eMeals Hires Shipt Executive as Head of Partnerships
Digital meal planning service eMeals today announced the hiring of Lindsey Seal to serve as Head of Partnerships with responsibility for building the company’s rapidly growing roster of CPG brand and grocery retailer relationships. Seal’s experience includes successful leadership of partner programs at Shipt, where she helped add more than 30 retail partnerships and scale the business from 35 to 250 markets before the company was acquired by Target.
eMeals launched its partnership initiative 18 months ago with the BrandBuilder program, which grows online and in-store sales for participating food and beverage brands by incorporating brand recommendations in the shopping lists that eMeals automatically generates when subscribers select menus from the service’s weekly meal and special occasions plans. The grocery lists can be used for in-store shopping or sent to Walmart, Kroger, Amazon, Albertsons, Safeway and all the retailers served by Instacart and Shipt for curbside pickup or delivery.
A wide range of national food and beverage brands have utilized BrandBuilder to date with a strong return on ad spend (ROAS). Many partners have seen a doubling of brand sales in online grocery carts, in part because branded products continue to appear in the cart after the initial purchase. This encourages repurchases whether or not the consumer orders through eMeals every time, increasing the lifetime value of the partnership.
Grocery partners benefit from eMeals’ integration with their grocery carts through increased online and in-store basket sizes, higher adoption of initial and repeat online orders and CPG shopper marketing programs that drive retailer traffic. The integration also enables customers of the retailer to seamlessly access eMeals’ 15 weekly food style plans and add recipes to their cart in one click.
“With 10+ years in the meal planning business and a unique partnership program leveraging their strong technology backbone, eMeals offers unique opportunities for food and beverage brands and retail grocers to drive incremental revenues,” Seal said. “They have built an impressive list of strategic relationships in just a short time of pursuing partnership efforts, and I will be aggressively expanding on that foundation to take the program to the next level.”
“The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated consumer adoption of online grocery as well as the level of interest from brands and retailers in working with platforms like eMeals that simplify the content-to-commerce path,” said eMeals CEO Forrest Collier. “With the success of her partner efforts at Shipt, Lindsey will be instrumental in helping us take advantage of these shifts in the grocery landscape to establish new relationships that will help our partners generate business.”