GoPuff has recently welcomed Maria Renz, a former Amazon executive, as its senior vice president to oversee its North American business domain. Maria will report directly to the co-founders and co-CEOs of GoPuff, Rafael IIishayev and Yakir Gola. The co-CEOs discussed that the new appointment would help the firm grow globally and become a leading delivery platform. As per YipitData, GoPuff is the market share leader in the budding instant delivery market and has a 69% share among first-party players. To read more, visit GroceryDive

Canadian grocery chain Sobeys has expanded its Voilà online grocery delivery service to Ottawa and Quebec. Canadian consumers can order thousands of products, including Sobeys Farm Boy store banner, from the Voilà mobile app. The online retailer will deliver customer orders within one hour to their doorsteps. The grocer caters to more than 100 communities, from Gatineau to Montreal to Quebec City, and offers an assortment of up to 39,000 products. The grocer is already serving customers in the greater Toronto area. To read more, visit SuperMarketNews

eMeals, a digital meal planning and grocery shopping app, has acquired RecipeBox, an online and offline recipe saving and organising app. eMeals made this move to grow its market reach and attract more shoppers. eMeals will offer eMeals Grocery Connect, a software that allows other platforms and websites to add online grocery shopping features, with the subscription-based digital meal-planning service delivering 15 food variations. These platforms will jointly offer a more organised approach to discovering and saving recipes. Home cooking is still one of the consumer’s priorities for health reasons, and eMeals wants to continue simplifying it. To read more, visit Progressive Grocer

Brick Meets Click, a market research firm, released its latest report about the US online grocery industry. The report suggests that the total online grocery sales in the US went down 6% in March versus 2021. It fell by $8.7B versus record sales of $9.3 billion in March last year. The research firm divided the online grocery industry into three categories: Ship-to-Home, Pickup, and Delivery. Ship-to-Home, which hauls delivering orders via parcel delivery firms like UPS and FedEx, had the lowest sales. It went down by 30%, from $2.1 to $1.4 billion. The pickup option involves curbside, in-store, lockers, and drive-thru pickups. This category saw a decline of 11%. Sales from the delivery options went up year over year, going from $2.9 billion to $3.5 billion, and came as a relief for e-grocers. To read more, visit The Spoon

GoPuff is currently busy realigning internally and making some company-wide changes. Putatively, the US-based instant delivery firm has laid off about 3% of its global workforce to cut employee costs and manage financial performance. The employee elimination also included some roles from the senior management. This move further reaffirms that instant delivery firms face tremendous financial and funding pressures to keep the technology costs running. Bloomberg reported that the employee elimination and company realignment could increase Gopuff’s chances of bagging $1 billion in new funding. To read more, visit GroceryDive

Walmart has announced that it will start testing on-site video ads on its official website later in 2022. The giant grocer will expand its Walmart Connect advertising platform while offering a focused omnichannel experience to other digital firms. The platform will enhance the digital programme through premium ads played across self-checkout screens, TV walls, sampling and in-store events. To upscale its media business for retailers, Walmart will boost its targeting, search, and measurement capabilities by automation. The advertiser base for the Walmart Connect platform grew 136% year-on-year in 2021. To read, more GroceryDive

BJ’s Wholesale Club has collaborated with DoorDash to offer an on-demand delivery service to its customers. The online service is not just restricted to BJ’s members. Shoppers with the membership programme will enjoy discounts and lower prices as compared to non-members. The online service will be accessible to consumers at all 226 BJ’s locations in 17 Eastern states of the US. BJ’s is the first club retailer offering merchandise in bulk to become a part of the online platform of DoorDash. Consumers can select thousands of products from BJ’s inventory from the DoorDash app to place an order. To read more, visit GroceryDive