Six tips for building a mutually beneficial partnership with the largest U.S. grocer.
As the largest U.S. grocer, Kroger’s core mission is to deliver on its “Fresh for Everyone” promise while helping shoppers save both time and money. Freshness, value, and convenience have long been core pillars of the retailer’s strategy, and they remain central to how Kroger competes today.
Freshness is one of Kroger’s strongest points of differentiation, with roughly 70% of customers citing it as a key factor in deciding where to shop. At the same time, the retailer is investing heavily in its value proposition, customer personalization, digital commerce, and technology, which are all designed to improve the overall shopping experience and strengthen customer loyalty.
Since taking the helm in early 2026, CEO Greg Foran has made it clear that Kroger’s path to growth starts with strengthening the fundamentals. Foran has prioritized improving store conditions, sharpening the price position, expanding the store base, and accelerating ecommerce growth. Rather than introducing a dramatically new strategy, his early message as CEO has stressed disciplined execution: closing the gap between Kroger’s best stores and the rest of the portfolio. Recent earnings calls and last week’s annual shareholder meeting reinforced these priorities, with leadership highlighting investments in the five areas mentioned earlier.
Critical to this strategy is strengthening the value perception. Kroger isn’t positioned as the lowest-price operator in every category, but leadership is focused on ensuring that shoppers consistently feel confident they’re getting a fair, competitive deal. Combined with strong execution in fresh departments specifically and a well-run store experience in general, this value perception is important to driving traffic, increasing basket sizes, and sustaining long-term loyalty. Rather than competing solely on price, Kroger is focused on delivering a compelling combination of value, quality, and convenience.
Physical stores remain at the center of Kroger’s strategy and provide the foundation for the retailer’s broader growth model. The retailer is continuously investing in new locations, remodels, and format innovations to expand the footprint and improve the in-store experience. Every element of the store — from assortment to layout to execution — needs to reflect how today’s customers want to shop.
These store investments are increasingly connected to Kroger’s broader transformation. The company is simultaneously modernizing its supply chain, expanding investments in technology and artificial intelligence, and improving operational efficiency throughout the enterprise. These capabilities are designed to enhance both the customer experience and internal productivity while enabling more personalized, data-driven engagement at scale.
Ecommerce remains a key extension of this store-first approach, having surpassed $16 billion in annual sales last year. The online business, including retail media, became profitable last quarter, supported by a hybrid fulfillment model that leverages stores, in-house customer fulfillment centers, and third-party delivery partners. As the company advances the “One Kroger” strategy, merchandising, marketing, loyalty, and retail media are becoming more closely connected, creating a more seamless customer experience that also improves the effectiveness of brand investments across the enterprise.
As a pioneer in retail media, Kroger Precision Marketing powered by 84.51° now operates as a fully unified organization spanning insights, media, loyalty marketing, and incentives. With 20-plus years of Kroger loyalty card data at its disposal, KPM boasts some of the richest insights and targeting capabilities available. Parent Kroger is fully behind KPM’s efforts as a key piece of the company’s overall plans to increase digital penetration.
Keys to Success
For brands seeking to build a strategic partnership with Kroger and a winning engagement strategy for the retailer’s shoppers, the following six recommendations are critical:
1. Align with Kroger’s Go-to-Market Strategy: Think customer first and support Kroger’s efforts to elevate the shopper experience. Under Foran, the retailer is placing more emphasis than ever on strengthening customer trust through a better value perception, improved store execution, and more consistent everyday experiences across the footprint. For brands, this means developing programs that reinforce Kroger’s core promise: fresh, affordable, and easy to shop. The most effective partners will understand how Kroger is balancing price, quality, and convenience and align their own merchandising, promotional, and media strategies accordingly.
2. Navigate the Value Creation Model: Leverage Kroger’s flywheel and broader value creation model to maximize your impact across merchandising, retail media, loyalty, and personalization. Brands that learn how these components can reinforce each other will be better positioned to influence behavior in real time across engagement channels, driving efficiency and ROI across the full funnel.
3. Lead with Category Growth: Category leadership is now a baseline expectation for brand partnerships at Kroger. Beyond driving sales for their own SKUs, Kroger increasingly expects brand partners to demonstrate how their activity will expand total category demand, attract new shoppers, and grow basket size. Winning brands bring a category-first mindset into sell-in conversations, supported by clear insights into shopper behavior, unmet customer needs, and growth white space. This includes identifying opportunities to recruit new category buyers, increase trip frequency, and unlock incremental consumption occasions.
4. Deliver a Seamless Commerce Experience: Develop solutions that drive engagement in-store and online, helping Kroger deliver products whenever and wherever its customers choose to shop. Effective programs ensure consistent messaging and availability across the full ecosystem — optimizing for digital shelf visibility, ensuring strong in-stock performance across fulfillment methods, and aligning activation with the way shoppers move between browsing and buying.
5. Leverage KPM and Invest in Personalization: Leverage the rich data available through KPM power by 84.51° to personalize engagement with Kroger’s most loyal shoppers. Leading brand partners are moving beyond broad targeting and instead activating against meaningful shopper segments tied to real purchase behavior, which facilitates more precise messaging, improves conversion, and drives a stronger return on media investments. Brands that embrace customer segmentation, behavior-based messaging, and closed-loop measurement will outperform those relying on broad-based promotional tactics.
6. Build One Connected Plan: Align shopper marketing, trade funding, retail media, and national advertising support to connect every investment into a single, integrated growth strategy demonstrating total business impact.
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Mars United’s Retail Consultancy is an unrivaled team of in-market commerce experts who simplify the complexity of retail for our clients. Located in Bentonville, Minneapolis, Cincinnati, Chicago, Seattle, and the “backyards” of other key retailers, they provide deep knowledge of the retailer, expertise in key business areas (like strategy, media and creative), and door-opening personal relationships with key executives to deliver an unmatched level of business success for clients across accounts, channels, and shopper engagement platforms. For more information, contact EVP-Retail Consultancy Kandi Arrington at [email protected].
