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Yahoo
16-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Kroger gives its Boost membership program a temporary lift
This story was originally published on Grocery Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily Grocery Dive newsletter. Kroger is adding an extra jolt to its Boost membership program as summer wears on, offering members additional savings for a two-week period. The 'Boost Bonus Days' promotion, which begins Wednesday and extends through July 29, includes the opportunity for shoppers to save more than $100 through a variety of deals on an unspecified assortment of grocery items. Customers will be able to redeem most of the offers up to five times during the promotion. Kroger is also offering $10 off a delivery order of at least $75 as well as a 50% discount on the cost of a new or renewed Boost membership during the promotion. The limited-time benefits apply to both Kroger Boost tiers, which are distinguished from one another by the type of delivery benefit they provide. The base level, which costs $69 per year or $8.99 per month, provides free next-day delivery, while the premium tier provides free same-day delivery at an annual cost of $99 per year or $12.99 a month. Both Kroger Boost levels require a minimum purchase of $35 for free delivery. In April, Kroger raised the annual cost of the lower-priced version of Boost by $10 per year and increased the monthly fee by $1. Kroger Boost benefits augment the features of the grocer's standard loyalty program, Kroger Plus. Kroger offers free pickup on orders that meet a $35 threshold for all loyalty program members. The Boost Bonus Days program reprises a similar promotion Kroger ran for two weeks last July, but comes with a different package of discounts. In 2024, Kroger's Boost Bonus Days initiative offered Boost members over $60 in savings that encompassed free private label goods including cookies, bacon and pasta in addition to price reductions on other products carrying the grocer's brands. Kroger said earlier this year that it would focus on boosting customer loyalty as it looked to juice growth following its unsuccessful effort to merge with Albertsons. 'Looking to 2025, we have aggressive plans to build more stores and improve our share results, attract new households and increase loyalty, which will accelerate growth and create shareholder value,' Kroger interim CEO Ron Sargent said during the supermarket company's fourth-quarter earnings call in March. Recommended Reading Kroger is striving for e-commerce profitability. What will it take to get there?
Yahoo
15-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
H Mart readies arrival in Florida
This story was originally published on Grocery Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily Grocery Dive newsletter. Asian supermarket chain H Mart is planning to arrive in Florida with an upcoming store in Orlando, according to the grocer's website. While the store has been in the works for several years, the grocer posted part- and full-time associate roles for the Orlando store in early July, signalling the location is getting ready to open. Florida will be the third new state H Mart has entered in the past year as the chain expands its U.S. presence. H Mart is ramping up its presence in new and existing markets. Earlier this year, H Mart made its debut in Nevada with the opening of a Las Vegas location, Eater reported. In June 2024, the grocer opened its first store in Utah, according to The Salt Lake Tribune. Located at 7501 W. Colonial Drive, the upcoming Orlando H Mart will occupy a spot that formerly housed a Target and sits across the street from a Sam's Club. H Mart's website does not include details on the opening date for the store. Along with the Florida store, H Mart has four other locations listed as 'coming soon' on its website, with two each in California and Texas. H Mart, which has 18 stores in California, is planning to open in Dublin and Westminster. In Texas, where the grocer currently has six stores, the chain's upcoming locations are set for Dallas and Austin. According to local news reports, H Mart has plans for a store in Sugar Land in the greater Houston area. Founded in 1982 in New York City, H Mart has over a hundred stores across the U.S. Along with its store fleet expansion efforts, H Mart has also recently grown its grocery e-commerce presence, adding Uber and DoorDash as delivery partners last summer. Recommended Reading H Mart links with DoorDash Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
15-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Albertsons posts a strong Q1 as pharmacy and digital operations steam ahead
