Safer, Healthier Food & Other Products

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S G | Last Updated: June 14, 2022

We aim to improve the lives of millions of people around the world by providing access to safer, healthier, more affordable food and products; educating and engaging people on food safety, nutrition and product safety; and facilitating industry innovation to promote access to safer, healthier options for food and other products (for example, sustainable chemistry).

Sam Walton founded Walmart in 1962 to meet the needs of communities for access to consumer goods.

Nearly 60 years later, Walmart’s ability to provide safer, more affordable food and other products for customer households around the world is core to our business success and to our mission to help people save money and live better.

Our customers, suppliers and other stakeholders expect us to create value for our business and for society by upholding high standards of safety for the products in our assortment; educating and engaging consumers and the public on food safety, nutrition and product safety; and encouraging innovation in product development and distribution to promote access to safer, healthier options.

Providing safer, healthier and more affordable food and other products is central to our mission to help people save money and live better. Our efforts include continuously strengthening policies, standards and practices around the safety and quality of our assortment, while engaging our customers and working with others on industry-wide efforts in consumer education, food and product safety, and increasing access to the food and products people want and need.

• Food Safety: Walmart is committed to providing safer, higher-quality food for our customers. In addition to promoting a positive food safety culture within our organization, we engage suppliers, coalitions, research institutions and others in our industry to foster a safer food system.
• Affordable, Nutritious Food: Through our omni-channel food offering, customer engagement, food donations and other philanthropic investments of Walmart and the Walmart Foundation, we aim to make it easier for people to choose healthier food options.
• Product Safety: Walmart is committed to providing our customers and members with access to safer, compliant and more affordable merchandise, while pursuing initiatives to promote safer use and formulation of products across the industry (e.g., responsible marketing efforts, opioid stewardship, sustainable chemistry).

Food Safety | Affordable, Nutritious Food | Product Safety

Walmart is committed to providing safer, higher-quality food for our customers; by doing that we earn and maintain their trust. In addition to promoting a positive food safety culture within our organization, we engage suppliers, coalitions, research institutions and others in our industry to foster a safer food system through our Global Food Safety Compliance Program.

Global Food Safety Compliance Team: Walmart maintains a Global Food Safety Compliance Program to assist Walmart associates and suppliers in meeting food safety expectations. This program is led by our Global Food Safety Compliance team of experienced food safety professionals. Under the leadership of our Vice President of Global Food Safety more than 100 food safety practitioners and scientists oversee food safety for our manufacturing operations, retail stores, transportation, warehouses, and e-commerce operations as well as the supplier food safety program. Among other responsibilities this team assesses food safety risks, sets standards, implements and trains associates on the required controls, and monitors the effectiveness of the program.

Policies & Standards: Our Global Food Safety Compliance team develops policies, standards, procedures and controls designed to prevent and remediate practices that do not meet our requirements. Food safety expectations are set forth in our Code of Conduct which was published in 2021, and our Global Food Safety Policy, which was updated in 2021. Both require associates to follow role-specific requirements relevant to food safety. Our Standards for Suppliers require that suppliers take steps to ensure the food they provide us is safe, meet all quality and technical requirements and initiate voluntary and mandatory product recalls where appropriate. Walmart’s current food safety compliance system is designed to meet all regulatory standards where we operate. Walmart is presently enhancing its food safety management system to ensure that Walmart standards go beyond regulatory requirements and provide a globally consistent, high standard of safety and compliance for our customers. The Global Food Safety Compliance team approaches food safety with a mind-set of collaboration and continuous improvement. For example, subject matter experts in food safety science have collaborated with business teams to develop risk-based standards for suppliers to incorporate food safety by design, and are in the process of implementing them with market teams.

Third-party Audits: We hold ourselves accountable by assessing compliance through regular independent, third-party food safety audits of our stores and clubs. We conduct these risk-based audits to verify that our stores and clubs are operating safely and in compliance with our own standards, processes and expected behaviors and with applicable laws and regulations. In 2021, we expanded the scope of our independent food safety audits at our stores and clubs globally by consolidating our pest and wider food safety audits, enhancing e-commerce focus, streamlining allergen management, and heightening importance of sanitation, hazard analysis and risk-based preventive controls requirements. During the transition we conducted more than 70,000 audits, as we refined the new program ready for full deployment in 2022.

