Foran Built the Walmart Grocery Playbook. Now He’s Running It at Kroger.

On February 9, 2026, Kroger named Greg Foran its chief executive officer, effective immediately. Foran spent five years as president and CEO of Walmart U.S., where Kroger’s announcement credited him with delivering 20 consecutive quarters of comparable sales growth. He left Walmart in 2019 and became CEO of Air New Zealand in 2020 before stepping down in October 2025. He is the first outside CEO in Kroger’s 143-year history. Kroger shares rose roughly 7% on the announcement.

For suppliers, the competitive framing misses the more operational question. What changes when the discipline that Walmart built its grocery dominance on is now being actively installed at the second-largest conventional grocer in the country? That question has direct consequences for how suppliers manage assortment, trade investment, private label exposure, and retail media budgets across both accounts.

A More Demanding Kroger Raises the Standard Across the Account Base

Walmart’s grocery position going into this shift is not a background detail. According to dunnhumby’s Wave 12 Consumer Trends Tracker, published in February 2026, Walmart’s grocery penetration reached a record 72% of U.S. households, up 6 percentage points year over year, the largest single-year gain among all retailers tracked. The company serves more than 190 million Americans each month. For the first time, mass-channel penetration matched traditional supermarkets at 79%, a shift dunnhumby attributed to persistent affordability pressure among consumers ages 18 to 54.

That growth has concentrated supplier attention, promotional investment, and supply chain discipline in one direction. A Kroger operating to a higher standard does not change Walmart’s trajectory. It raises the floor that national brands must clear to justify shelf space and trade investment across the full grocery account base, and it does so at an account with the store footprint, loyalty data, and media infrastructure to enforce that standard in ways it previously lacked the management focus to pursue.

Foran’s stated priorities at Kroger’s Q4 2025 earnings call, his first as CEO, were direct. He described the path forward as delivering more value to customers, improving the in-store experience, and driving cost savings to fund growth. CFO David Kennerley said Kroger plans to allocate between $3.8 billion and $4 billion in capital expenditures in 2026, directed primarily at new stores and remodels. Kroger’s alternative profit businesses, including retail media, data insights, and Kroger Personal Finance, delivered $1.5 billion in operating profit in 2025, with double-digit media growth expected in 2026. Kroger introduced more than 1,100 new Our Brands products during fiscal 2025, up from approximately 900 the year before.

Those priorities track directly to the disciplines Walmart has already established as account-level expectations: assortment rationalization, private label as a structural tool rather than a defensive hedge, and retail media as a cost of category investment. Suppliers who have calibrated their Kroger approach to a lower standard of rigor than their Walmart approach should expect that gap to close.

Assortment Discipline Is Where Foran Always Starts

Within months of arriving at Walmart U.S. in 2014, Foran told investors in October 2014 remarks that inventory was “growing at twice the rate of sales” and that the business was “over-SKU’d in some cases,” according to Talk Business and Politics coverage of those remarks. His early tenure at Walmart was defined by exactly the kind of assortment and in-stock discipline that suppliers eventually felt in line reviews and replenishment conversations.

At Kroger, the same instinct applies. Foran has framed competitive pricing alongside quality fresh products and efficient store management as the core levers for traffic and share retention. Kroger recorded its best market share performance since 2021 in Q4 2025, driven by what the company described as intentional price investment and improved customer value perception. Identical-store sales excluding fuel grew 2.4% in the quarter. The direction Foran has set publicly is tighter assortments, stronger private label value ladders, and a store experience built to bring shoppers back, which is precisely what he spent five years building at Walmart.

For suppliers, the implication heading into line reviews is that the documentation requirements for national brand shelf presence are rising at Kroger on the same dimensions they already exist at Walmart: category incrementality, promotional efficiency, and shopper conversion that goes beyond the deal period. Brands that can demonstrate those metrics at Walmart and translate the evidence specifically to the Kroger account team are better positioned than those treating the two accounts as requiring entirely separate strategies.

Private Label Acceleration Is Now Synchronized at Both Accounts

Kroger’s Our Brands business already outpaces national brands in sales growth when egg deflation is excluded, according to Kroger’s Q4 earnings commentary. Simple Truth and Private Selection led the portfolio. With more than 1,100 new items launched in fiscal 2025 and a clear signal from Foran that private label expansion is both a traffic driver and a margin tool, suppliers in center store, refrigerated, and fresh-adjacent categories face more active own-brand competition at Kroger in 2026.

At Walmart, Bettergoods has grown to approximately 400 items and approached $500 million in sales, a figure Walmart CFO John David Rainey discussed in public comments. Retail Dive reported in October 2025, citing Numerator data, that Bettergoods reached purchases from 9% of U.S. households, making it one of the two fastest-growing private label brands in the country that year. Both accounts are now running private label acceleration programs simultaneously, under leaders who understand how to use own-brand strategically to reshape category economics.

For national brand suppliers, the question at each account is whether a given brand’s contribution to category incrementality is documented, current, and framed in terms specific to that retailer’s shopper base. Generic category data presented interchangeably to both account teams does not answer the question either is now asking. The 1P and 3P implications diverge here: for 1P suppliers, private label pressure at both accounts is a direct shelf-space and margin conversation. For 3P Marketplace sellers, the more immediate question is whether the categories where Kroger and Walmart are both expanding own brands are also categories where Marketplace competition is intensifying from the value tier.

Retail Media Parity Is Closer Than Most Supplier Budgets Reflect

Kroger’s alternative profit businesses delivered $1.5 billion in operating profit in 2025, with Kennerley guiding for double-digit media growth in 2026. Kroger Precision Marketing, backed by 84.51°’s shopper data infrastructure, is a meaningful component of that figure. Foran’s background at Walmart, where Walmart Connect has become one of the largest closed-loop retail media networks in the country, means he understands precisely how media revenue can be structured to fund price investment while sustaining category margin.

Suppliers who have treated Kroger’s retail media requirements as more negotiable than Walmart Connect’s are likely to find that calculus shifting. The data asset Kroger holds through 84.51° is comparable in depth to what Walmart generates through its own loyalty and transaction infrastructure. Suppliers building 2027 Connect plans should be modeling Kroger media investment on a parallel track rather than as a secondary line item.

Suppliers Already Running on Walmart’s Standard Are Ahead of the Transition

Foran’s operational priorities at Kroger, including expanding fresh assortments, raising store standards, and treating frontline labor as a traffic driver rather than a cost line, align with categories where strong supplier partnerships create compounding value at both accounts. Fresh food performance, in particular, is an area where supplier collaboration on quality, assortment depth, and replenishment consistency produces results that benefit the retailer and the brand. The Kroger that Foran is building rewards the same supplier behaviors Walmart has been requiring for years.

Kroger reported approximately $16 billion in full-year digital sales for fiscal 2025, with Q4 adjusted ecommerce sales up 20% year over year, the seventh consecutive quarter of double-digit digital growth, per the company’s earnings release. Kroger is directing that investment toward store-fulfilled pickup and delivery to improve profitability, the same model Walmart refined over the preceding several years. A grocery landscape where both major accounts execute store-as-fulfillment-hub with comparable discipline is a more demanding environment than one where only one account has the management focus to enforce it.

Dunnhumby’s February 2026 data showed Walmart’s grocery penetration rising 6 points in a single year, in part because Kroger was operationally distracted and leadership-uncertain for most of 2025. The supplier base that spent that period building toward Walmart’s standard on assortment productivity, private label differentiation, omnichannel supply chain readiness, and retail media attribution enters 2027 with the one thing Foran’s arrival at Kroger now makes genuinely scarce: time to prepare.

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