This story was originally published on Grocery Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily Grocery Dive newsletter. Albertsons generated $24.9 billion in net sales and other revenue during the first quarter of fiscal 2025, up 2.5% compared with the same period last year, the supermarket chain reported Tuesday. Identical sales moved ahead at a 2.8% clip, twice the rate it posted for the metric during Q1 of 2024, driven by double-digit growth in pharmacy and e-commerce sales. Albertsons raised its expectations for identical sales for the year, based in part on the assumption that its pharmacy and digital businesses will continue to grow, President and CFO Sharon McCollam said during an earnings call. Albertsons has been directing resources toward its pharmacy and e-commerce operations, and those investments are paying off for the company, executives said during the earnings call. The grocer has seen 'sequential improvement' in its core grocery operations and believes that continued strength in that area will help push identical sales up as the year moves ahead, McCollam said. The company now expects identical sales to rise between 2% and 2.75% during fiscal 2025, up from the range of 1.5% to 2.5% it previously forecast. Albertsons' pharmacy and health business grew 20% year over year during Q1, due in part to robust prescription sales and immunization growth, said CEO Susan Morris, who took over the top job in May. That, in turn, is helping to increase sales elsewhere in the store. People who make purchases at the pharmacy counter visit stores four times more often and buy significantly more groceries than other shoppers, Morris said, underscoring the long-term value for Albertsons of investing in that part of its business. Morris added that Albertsons has found that GLP-1 drugs intended to help people lose weight have turned into sales drivers beyond the pharmacy counter despite the fact that the grocer does not make much money on the drugs themselves. While shoppers who take those medications often decrease the size of their basket at the start, they typically start buying things like supplements and lean proteins, 'categories that are actually quite profitable for us as a company,' Morris said. During Q1, Albertsons saw 25% growth in digital sales, and e-commerce accounted for 9% of total grocery revenue, Morris said. In response to a question from an analyst, McCollam said Albertsons is 'getting very close' to breaking even on its e-commerce operations — a goal that Walmart has already achieved and Kroger is also pursuing. McCollam emphasized that Albertsons does not take its Albertsons Media Collective digital media operation into account when evaluating the profitability of its e-commerce business, which she said differentiates it from competitors. 'From a financial point of view, of course, [e-commerce] creates data for the media collective, and it is a major provider of information for the media collective. But from a P&L point of view, it's pure. What is driving that is volume, first and foremost,' McCollam said. Morris also said during the call that Albertsons sees a strong growth path for its own brand business, noting that while private label penetration was nearly 26% during Q1, the company believes that figure should be at least 30%. Recommended Reading Albertsons needs to move fast as it looks to regroup, experts say Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Miami Herald
09-07-2025
- Business
- Miami Herald
What makes The Fresh Market pop, according to its CEO
After navigating a bit of an identity crisis, The Fresh Market has set its sights back on rediscovering its roots. CEO Brian Johnson, who took over the top role in February, said the specialty grocer has put its goal of creating a European-esque grocery shopping experience back at the forefront, with foodservice as a star attraction along with a soothing atmosphere and a hospitable staff. "It's all about going back to our roots and what made The Fresh Market special. … You've got to know who you are," Johnson said, noting that since joining the company as COO five years ago, he and the executive team have made a conscious effort to lean into the specialty grocer's original vision. Johnson added that these points of differentiation include focusing on guests, offering value and keeping the retailer relevant. While store expansion is in the works, Johnson said the grocer will grow its fleet at a moderate pace in order to maintain The Fresh Market's culture and in-store experience. Shoppers can also look forward to a new app that better ties in the grocer's loyalty program. Johnson spoke with Grocery Dive to provide insights on The Fresh Market's priorities, outline how it approaches differentiation and share details on its upcoming app. Editor's note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity. GROCERY DIVE: What are The Fresh Market's biggest differentiators compared to traditional supermarkets as well as fellow specialty grocers? BRIAN JOHNSON: I would say that [our differentiation] starts with our service and our people. Because we are a smaller footprint, and because we offer a lot of services in our stores - with fresh cut meat, our service meat counters, our service deli counters, our service bakery counters - there are many, many instances when a guest shops with us, they're going to interact with our people. So that's a service, and we call it impeccable hospitality… and that makes up that differentiated shopping experience from a service perspective. Being called The Fresh Market, our [fresh department] is certainly a differentiator for us. We offer fresh-cut meat that we cut fresh every single day. In our bakery, those ovens are on every day. We're baking fresh products. Our produce is the highest grade product that we can buy. In our deli, or our convenience meal solution area, as we call it, we've got many, many either low- or no-cook meals that are chef-quality. All of these things are differentiating points for us. In our grocery department, we've got a very interesting assortment. We have some of the world's