GFSI Engagement: We have long supported the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) as an important part of our effort to promote food safety among suppliers. Walmart is currently active in a number of working groups within GFSI and focuses on supporting science-based food safety audits and GFSI in its aim to strengthen its programs.

The GFSI benchmarked audits are an important requirement within our private brand supplier approval program. In addition, we have 25 certified Walmart-owned manufacturing facilities and select national brand suppliers are also required to be certified to one of the GFSI-recognized schemes. We have also certified 25 distribution centers with more working toward certification.

Walmart also embraces innovation and technology to improve supply chain transparency and traceability of food. In 2018, we invited two of our competitors and seven of our suppliers to build a blockchain ecosystem with us. For Walmart U.S. and Sam’s Club U.S., all of our fresh leafy green suppliers are on the blockchain platform. This helps us build a smarter, safer, more sustainable food system, enables faster outbreak investigations and has the potential to reduce the scope of a recall and its impact on food waste.

Associate & Customer Engagement: Walmart associates celebrated the World Health Organization’s Food Safety Day with awareness campaigns that included messages from senior executives, contests, webinar events, and posters. For example, in Africa, certain business teams were recognized, based on how they were performing against food safety metrics. In, India, Flipkart sent food safety messages to customers through posts in websites and apps. For the Walmart Global Food Safety Compliance team, experts were invited to share their knowledge via a series of monthly lectures that were made available to all members and additional stakeholders.

Convening Cross-Industry Professionals to Tackle Pressing Food Safety Challenges: In 2016, Walmart and the Walmart Foundation announced a commitment to invest $25 million over five years to support research projects in applied science, education and communications that strengthen food safety knowledge and practices in China.

As part of this commitment, Walmart created the Walmart Food Safety Collaboration Center (WFSCC) to focus on innovation, education and policy support in the food safety system. The Center brings together stakeholders across industry, government, academia and trade associations to address the root causes of foodborne illness outbreaks—among other efforts. In 2021, Walmart and the Walmart Foundation met our original investment goal of $25 million.

The WFSCC organized the Global Food Safety Innovation Pipeline competition to identify critical food safety, sustainability and wellness issues, spur fresh thinking and fast-track promising solutions. The 2021 competition drew 82 applicants from across Asia, Africa, Europe, the Middle East, North America, and Oceania. Selected finalists will share their solutions during the innovation showcase in Summer 2022.

For more information on our food safety-related initiatives and work in China, please visit walmartfoodsafetychina.com.

Providing and improving access to affordable, nutritious food is central to Walmart’s core business as well as its philanthropic efforts around the world. For example, in FY2022, over 55% of our Walmart U.S. net sales were from grocery items and over 63% of our Sam’s Club net sales were from grocery and consumables. Our efforts to provide more affordable, nutritious food include increasing our assortment of nutritious food, improving access to nutritious food, and engaging and educating customers and communities on making better food choices.

Over ten years ago, we introduced our Walmart U.S. Great for You icon for private-label products to make it easier for customers to build healthier diets. The icon serves as a guide to help people make incremental changes to their diet by encouraging more nutritious food choices. Items with this label meet rigorous nutrition criteria informed by the latest nutrition science and authoritative guidance from the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA), U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and National Academies of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine). Our Great for You standard has been evaluated by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and scored in the top tier of nutritional standards for highest consistency with the DGAs. As of May 3, 2022, approximately 30% of items in fresh produce and food items across the Great Value, Marketside and Parent’s Choice private brands qualify for the Great for You icon.⁹ In 2021 we began work to update our Great for You nutrition criteria to match the 2020-2025 USDA's Dietary Guidelines for Americans, and we aim to benchmark our assortment of private label products against the updated standard in 2022. For more information, please visit the Great for You section of our website.

Our omni-channel business model provides convenient access to food and other products for our customers around the globe. In the U.S., our stores and clubs are within 10 miles of approximately 90% of American households, and our eCommerce capabilities allow us to reach many more. As of January 31, 2022, we had the following pickup and delivery options around the world:

• Walmart U.S.—approximately 4,600 pickup locations and more than 3,500 same-day delivery locations
• Sam's Club—curbside pickup at all clubs
• Walmart International—approximately 2,900 pickup locations and over 1,900 delivery locations

We have also worked to improve access to online grocery for all customers. We worked with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and state agencies to allow customers to use Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits for online grocery shopping (and we worked to scale this option in the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic, when customers especially wanted low-contact shopping options). Currently, SNAP benefits can be used for grocery pickup and delivery orders in 49 states as well as on Walmart.com.

