Walmart adds Subway ordering to Express Delivery in select stores
Subway orders are now flowing through Walmart’s Express Delivery in select stores, bundling sandwiches with groceries in one checkout. That turns store handoffs into a tighter race against the clock.
Walmart has started weaving Subway into its Express Delivery system, letting customers order sandwiches through the Walmart app or Walmart.com in select stores and have them delivered on their own or with a grocery run. The rollout began June 4 and is live in parts of Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas, with Walmart saying it plans to reach about 1,400 Subway locations by the end of summer. In some stores, the meal can arrive in as little as 30 minutes or less.
For store teams, that means the old boundary between prepared food and grocery pickup got thinner. Walmart says Subway pricing will match in-restaurant menus, while some participating locations inside Walmart stores will carry exclusive items. Customers will still pay a flat Express Delivery fee, but inside the building the work gets more complicated: a sandwich order now has to move through the same operational chain as chilled groceries, general merchandise and any substitutions the store has to manage before the handoff is complete.
Walmart’s Global Tech team says it built a new restaurant eCommerce platform with menu management, item customization, ordering, fulfillment and delivery inside the Walmart experience. The company also says its systems use artificial intelligence and machine learning to predict preparation times, order readiness and delivery promises, while orchestration logic is meant to keep frozen items cold and prepared meals fresh as driver arrival times are synced to food readiness. Spark Driver now has restaurant-specific pickup and delivery workflows, including item validation, pickup instructions and proof-of-delivery capabilities. That puts more pressure on store associates, digital fulfillment teams and drivers to get the timing right when a basket contains both a sub and a cart full of groceries.
The Subway tie-up also makes sense inside Walmart’s existing footprint. Walmart says Subway is its largest in-store restaurant tenant, a relationship that began in 2004. Greg Cathey said, “Almost all quick-service restaurant brands are located within five miles of Walmart; we think it’s a natural revolution over time to think through thoughtfully how we expand this service,” a sign that the company is already looking beyond a single test.
Walmart is not building this on a blank slate. Supply Chain Dive reported in 2023 that Spark Driver covered 15,000 pickup points and could reach 84% of U.S. households, with 248 million deliveries fulfilled from Walmart stores in fiscal 2023. That kind of scale gives Walmart room to fold restaurant orders into an existing last-mile network, but it also raises the stakes for store-level execution. If the system works, Walmart gets closer to a true multi-service fulfillment model. If it slips, the added complexity lands first on the associates and drivers trying to keep every handoff straight.
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