The On-Ramp Has Never Been Wider

In October 2020, Bill Shufelt sat down with a Walmart beverage buyer in Bentonville and pitched a non-alcoholic craft beer. Shufelt and his co-founder John Walker had started Athletic Brewing in a Connecticut garage three years earlier, driven by a simple frustration: the non-alcoholic beer available in stores was terrible. Shufelt described finding nothing but dusty old bottles on the shelf. At the time of the pitch, Athletic had one brewery, limited regional distribution, and no mass retail presence.

The buyer, Jason Fremstad, loved the product and wanted it in 1,000 stores. But Athletic couldn’t produce enough beer for that kind of rollout. So Walmart scaled back to 120 doors to start, knowing that if the product performed the way they believed it would, they could always expand. Fremstad later described the non-alcoholic beer category as having seen “little to no innovation in 50 years.” That bet required a buyer willing to back a supplier that wasn’t ready for national scale in a category no one else was paying attention to. It was, by any measure, an early bet.

By 2024, Athletic Brewing was the number-one non-alcoholic beer brand in the United States, ahead of Heineken and Budweiser. The company had generated more than $130 million in annual sales, invested over $115 million in its brewing facilities, and was selling in 2,700 Walmart stores. Fremstad, the buyer who made the original call, is now Walmart’s senior vice president of supplier development and sourcing. He runs the programs that find the next Athletic Brewing.

A year after that Bentonville meeting, Walmart made another early bet. In July 2021, it placed Bubble Skincare, a direct-to-consumer startup founded by Shai Eisenman the year before, into approximately 4,000 stores as an exclusive retail partner. Bubble had seven SKUs, no retail track record, and landed in the same skincare aisle as Neutrogena and CeraVe. Other retailers, including prestige and specialty chains, had approached Eisenman. She chose Walmart. “Ninety percent of the US population lives within 30 minutes of a Walmart,” she told BeautyMatter, explaining the decision.

By late 2024, Bubble’s annual sales were estimated at roughly $170 million, according to WWD. Its ambassador community had grown to more than 84,000 members generating 133 million social impressions, per Fast Company’s Brands That Matter report. Cosmetify named it the fastest-rising beauty brand of 2024, citing a 2,872 percent surge in search volume.

Athletic Brewing and Bubble are specific outcomes. But the conditions that produced them are not accidental, and they have deepened considerably since those original bets were placed. Over the past three years, Walmart has assembled a set of programs, platforms, and category strategies that together form something the company has never had before: a repeatable system for finding emerging brands, placing early bets on them, and scaling the ones that perform. And the shopper walking through Walmart’s doors today is more receptive to those brands than any customer base the retailer has ever served.

A Shopper Base That Didn’t Exist Five Years Ago

The single most consequential shift in Walmart’s recent history is not a program or a technology investment. It is who shops there.

On the company’s Q3 fiscal 2025 earnings call in November 2024, CEO Doug McMillon reported that households earning more than $100,000 accounted for 75 percent of Walmart’s market share gains in the quarter. The figure was reported prominently by the Washington Post, CNBC, and CNN. By that same month, Morning Consult Intelligence found that 87 percent of consumers earning $100,000 or more annually reported shopping at Walmart, an all-time high.

The trend has proven durable. On the Q4 fiscal 2026 earnings call in February 2026, CEO John Furner confirmed that the majority of share gains again came from households earning above $100,000, according to Retail Dive. Morning Consult’s data showed Walmart+ usage among high-income consumers rose 17 percent over 2024, and RetailWire reported that roughly 80 percent of new higher-income converts continued shopping at the retailer. These are not temporary trade-down shoppers. They are integrating Walmart into routine purchasing.

For suppliers, this changes the demand signal inside the store. Higher-income shoppers are more likely to seek products with functional positioning, clean ingredient profiles, and brands they discovered through social media rather than legacy shelf presence. When Walmart expands its premium beauty assortment or creates a dedicated section for functional beverages, it is responding to its fastest-growing customer segment. The brands that match those preferences are, disproportionately, founder-led and emerging.

The Infrastructure Walmart Built

Walmart’s challenger brand programs are not experiments. They are deployment infrastructure, each designed for a different stage of the path from founder to national supplier. Taken together, they form a pipeline that did not exist five years ago.

