Walmart, Cropin Partner to Help Build a More Predictable Food Supply Chain
Global retailer Walmart is working with Cropin, an AI platform for food and agriculture, to enhance scalable sourcing solutions across the mega-retailer’s U.S. and South American markets. Under this collaboration, Cropin’s advanced agri-intelligence platform is poised to help optimize Walmart’s fresh produce supply chain by improving yield forecasting, monitoring crop health and predicting seasonal transitions with higher accuracy. The partnership aims to mitigate risks related to weather, market volatility and supply chain disruptions, and thereby helping to ensure a steady supply of high-quality perishables, enhancing product availability, lowering waste and delivering better-quality produce to customers.
As climate change grows ever more evident, agri-food stakeholders must deal with extreme weather events, supply chain disruptions, and the ripple effects of macroeconomic and geopolitical issues. In a first-of-its-kind deployment, Cropin is deploying advanced, custom-built AI-powered solutions to help revamp Walmart’s sourcing strategies, boost supply chain resilience and optimize operational efficiency in the food retail sector.
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Cropin’s platform was developed to create a consistent supply of high-quality produce with maximized shelf life at optimized rates. The company’s automated tools provide granular, localized insights into crop health, pest outbreaks and extreme weather risks, with the goal of making supply chains more climate resilient. Further, Cropin can help predict the future of crop yields and supply stability, enabling businesses to manage pricing strategies without compromising quality. Its sustainability impact dashboard further bolsters compliance by tracking greenhouse-gas emissions, water usage and deforestation impact, providing digital validation for such regulations as EUDR (EU Regulation on Deforestation-free Product).
“Tech innovation is what drives real-world solutions to move forward a globally resilient supply chain,” said Kyle Carlyle, VP of sourcing innovation and surety of supply at Walmart. “By collaborating with Cropin, it enables Walmart to further streamline sourcing practices and better predict yields using their real-time GenAI technology. We are always looking for new ways to innovate, and Cropin demonstrates our bold innovation goals in the agriculture space.”
“I’m delighted to start 2025 on such a high note with this significant milestone in our journey,” noted Cropin founder and CEO Krishna Kumar. “Collaborating with Walmart is both an honor and an invaluable learning for us at Cropin. We are deeply excited about delivering on our commitments to help shape a new era of agri-food sourcing. As a champion and role model in the retail sector, Walmart has consistently set the bar by evolving best practices, not just for the company, but for the sector as a whole. In my 14 years of driving tech and AI-enabled transformations in the agri-food industry, the last few years have been particularly promising, as stakeholders in the agri-food space recognize that technology in upstream agriculture is no longer a luxury, but a necessity to future-proof business models. Our collaboration with Walmart reflects this ongoing shift, and we look forward to exceeding their expectations, strengthening our position as a trusted enabler of future growth.”
Founded in 2010 and based in Bangalore, India, Cropin has worked with more than 100 B2B customers, digitizing 30 million acres of farmland and affecting more than 7 million farmers worldwide. Its crop knowledge graph, covering 500 crops and 10,000 varieties in 103 countries, powers the Cropin Cloud.
This past June, in an effort to help its sourcing managers make better-informed decisions on seasonal fruit crop yields, Walmart partnered with Agritask (now known as Acclym) to use the Tel Aviv-based crop supply intelligence company’s remote sensing and data analytics tools.
Each week, approximately 270 million customers and members visit Walmart’s more than 10,750 stores and numerous e-commerce websites in 19 countries. With FY2025 revenue of $681 billion, the company employs approximately 2.1 million associates worldwide. Bentonville, Ark.-based Walmart U.S. is No. 1 on Progressive Grocer’s 2024 list of the top food and consumables retailers in North America.
