Great Value’s New Look Is Aimed at the Shoppers National Brands Thought Were Theirs

Walmart announced Wednesday that Great Value, its flagship private label, will begin appearing in new packaging this May. The rollout covers roughly 10,000 food and consumables items and will phase in over 18 to 24 months, starting with salty snacks and expanding category by category. It is the brand’s first full packaging refresh in more than a decade, and Walmart is calling it the most extensive private brand update in the company’s history.

The price is not changing. The product is not changing. But the merchant’s posture in the next line review might be, and that is the part of this announcement worth sitting with.

The Admission Inside the Announcement

David Hartman, Walmart’s vice president of creative, told CNBC that customer research showed shoppers liked Great Value’s quality and price, but that “the expression of the brand on the pack was kind of lagging.” More specifically, he said shoppers felt like buying Great Value was “kind of a compromise,” something they used but did not particularly feel proud to display at home or with family.

For national brand suppliers, the implication runs in both directions. It confirms that Great Value has not yet closed the pride-of-ownership gap that national brands still hold with a meaningful segment of shoppers. It also signals that Walmart has diagnosed that gap precisely and is now spending at scale to close it, with consequences that extend well beyond shelf aesthetics.

The redesign addresses both shelf and screen. Scott Morris, Walmart’s senior vice president of private brands, noted that clearer visual cues would help customers and associates move faster, including pickers fulfilling online orders. Hartman said the new system was built to improve discoverability in the app. The packaging is being engineered as a digital shelf asset, not just a physical one, which matters for any supplier tracking Great Value’s search performance on Walmart.com.

The packaging refresh is not a standalone investment. Last fall, Walmart announced its goal to remove synthetic dyes from all food private brands by January 2027. The corporate announcement released Wednesday connects both moves explicitly as part of the same ongoing commitment to private brand quality. A visual upgrade and a formulation upgrade, arriving in sequence. Suppliers in food categories who assumed Great Value’s ingredient story was weaker than theirs should check that assumption against the January 2027 deadline.

87% Household Penetration Is a Floor, Not a Ceiling

Numerator puts Great Value’s household penetration at 87% of U.S. households purchasing at least one item in the past year. Walmart states that Great Value reaches nine out of ten U.S. homes, saving an average family 35% annually compared to national brand equivalents in categories where Great Value competes, a figure based on a conceptual basket of high-penetration items, not total grocery spend. By unit and dollar reach, Great Value is already the largest food and consumables CPG brand in the United States.

A brand at 87% penetration is not trying to acquire new households in meaningful numbers. The redesign is about changing frequency, basket depth, and category breadth among existing Great Value buyers, converting the shopper who buys Great Value paper towels but still reaches for a national brand in cereal. The packaging redesign, by creating what Hartman described as “a sense of discovery” across the shelf, is built specifically for that conversion.

The rollout sequence is the most underleveraged fact in this announcement. Salty snacks first. Then cereals. Then cream cheeses and sour cream. Those are categories with high national brand investment in packaging equity, categories where the visual and emotional appeal of a national brand has historically done real work at the moment of decision. Walmart is not starting with commodities like flour or sugar where Great Value already competes primarily on price. It is starting where packaging influences the purchase.

That sequencing is a map of where Walmart’s merchant team believes Great Value currently loses shoppers to national brands on perception rather than on product inferiority. Suppliers whose categories appear in the first wave should understand what that belief means for the next line review. The merchant’s conviction that Great Value can compete on something other than price in your category will be present in the room before the new packaging ever hits the shelf.

A More Credible Great Value Changes What a Merchant Can Say

The conventional concern about private label is displacement, losing a facing, a SKU, distribution. That is a real risk. It is not the most immediate consequence of this announcement for most national brand suppliers.

The more immediate consequence is negotiating posture.

Walmart does not need Great Value to defeat national brands in order to extract value from them. It needs the merchant to credibly believe that Great Value could hold the category without the national brand, credibly enough to say so across a table. Every dollar invested in closing Great Value’s perception gap increases the plausibility of that claim. A packaging system that shoppers find as appealing as a national brand, combined with a formulation commitment that removes the last easy ingredient-story advantage, makes that claim harder to dismiss.

The supplier does not have to lose the shelf to lose the negotiation. They just have to believe they might.

For 3P Marketplace sellers in food and consumables, the implication is more immediate and more structural. A redesigned Great Value that is easier to find on Walmart.com, built as Hartman noted for discoverability in the app, competes directly for search placement and page visibility against every third-party seller in those categories. The packaging work is also content work, and it is being done at a scale most 3P sellers cannot match.

NielsenIQ’s Steve Zurek noted that Gen Z shoppers buy private label at higher rates than previous generations and often prefer store brands outright. The stigma, he told CNBC, has been “slowly falling away.” Walmart is not creating that environment. It is building infrastructure scaled to capitalize on it, across 10,000 SKUs and 87% household penetration simultaneously.

The Higher-Income Shopper Is the Real Battleground

The Great Value refresh does not arrive alone. It lands alongside Bettergoods, a premium private-label line Walmart launched roughly two years ago, aimed at higher-income households drawn to chef-driven flavors, plant-based items, and trend-forward ingredients. Walmart has reported significant gains among customers with annual household incomes above $100,000, driven by lower prices, faster delivery, and more distinctive merchandise. Great Value and Bettergoods now bracket the private label opportunity from both ends: trusted everyday value at one end, aspirational quality at the other.

The higher-income shopper is precisely the segment national brand suppliers have relied on to anchor their premium. That shopper buys national brands not only out of trust but because the packaging signals something about how they shop. Hartman’s research finding, that Great Value felt like a compromise to display at home, describes exactly the perception gap national brands have been living inside. The redesign is a direct attempt to close it with the shopper both sides are currently chasing most aggressively.

For national brand suppliers, the question is not whether Great Value’s new packaging will move units. At 87% penetration with a refreshed shelf presence and a cleaner ingredient story arriving in parallel, it will. The more useful question to bring into the next line review or JBP conversation is which of your categories fall in the first rollout wave, what Great Value’s current velocity in those categories shows in Luminate, and whether your packaging and brand system is doing something the redesigned Great Value demonstrably cannot.

If the honest answer to that last question is price premium alone, this announcement deserves more than a note in the Monday recap.

Winning With Walmart

Winning With Walmart is an independent platform for suppliers, sellers, solution providers, and industry experts.

Articles are developed by staff editors, contributing experts, and trusted partners.

Some are researched and drafted with the assistance of AI tools and are reviewed, fact-checked, and edited by Winning With Walmart editors before publication.

Editorial judgment, sourcing decisions, and final approval rest with the publication's human editors in every case.

We are committed to accuracy and fairness. If you believe this article contains an error, we welcome your feedback.