Kroger Blueprint 2024 Event Recap

Last week, our Harvest Group Kroger team hosted the 3rd annual Kroger Blueprint event in Cincinnati. We developed our series of Blueprint events to remove the barrier between retailer strategy and our clients by providing an opportunity to hear directly from retailer executives about their growth strategies for the coming year and how they specifically apply to our clients’ businesses.

A Day of Community, Collaboration, and Connection  

The additional benefit of an event like Blueprint is the community, collaboration, and connection we get to experience between our clients, Harvest Group’s team, and Kroger representatives.

We were fortunate to hear from several Kroger, KPM, and 84.51° leaders, most notably:

The day was packed with valuable insights. Below we’re recapping just a few of the top strategies for growth:

Key Strategies for Growth

  1. Kroger’s leadership emphasized a return to growth, with market share as their primary success metric. While customer trips are healthy, they’re seeking supplier help to increase units per trip. For future growth, they’re prioritizing bigger and bolder bets vs. adding fragmented new items going forward.
  2. VPS (very price sensitive) and LPS (least price sensitive) customers make up about 40% of Kroger’s business, leaving 60% coming from the middle, or Price Sensitive, consumers. Vendors are encouraged to clearly define the role their item(s) and pack(s) play within the framework of Kroger’s shopper groups and try not to be all things to all shoppers.
  3. Category managers emphasized their focus on streamlined, impactful promotions that effectively communicate value to shoppers. They stressed the importance of a comprehensive promotional strategy and expressed interest in receiving more post-promotion analyses from suppliers to refine their approach.
  4. 3CM process was referenced throughout the day, perhaps most notably that it is currently being used to identify new items missing from distribution, but in the future 3CM will be used to discover new categories entirely. Even non-3CM partners can bring new data and insights from non-traditional sources to guide future category strategy.
  5. We heard consistently throughout the day Kroger’s 15% digital penetration goal for all categories by the end of this year (about 11% today), which more closely aligns to the overall retail market at 15-16% penetration. The runway for eCommerce is clear, as Kroger’s omnichannel shoppers spend 3-6x more than in-store only shoppers.
  6. The company stressed the breadth and quality of Kroger’s 1P data as Kroger is confident about their ability to leverage that data at scale better than their competitors. 75% of Kroger’s ad impressions were served to new-to-brand customers in the last 26 weeks, and 75% of the clicks and conversions came from net new households.

Looking Forward

We are incredibly grateful for the dedication of time and resources our Kroger and 84.51° partners offered to make this day so meaningful for our clients, and we look forward to continuing to bridge the gap between retailers and clients through these events.

Interested in learning more about Harvest Group’s services at Kroger? Reach out to us at hello@harvestgroup.com or our Contact Us form here.