Open Call, now in its twelfth year, brought more than 500 entrepreneurs from 47 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico to Bentonville in October 2025. More than 100 received Golden Tickets — formal pathways to shelf and online distribution. Since inception, the program has generated more than 9,000 unique supplier opportunities. Furner called it “Walmart at its best.” More than 60 percent of Walmart’s U.S. suppliers are now classified as small businesses, many of whom entered through this event. Athletic Brewing’s 2020 pitch came through Open Call. So did Fire Department Coffee, which went from its first meeting to 3,000 stores within two years of receiving its Golden Ticket in 2023.

Walmart Start, the company’s beauty accelerator, launched in 2022 and is now in its fourth year. The first application cycle drew more than 500 submissions. Selected brands are paired with merchant mentors who meet with founders at least twice a month, supported by brand management consultants, and trained through a virtual classroom series that covers everything from shipping compliance to Walmart Connect. More than 10 Start brands have launched in Walmart stores and online since the program began. Vinima Shekhar, vice president of Beauty Merchandising, said the company launched over 60 new brands across beauty in the past year alone. The scale threshold tells you how serious the commitment is: acceptance requires manufacturing and supply chain capability to support a potential launch in 1,000 to 3,500 stores.

The Start program has produced brands that launched their first-ever retail products exclusively at Walmart. The Hair Lab by Strands was not a fully formed brand before a Walmart merchant reached out to founder Eric Delapenha via Instagram DM in March 2021. Pardon My Fro introduced its first product line exclusively through the program. Dossier, the fragrance brand, used Start as its pathway to mass retail and launched in stores in fall 2022. These are not brands Walmart poached from competitors. They are brands Walmart helped build.

Grow With Us, launched in April 2025, extends support beyond the initial pitch. The program includes a 30-module Supplier Academy focused on retail readiness, mentorship matching, and access to financing through Walmart’s Early Payment Program and Bridge Marketplace. It is designed for the specific challenge that trips up most emerging suppliers: navigating the operational complexity of a retailer that operates at Walmart’s scale. The kind of trajectory the program is built for already has precedent at Walmart. Milo’s Tea started by hand-delivering product to a single Alabama store. Today it operates four manufacturing and distribution facilities, employs over 1,000 people, and is carried in nearly every Walmart in the country. Grow With Us aims to make that path less improvised and more repeatable.

Walmart Marketplace has become the fastest-growing major e-commerce platform in the United States. It crossed 200,000 active sellers by mid-2025, adding 44,000 new sellers in the first five months of the year — nearly matching the full 2024 total — according to Marketplace Pulse. Marketplace items now represent 95 percent of the more than 420 million products on Walmart.com.

For brands not ready for physical distribution, Marketplace serves as a proving ground with real commercial stakes. Increasingly, it also functions as a deliberate audition for shelf space. At a Goldman Sachs conference, Walmart’s Chief E-Commerce Officer David Guggina cited Arctic, the insulated cups and coolers brand, as an example: Arctic started as a marketplace seller, adopted Walmart Fulfillment Services, and is now a first-party supplier in thousands of stores. Manish Joneja, SVP of Marketplace and WFS, put the strategy plainly: “The future of retail is not first party or third party. It’s first and third party.”

What the Modern Soda Set Tells You About How Walmart Thinks

In October 2024, Walmart carved out a dedicated section in its carbonated soft drink aisle, stocked it with Poppi, OLIPOP, Culture Pop, and Zevia, and called it “Modern Soda.” Kroger, Publix, and Albertsons adopted similar merchandising approaches, but Walmart named the category first, according to Modern Retail and BevNET.

Walmart did not create prebiotic soda. Entrepreneurs built those brands over years of product development, retail pitching, and community building. But Walmart recognized the demand signal — through sales velocity, social data, and search behavior — before the category had a formal name in syndicated data. It then built the merchandising infrastructure to scale it. That is a different kind of early bet than picking an individual brand. It is picking an entire consumer shift and creating the shelf for it.

The category grew 83 percent in 2024 to $1.8 billion in retail sales, according to Circana. OLIPOP generated $400 million in revenue that year, doubling from the prior year, and is now valued at $1.85 billion, according to Food Dive. Poppi’s Walmart footprint expanded to over 4,300 doors, a 79 percent increase, with its SKU count growing from five to seventeen in a single buying cycle, per Modern Retail. Poppi CEO Chris Hall credited Walmart for paying attention: “It shows that their team is really paying attention to what consumers’ needs are, and they’re designing their store around that.”

