The Kroger Company, or simply Kroger, is an American retailing company. The first Kroger market store was opened by Bernard Kroger in the year 1883. The headquarters of the Kroger marketplace is in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States. The store has its branches across the United States. At present, the store has 2,778 locations in the U.S. About 443,000 number of employees work in it. Rodney McMullen is the present CEO of the company.
Coming to the story of the grocery, In 1883, Bernard ‘Barney’ Kroger invested his life savings to open a grocery store at 66 Pearl Street in downtown Cincinnati. Pearl Street formerly existed between 2nd Street and 3rd Street. In 1884 Kroger opened his second store.Kroger tried many ways to satisfy customers. He experimented with making his own products, such as bread, so that customers would not need to go to a separate bakery.In 1916 Kroger company began self-service shopping.In the 1930s, Kroger became the first grocery chain to monitor product quality and to test foods offered to customers, and also the first to have a store surrounded on all four sides by parking lots.
In April 2016, Kroger announced that it had made a “meaningful investment” in the Boulder, Colorado-based Lucky’s Market, an organic foods supermarket chain that operated 17 stores in 13 states throughout the Midwest and the Southeast United States. On May 1, 2017, Kroger, along with the University of Kentucky and UK Athletics, sports and campus marketing partner JMI Sports announced a 12-year, $1.85 million per year campus marketing agreement. Included in the agreement is the naming rights to Commonwealth Stadium, the university’s football stadium, which will be renamed Kroger Field. This agreement makes the University of Kentucky the first school in the Southeastern Conference to enter into a corporate partnership for the naming rights to their football stadium.
The Kroger Company also employs one of the largest networks of private label manufacturing in the country. Thirty-seven plants in seventeen states create about 40% of Kroger’s private label products. Similar to most major supermarket retailers, Kroger uses a three-tiered private label marketing strategy.