best products, but we also have some of the highest quality and unique local products from around the different markets that we serve here in the U.S., and that's something that we're really working on expanding in our stores - having more of those local items. That element of discovery makes our stores fun. And then we've got the relaxing music and the relaxed atmosphere in our stores. So you come in and you may have had a stressful day, but you come into a very relaxing atmosphere with a lot of these very interesting products and great service. Can you talk more about how The Fresh Market approaches foodservice? How does the offering continue to evolve? It's very difficult to execute if you're not 100% committed, because it's very labor-intensive. We're committed to it. We understand the importance of providing convenient, high-quality, and, in many cases, healthy meal solutions to our guests who are, in most cases, very time-starved. People in our society today, we're all super busy, yet we still want to eat well, and we want to provide that solution where you can buy [affordable] high-quality meals that are either already prepped for you or require very little preparation. We want to be able to meet all of those needs, because we think that by focusing on that, it's a great point of differentiation for us. There are certainly others in the industry that do a very good job of it, but we feel that it is certainly a strength of ours. In our new stores, we've got a barbecue program where we've got smokers in these stores. We're smoking brisket, and we've got fresh, world-class barbecue in these new stores that our guests rave about. That was introduced with our first new store of this decade, and it was introduced at our first remodel, which is our store in Greensboro, North Carolina. And then all the new stores, starting from that point forward, have gotten our barbecue program. I'm from Texas. Barbecue is close to my heart, and I can tell you, our barbecue is fantastic. In what ways has The Fresh Market implemented technology into its operations and stores? We just completed rolling out electronic shelf labels in every store in our company. We've also got an in-stock too, called Captana. So what it does is it will periodically take snapshots of our shelves - and it does not take pictures of our guests, by the way, so there's no privacy concerns there - for up-to-the-minute [inventory levels] in every single store in the company. Most retailers have visibility into the in-store inventory balance, but they don't know if it's on the shelf or in the back room. I know if it's on the shelf. It's enabled us to increase our on-shelf and in-stock percentage, which has been a huge help and really provides a much better shopping experience for our guests. You mentioned the upcoming launch of an updated app for The Fresh Market customers. What will the app look like and what will it offer shoppers? We're working on developing a new app, and we're in the early stages of it. The goal of the app is to provide a much better experience for our guests, one that's seamless, that really delivers on our shopping experience digitally, just like in the store. So we want to take our impeccable hospitality and incorporate that same shopping experience onto our app. And that's not easy to do. We're still working on the discovery phase on that, and we're kind of mapping out what that looks like. There are a lot of things that we'll be able to do with the app. One example would be helping guests find the items they're looking for. So we can tie that into our electronic shelf labels that have a blinking light. And if a guest is looking for an item in the olive oil set that they can't find, they can push a button and the light will start blinking on the tag so they can find it. One of the big drivers of us wanting to develop a new app is that we want to incorporate the elements of our loyalty program [into it]. Sometime in 2026, the app will be ready to pilot. We want to make sure that we do all our due diligence to get it right. What does store growth under the revamped store format look like for The Fresh Market? With us, efficiency is important, but what's even more important is making sure that we continue to strive to be even more relevant than yesterday. So while we want to be efficient, because we want to pass those efficiencies on to our guests, we also want to make sure that we are ramping up that in-store experience. I think it would be easy to do some things from a cost-cutting perspective, but we might lose a little bit of interest in our stores. And we don't want to do that. We want to make sure our stores are super interesting, because honestly, our brand is our moat, and we want to make sure that brand is as strong as it can possibly be. We constantly tweak things [in our format] to make sure that we're being relevant. This year, we'll open 11 stores - that's kinda the range that we're looking at moving forward - and we'll ramp up from there as we continue to grow and as we continue to tweak things. We could open more stores, but it's important to us that we staff these new stores with great people, and so when we open a new store, we put a current manager in that new store. We're not going to hire someone [new] to manage our new stores, because culture at The Fresh Market is extremely important. Copyright 2025 Industry Dive. All rights reserved.