Walmart is also a significant contributor to community initiatives that address food insecurity through donations of unsold food and a philanthropic supporter of organizations to reach the underserved. Our U.S. food donation program started in 2006 through the efforts of a single Sam's Club. Since then, we have provided more than 7 billion pounds of food from our network of stores, clubs and distribution centers to Feeding America food banks. In FY2022, stores, clubs and distribution centers in the U.S. donated more than 696 million pounds of food to Feeding America, 64% of which were fruits, vegetables, dairy products and meats. These donations help to improve food security for those in need and strengthen the charitable meal system—the network of food banks, food pantries and meal programs across the U.S. In 2021, Walmart donated more than 783 million pounds of food globally.

We have provided more than 7 billion pounds of food from our network of stores, clubs and distribution centers to Feeding America food banks

In addition, the Walmart Foundation supports efforts to unlock resources for community-based organizations and entrepreneurs in geographic areas with limited access to food, often characterized as food deserts or swamps, focusing on removing barriers to funding for Black, Indigenous, and people of color-led organizations.

Through our food offering, customer engagement and philanthropic investments in nutrition education, we aim to make it easier to select healthier food options.

Affordable, Nutritious Food Offering: We manage our food assortment to meet a wide range of customer occasions ranging from tonight’s dinner to birthday celebrations in categories ranging from produce to ice cream. While we are not in the business of telling our customers what to buy, we want to make shopping easier for our customers who have told us they are looking for affordable, healthier options, including private brand products, affordable produce, organic options and alternative protein.

In FY2022 we launched our Built for Better program which helps customers identify products that are made with the well-being of people and the planet in mind. The Built for Better icon includes foods with nutritional benefits like our Great for You items, plus household & beauty items made without materials or ingredients customers may not want. For more information, please visit the Built for Better section of our website.

Consistent with our mission to help people save money and live better, we focus on affordability as well as quality of our organics offering. For those seeking meat and dairy alternatives, we offer a variety of plant-based product choices; customers can also view the plant-based section on Walmart.com for breakfast foods, snacks and other items.

Nutrition Education in the Community: Walmart and the Walmart Foundation also provide philanthropic support to encourage healthier eating by funding programs that teach children and families that fruits and vegetables taste good and are good for you. Through the Healthier Food for All strategy, Walmart and the Walmart Foundation support philanthropic programs that help build people’s confidence in selecting, preparing and serving healthier meals, building on our previous milestone, achieved in 2019, of providing nutrition education to 4 million households. In FY2022, Walmart and the Walmart Foundation provided funding to reach 1.1 million people with nutrition education. Two examples of this work are the 4-H Healthy Habits program and Brighter Bites. The 4-H Healthy Habits program has shown that when children and families learn about healthy eating, they increase their healthy eating habits and adopt other healthy behaviors like drinking more water and physical activity. Brighter Bites’ programming engages kids and families in schools across the country, increasing access to fresh fruits and vegetables, along with nutrition education to prevent obesity and improve health outcomes.

In March of 2020, Walmart Foundation launched the Healthy Food Community of Practice (HFCOP) as a space for connection, learning, resource sharing and action for more than 35 organizations that focus on improving healthier food access and consumption with a focus on people who face systemic barriers. Funded by the Walmart Foundation, the Community is facilitated by Share Our Strength through its subsidiary Community Wealth Partners. Read more about the work of HFCOP.

More on programs and organizations supported through our Healthier Food for All strategy can be found in the Serving Communities brief and also at Walmart.org.

Walmart is committed to providing our customers and members with access to safer, compliant and more affordable merchandise, while pursuing initiatives to promote safer formulation and use of products across the industry.

Product Safety Policies & Standards: We set high expectations for product safety in our Code of Conduct and our Global Product Safety Policy, which was updated in 2022, as well as in our Standards for Suppliers. Walmart associates in store operations, distribution and fulfillment centers, and merchandising help Walmart source safer products and respond to safety issues. We require associates to follow particular role-specific practices relevant to product safety. We also require suppliers to take steps to ensure the products they provide to us are safe, meet all quality and technical requirements, and to initiate voluntary and mandatory product recalls where appropriate (see below).

Holding our Suppliers to High Product Safety Standards: Walmart maintains a risk-based Global Product Safety Compliance Program to assist Walmart associates and suppliers in complying with local product safety laws and requirements and company policies. Walmart’s Product Safety Compliance team includes experienced product safety professionals who oversee our product safety program. The Product Safety Compliance program includes training requirements tailored for merchandising teams.

