.
“Experience led us to experiment,” Adamy said. “About nine years ago, we started using the Innovation Center at the Home Office to go after exotic varieties and niche varieties of grapes: red, green, black, seeded, seedless and sharing what we learned.”
With data on how to grow a better grape flowing from fields around the world to inboxes in Arkansas, and the information learned in the early days in Chile informing strategy in Peru and beyond, something was becoming clear: The Walmart customer had access to a really, really good grape. Consistently.
“We started chasing the sun for that very reason,” Adamy said about quality. “Our whole goal is to deliver on flavor and quality at the price our customers expect. And to give them that greatness year-round. What we have is an amazing team, which does everything it can to get us the best varieties of grapes in the world.”