Yahoo
08-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Pardon the Disruption: Kroger and Albertsons are tightening their belts
This story was originally published on Grocery Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily Grocery Dive newsletter. Pardon the Disruption is a column that looks at the forces shaping food retail. In the more than two years they spent trying to combine, Kroger and Albertsons held off on making any deep cuts to their businesses as they looked to curry favor with regulators and consumers. But now that the supermarket megamerger isn't happening, the two chains have returned in a big way to the tough but necessary work of making their stores, supply chains and corporate operations run more efficiently. Call it making up for lost time. Kroger announced in late June that it plans to close 60 stores over the next year and a half. It promptly got to work, with local media reporting impending closures of company-owned stores across several regions. Albertsons, meanwhile, has laid off around 800 employees and shuttered close to a dozen stores so far this year, The Wall Street Journal reported. There's much more to come. Both grocers say they are looking to wring unnecessary costs out of their businesses and better focus their efforts on high-performing products and services. Albertsons is in the process of cutting $1.5 billion over a three-year period, while Kroger is looking to bring more discipline to its investments and cost structure. 'We're going to modernize operations and ways of working across the board, from corporate to our stores and supply chain, to work smarter and more efficiently,' Kroger CFO David Kennerly said during the company's earnings call at the end of June. Instead of popping champagne, the nation's largest supermarket chains are cutting deep so that they can continue battling the very forces that spurred their attempted merger. They are also suing each other over who's to blame for the deal going up in flames. The belt-tightening that both companies have embraced this year comes as no surprise, and it will go a long way toward keeping prices down and staying competitive. But Kroger and Albertsons can't just hack and slash their way to a more compelling grocery experience. That's going to take innovation and risk-taking. How will these supermarket giants beat the growing threat that low-price and specialty retailers pose? Here are three things I'll be watching in the months ahead. Both Kroger and Albertsons will forge ahead with new leadership at the helm. For Kroger, that new leader has yet to be identified four months after former CEO Rodney McMullen resigned following an ethics review. Ron Sargent, who became interim CEO in March, said Kroger's board of directors has formed a search committee and is currently working with a nationally recognized search firm to identify candidates. As I wrote earlier this year, Kroger's next permanent CEO will have a lot of challenges to address, including labor unrest, mounting industry competition, an overly complex e-commerce network and a brand campaign that's starting to feel stale. The role also offers an opportunity to transform the conventional grocery model, and Kroger would do well to name someone with an innovative spirit. Albertsons, on the other hand, has its new leader in Susan Morris, the former operations chief who took over for Vivek Sankaran in May. She's coming into the CEO role at a difficult time. During the merger trial, lawyers painted Albertsons as a company with a bleak future. Since then, speculation has swirled about Albertsons eventually finding another suitor. But Morris told The Wall Street Journal the company has no plans to sell. She said she wants to make Albertsons leaner and negotiate more forcefully with suppliers. She also sees opportunities to expand its leading retail media network and improve key areas like produce, private label and its loyalty program. Morris told the Journal that Albertsons' specialty is one-stop shopping. That may be true, but a lot fewer consumers are shopping this way than when Morris joined the company nearly 40 years ago. Albertsons needs to figure out how to be an important stop for today's shop-around consumers. Kroger's online business has been growing at a healthy clip. During its first fiscal quarter this year, e-commerce sales increased 15%, with delivery driving a growing number of households to engage digitally with the grocer. That's well ahead of the overall sales growth rate in digital across the industry. But e-commerce remains an unprofitable business for Kroger — and that needs to change, Sargent said during the company's first-quarter earnings call. 'Our customers are embracing the whole digital model of our business. We are seeing improvements in profitability at an increasing rate. But to be clear… we're not profitable at this point,' he said. That's an understandable goal, and one that comes at a time when fierce competitor Walmart says its online business is now profitable. Trouble is, Kroger seems to be a long way off from achieving this, with Sargent noting: 'We still have a lot of work to do.' The 800-pound gorilla in the room is Kroger's network of automated fulfillment centers and spoke facilities powering its delivery service. This network needs to build scale and serve high levels of demand to achieve its full value, but right now Kroger and its fulfillment technology partner, Ocado, seem to be stuck figuring out how to make these facilities work for shoppers and Kroger's bottom line. Kroger and Albertsons have had a strong track record of innovation over the past several years. Both companies ramped up retail media and embraced trends like quick delivery, ghost kitchens and online marketplaces. While some of these bets didn't pan out, their nimbleness and willingness to learn have been encouraging at a time of rapid evolution across retail. Will that spirit of innovation diminish as the companies push for greater efficiency? That already seems to be happening, with neither company making the sort of eye-grabbing announcements in recent months that it used to. I understand pulling back on e-commerce innovation, given how demand has moderated in that channel over the past two years. But Kroger and Albertsons need to take bold steps in areas that are key to their associates and in-store shoppers, including meal solutions, loyalty programs and employee services. I live in an area that's packed with QFC, Fred Meyer and Safeway stores, and I can tell you that none of them come to mind when I think, 'What's for dinner?' All of these locations carry prepared meals, salad kits, packaged sushi and more, but the selections are usually uninspiring and merchandised in out-of-the-way areas that make it feel like the companies are checking boxes rather than trying to entice shoppers. Kroger and Albertsons both have paid digital membership programs, but they pale in comparison to the bevy of perks part of Walmart+ or Amazon Prime. Will Kroger and Albertsons expand these programs to provide more perks? The nation's largest supermarket chains' latest cuts show they understand the importance of playing defense in this ever-evolving, crazily competitive industry. Their bold merger attempt showed a willingness to play offense, and they should keep that competitive fire burning. Recommended Reading Kroger looks to cut costs as it chases growth Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