In the U.S. we expect our general merchandise (GM) suppliers to send their items to third-party global testing laboratories so the items can be independently tested for compliance with all applicable laws, regulations and standards. The testing protocols utilized by third-party testing laboratories are developed in concert with and maintained by Walmart's U.S. Product Safety Compliance team. In addition to regulatory safety standards, Walmart has adopted certain industry consensus safety standards and utilizes a formal risk-based process to assess products for compliance with those standards. We require GM products to undergo this testing before we sell them, and annually thereafter.

When an item is deemed non-compliant, we instruct the supplier to correct the issue, remove the item from sale and prohibit purchase in stores and online, when necessary. We voluntarily provide the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC)—the principal federal regulatory agency overseeing the safety of consumer products—with product incident data on a regular basis so that it can take additional actions to keep consumers safe.

Walmart’s Product Safety Compliance program includes a rigid product recall process to support efficient and effective product withdrawals. This process includes customer awareness communications and perpetual collection of recalled products, in an effort to ensure potentially unsafe products are removed from consumer use. In the U.S., for example, recalled product returns are accepted at all Walmart facilities after the recall notice has been issued.

Educating the Public About Proper Use of Products: In 2021, we partnered with U.S. government agencies and an industry trade association to develop ad campaigns to promote consumer safety in key product categories including:

• The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s “Where’s Baby?” campaign to prevent hot car heatstroke deaths
• The Consumer Product Safety Commission’s “Pool Safely” campaign to prevent child drownings

Consumer Protection and Responsible Marketing: Walmart is committed to complying with all applicable consumer protection laws and regulations where we do business. Providing clear and accurate information helps our customers decide where to shop and what to buy. In addition to our Code of Conduct, we have a Global Consumer Protection Policy that requires associates involved in developing, sourcing, marketing and selling products to provide clear and accurate information to our customers (e.g. through product labeling or display signage) so they can make the most informed buying decisions. It also requires associates responsible for marketing to follow requirements for making product claims, to provide clear and transparent disclosures, and to partner with associates in merchandising to provide adequate stock levels for advertised items.

Code of Conduct

Walmart is committed to complying with all applicable consumer protection laws and regulations where we do business. Providing clear and accurate information helps our customers decide where to shop and what to buy.

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Maintaining Trust in Pricing & Product Quality During the Pandemic: These principles have been particularly important during the COVID-19 pandemic. With certain products in high demand, Walmart maintained everyday low-price discipline and we issued guidance for setting limits on customer purchases for these items and other categories, including paper products, milk, eggs, diapers, wipes, formula and baby food to help sustain inventory availability for as many community members as possible. We also worked to protect our customers from price-gouging on high-demand items such as masks, hand sanitizer and other forms of PPE throughout the pandemic. Walmart moved quickly to institute pricing guardrails and a social media monitoring tool to surface and address potential incidents of price-gouging. Our compliance program also enabled us to help our merchant partners quickly source hundreds of millions of safer and compliant masks and other PPE for our customers.

Opioids: At Walmart, we see and feel the impact of the opioid crisis in the communities we serve. Our mission is to help people “live better,” and this means helping to fight the opioid crisis facing our country. As part of our commitment, in early 2017, we established the Walmart Opioid Stewardship Initiative to identify concrete, high-impact actions to help fight the opioid epidemic. The Initiative focuses on supporting solutions in three core areas:

• Stewardship: Adopting policies and practices to help safeguard our patients
• Education: Supporting education programs for our patients, pharmacists, associates and communities
• Advocacy: Supporting legislation and public policy solutions aimed at reducing opioid misuse and dependence

We are proud of our pharmacists who help patients understand the risks of opioid prescriptions. In addition, our pharmacists have refused to fill hundreds of thousands of opioid prescriptions they thought could be problematic. Walmart has also blocked thousands of questionable doctors from having their opioid prescriptions filled by any of our pharmacists, as part of our good-faith efforts to help address the opioid crisis and to satisfy the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA). As a result, many health regulators, medical groups, doctors and patients say that Walmart is going too far in refusing to fill opioid prescriptions—and even say we are improperly interfering in the doctor-patient relationship, which is a big reason a lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and DEA against Walmart is so misguided and misleading. There are a lot of problems with the lawsuit. As we will explain in court, it is wrong on the law and is riddled with factual inaccuracies, mischaracterizations and cherry-picked documents taken out of context. To learn more, please visit Walmart’s blog post, A Misguided Department of Justice Lawsuit Forces Pharmacists Between Patients and Their Doctors.