Within months, PepsiCo acquired Poppi for $1.95 billion, closing in May 2025. Coca-Cola launched Simply Pop, its first prebiotic soda, in February 2025. Two of the largest consumer goods companies on earth responded to a category that entrepreneurs built and Walmart chose to elevate.

The pattern matters more than the specific category. Suppliers across food, beverage, beauty, and personal care should understand the Modern Soda set as a template: Walmart reads the demand signal, builds the merchandising infrastructure, and scales the brands that are there to meet it. The question for any emerging brand is whether Walmart’s merchant teams can see the same kind of signal in their category.

Where This Connects to Your Next Planning Conversation

For challenger brands evaluating Walmart for the first time, the on-ramp is more structured than it has ever been. Open Call provides a direct pathway to merchant meetings. Walmart Start offers category-specific support in beauty. Grow With Us provides retail readiness training through its Supplier Academy. And Marketplace allows brands to build velocity data, shopper demographics, and fulfillment performance before a physical shelf conversation begins — data that is visible to Walmart’s merchant teams and that increasingly serves as the audition tape for a physical shelf conversation. Brands entering Marketplace should treat their velocity metrics, WFS adoption, and listing quality scores as the foundation for a future line review.

The gating factor is operational readiness, not awareness. Athletic Brewing’s story illustrates this precisely: Walmart believed in the product immediately, but the supply chain wasn’t ready for 1,000 stores, so the retailer started with 120. The willingness to scale back — rather than walk away — is the signal. Walmart will meet a brand where it is. But only if the brand is honest about where that is. For companies with strong social traction and product-market fit, the constraint is almost always supply chain compliance, OTIF performance, and financial resilience for national distribution. The programs — Open Call’s training on scaling production, Walmart Start’s 1,000-store readiness threshold, Grow With Us’s 30-module Supplier Academy — exist to close that gap. But they require a brand that knows what gap it has.

For brands already in the ecosystem, the higher-income shopper shift creates an opportunity that should reshape the next JBP conversation. Channel Performance and Shopper Behavior data in Scintilla now reflect a customer mix more receptive to premium positioning, functional claims, and differentiated brand stories than Walmart’s historical base. If a brand’s data shows it is pulling disproportionately from higher-income households, that is a concrete case for expanded distribution, incremental shelf space, or a Walmart Connect investment sized to the opportunity. Connect grew 41 percent in the U.S. in Q4 fiscal 2026, reaching nearly $6.4 billion globally, and its closed-loop measurement in Ad Center makes the incrementality case provable. For challenger brands with organic social traction — the kind of awareness that 84,000 brand ambassadors or a viral social presence generates — Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands can now convert that awareness into measurable purchase. The paid media gap against national incumbents has never been narrower.

The Convergence Is the Story

Any one of these developments in isolation would be noteworthy. A demographic shift toward higher-income shoppers. An accelerator that helped build brands before they had a single retail presence. A marketplace that added 44,000 sellers in five months. A buyer who scaled back a launch because he believed in a product the brand couldn’t yet supply at scale. A retailer that named a new beverage category before the national brands that would eventually spend billions to enter it.

Together, they describe something more consequential: Walmart has built the capability to identify emerging consumer demand, take early bets on the brands meeting that demand, create the infrastructure for those brands to scale nationally, and attract the shoppers who will pay for it. The programs, the data, the shopper base, and the merchandising strategy now reinforce one another in ways they did not three years ago.

A brand entering through Open Call today builds velocity data on Marketplace that informs its physical shelf placement, which generates insights that shape its Walmart Connect investment, which reaches a customer base that is wealthier, more brand-aware, and more receptive to differentiated products than at any point in Walmart’s history. Fremstad was a beverage buyer who took a chance on a garage brewery. Now he runs the system that makes those chances repeatable.

For emerging brands with the operational foundation to support national distribution, the conditions at Walmart have not been this favorable. The next Open Call application cycle, the next Walmart Start cohort, the next JBP refresh, and the next Connect budget conversation are where this analysis becomes action. The on-ramp is open. The question is whether you’re ready to use it.

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