Our efforts together with those of governments at the state and federal levels and others in the private sector are beginning to yield results. But more work needs to be done. We will continue working with individuals and organizations in our communities to protect patients and families from the risks of prescription opioid misuse and abuse.

For more information on how Walmart is working to combat the opioid crisis, please see our Protecting Communities web page.

Through Walmart’s Sustainable Chemistry Commitment we encourage our suppliers to incorporate sustainable chemistry principles into the development of their products. This means reducing or eliminating the production and use of chemicals of concern. In 2020, we achieved the goal we set in 2017 to reduce our footprint¹⁰ for Walmart U.S. stores and Sam's Club U.S. of priority chemicals in formulated consumables by 10% by 2022, compared to our 2017 baseline of 215.9 million pounds.¹¹ Based on supplier reports, our priority chemical footprint for 2020 for in-scope products sold in Walmart U.S. stores and Sam’s Clubs U.S. saw a 17% decrease over 2017, as measured by weight in pounds. The weight of priority chemicals as a proportion of total product formulation weight for items sold in Walmart U.S. stores and Sam’s Club U.S. declined by 61 basis points from the 2017 baseline year. We achieved this goal ahead of our target date through a combination of assortment changes, reformulation, and shifts in consumer purchases.

As the first U.S. retailer to announce a time-bound chemical reduction goal, we are continually learning and refining our process, assumptions and approach. We are also the only retailer that agreed to publicly disclose our answers to the 19 questions in the Chemical Footprint Survey and our overall final score in the 2020 survey Chemical Footprint Project. For the second year, Walmart was recognized as a CFP 2020 Disclosure Leader.

In implementing our Sustainable Chemistry Commitment we reference regulatory and authoritative lists to determine priority chemicals in our products. In 2020, we had more than 140,000 formulated consumable products in-scope within beauty, personal care, baby, pet and household cleaning products sold by Walmart U.S. stores and Sam’s Clubs in the U.S. We then ask suppliers to reduce these priority chemicals by accelerating product reformulation and improving transparency into ingredients and formulations and certifying products using credible accreditations such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Safer Choice program, EWG Verified and Cradle to Cradle (silver level or above). We also work with industry experts and our suppliers to share best practices and encourage innovation. In FY2022, we continued our collaboration with the Environmental Defense Fund.

To track and disclose progress toward our chemical reduction goal, Walmart asks suppliers to share their formulations for each in-scope Universal Product Code (UPC) with WERCSmart system, which is managed by safety certification organization UL. UL WERCSmart aggregates the information and calculates Walmart’s chemical footprint. In 2020, suppliers provided product formulations to UL WERCSmart for 95% of in-scope UPCs.

Weight change of in-scope priority chemicals in our consumable chemical footprint^{5, 6, 7, 8}

Read more about our current methodology in the Sustainable Chemistry Implementation Guide.

• Food and product safety programs are dependent on the maturity, rigor, and efficacy of third-party standards and initiatives, and there are limits to the efficacy of tools used to monitor compliance with expectations.  
• The success of food and product safety programs is dependent on suppliers’ capacity and willingness to meet high standards, as well as their performance.  
• Food safety risks are often upstream and beyond the reach of traditional retailer oversight and monitoring tools. Lack of reliable data on source/origin of certain commodities and product ingredients and the way they are produced—as well as the blending and commoditization of product inputs and ingredients—complicates food safety. The use of technology to improve transparency and traceability (e.g., blockchain) can help, but adoption takes time and further innovation is necessary to meet these challenges.  
• The breadth of Walmart's global product offerings and dispersed geographical reach of supply chains can present challenges for supplier engagement and risk identification and mitigation.  
• Walmart’s ability to scale healthier food options is dependent on customer preferences and demand (which can depend on the cost and convenience of such options) and the availability and cost of preferred products, ingredients, commodities, and inputs. Growth in and/or changes in our business can challenge our ability to meet customer demands consistent with our aspiration of healthier food for all.  
• Pandemics, weather-related events, and political/social unrest can create supply/demand volatility and interrupt supply chains. Moreover, economic shifts can create sudden and volatile food access issues and increase demand for food donations.  

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