Is Kroger Beating Walmart On Price? Not So Fast.

A grocery price comparison attributed to Restaurant Furniture Plus put Kroger at the top of a four-retailer basket test. Kroger totaled $30.00 across fifteen store-brand staples, followed by Walmart at $30.95, Aldi at $33.15, and Albertsons at $35.58. Kroger posted the lowest price on ten of the fifteen items, more than any other chain. Aldi led on two, including a gallon of whole milk at $3.05. Costco, Trader Joe’s, H-E-B, and Piggly Wiggly were excluded. None of the outlets we examined links the study.

That finding has traveled. Fox Business ran it July 19, three Fox owned-and-operated affiliates carried identical copy, Benzinga and Yahoo Finance picked it up mid-week, and Dallas Express, WBAP, and KLIF were still publishing it fresh-dated on July 25.

A Number With No Reachable Source Is Still A Number In Your Merchant’s Deck

Restaurant Furniture Plus sells commercial foodservice furniture, describing itself on its own site as a leading online seller of commercial-grade chairs, bar stools, tables, and booths for restaurants, hotels, and similar venues. It is not a research firm.

Every outlet we checked attributes the study to Southern Living or Supermarket News, which in turn attribute it to Restaurant Furniture Plus. We traced that chain rather than reading every link in it, and at the end of it no publication has posted a link to a primary document, a methodology note, or a data table. We could not locate one either.

None of that is a claim that the underlying work is unsound, because we have not read it. It is an observation about how a competitive claim involving four named retailers reached a dozen outlets without any of them showing their work. One version, published by Benzinga, carries an explicit disclosure that it was produced partly with AI tools.

The published figures also deserve a second look on their own terms. The distance between first place and second is ninety-five cents on a thirty-dollar basket, or 3.2%. Grocery prices move more than that between two stores in the same metro, between two weeks in the same store, and between a promotional cycle and the week after it. No collection date, market, or store selection appears in any of the coverage.

Kroger did post the lowest price on ten of fifteen items as reported, and that should be said plainly rather than hedged. The argument here is not that Walmart won. It is that a three percent gap measured once, somewhere, cannot establish which retailer is cheaper, and suppliers should know that before the number reaches a category review.

Fifteen Items, Four Retailers, Zero National Brands

The detail worth a supplier’s attention is not the ranking. It is the composition.

Every item in the basket was store brand. Milk, bread, eggs, chicken breast, spaghetti, canned beans, canned diced tomatoes, sugar, baking staples. The comparison that trade and consumer press used this month to adjudicate which major grocer is cheapest contained no national brands at all.

That is a defensible design choice for comparing retailers to each other. It is also a description of where the industry now believes the price question gets settled. For a national brand supplier, the scoreboard being used to judge your retailer’s competitiveness does not include your product.

The timing makes that more than a curiosity. The Private Label Manufacturers Association reported this month, using Circana data, that over the six months ending June 14 store brand unit sales rose 0.2% while national brand unit sales fell 0.5%. Store brand unit share reached 23.8%, an all-time high, and store brands outperformed national brands on units in five of Circana’s six monthly reporting periods this year.

Consumer Reports Hit The Same Wall From The Opposite Direction

Basket studies have a structural problem with private label, and the clearest evidence is a study with the opposite flaw. Consumer Reports leaned too heavily on national brands. This month’s study used nothing else.

In February, Consumer Reports published a grocery price comparison across dozens of grocery retailers in six metro areas, using Walmart as the baseline. Whole Foods came in 39.7% above Walmart, Trader Joe’s 24.6% above, and Aldi 8.3% below. The finding was widely repeated, and on its face it favored Walmart.

Consumer Reports then updated the article. A clarification appended to it states that the piece was updated to clarify that the price-comparison baskets were significantly larger for mainstream supermarkets carrying a wide selection of national-brand goods than for retailers focused on private-label or specialty goods. Consumer Reports explained that its comparisons were most reliable for retailers stocking identical national-brand items that could be matched across chains, and that baskets shrank for private-label-focused stores because those stores carry fewer items in common with the Walmart baseline. In the Chicago analysis, the baskets comparing Food4Less, Jewel-Osco, Marianos, Meijer, Target, and Walmart each held 56 items. The basket comparing Trader Joe’s to Walmart held 23.

Numerator has ranked Trader Joe’s highest in the country on private label share at 79%, with Aldi at 77%. A comparison built on matching national brands cannot see most of what those two retailers sell, which is why the Chicago basket shrank by more than half.

Walmart discloses a version of the same limitation about its own claims. The footnote on its April Great Value announcement states that its price comparison rests on a conceptual basket of high-penetration items across food categories where Great Value is available, and reflects a comparison against national brands rather than total grocery spend. Two organizations, two different disclosures, and one study circulating this week with none.

The Private Label Walmart Is Growing Fastest Cannot Be Compared At All

Walmart’s private brand strategy makes the measurement problem worse, and deliberately so.

When Walmart launched bettergoods in April 2024, it described the line as its largest private brand food launch in twenty years and its fastest food brand brought to market, opening with 300 items priced mostly under $5. The company drew an explicit distinction in the announcement: rather than offering direct alternatives to national brand items at a lower price, many bettergoods products are unique to Walmart.

An item built with no national brand equivalent cannot appear in a like-for-like comparison anywhere. The premium tier of private label, the tier designed to capture trade-up spending, is structurally invisible to the entire genre of study this article is about.

Meanwhile the flagship keeps expanding. In April, Walmart announced a redesign of Great Value spanning almost 10,000 food and consumable items, which it called the most extensive private brand update in company history, rolling out over two years beginning with salty snacks. Scott Morris, senior vice president of private brands for Walmart U.S., said in a statement that the brand is getting a modern look but “what’s inside isn’t changing.”

The reach behind that is the number suppliers should sit with. According to Numerator, Great Value has higher household penetration than any other store-owned brand in the country, with 87% of U.S. households buying at least one item in the past year, and all five of the top private-label brands by household penetration in the United States belong to Walmart.

The Share Loss Is Already Showing Up In Filings

Hershey’s first-quarter disclosure gives the clearest picture of what this looks like from inside a national brand. U.S. candy, mint and gum retail takeaway rose 8.1% for the twelve weeks ended March 29 in multi-outlet plus convenience channels. In the same filing, the company reported that its share of that category declined against the prior year, attributing the decline to “increased marketplace competition” and the timing of innovation and merchandising programs. Hershey reported a second consecutive quarterly share decline on July 30.

No published data isolates where those units went, and treating that as a private label story is inference rather than established fact. What is documented is that the largest publicly reporting U.S. confectioner grew category dollars and lost category share during a period when store brand unit share set a record.

The Question Is What Was Measured, Not Who Won

Basket studies circulate. They reach category decks, competitive summaries, and eventually a line review conversation, usually without their methodology attached. Suppliers should consider treating them the way a merchant treats an unfamiliar data source: ask what was measured, when, and where, before accepting what it implies.

For this one, the answers are that fifteen private label items were priced at four retailers on an undisclosed date in undisclosed markets, that the reported spread between the top two was 3.2%, and that no national brand was in the comparison. A supplier walking into a fall conversation should be prepared for the headline and equipped with the composition.

The more durable move is to know your own subcategory’s private label position before the meeting rather than during it. Scintilla’s category performance reporting will produce that without anyone having to accept a trade summary’s framing of it.

3P Sellers Face The Inverted Version Of This

For 1P suppliers, the exposure is direct and structural. The competing store brand item sits in the same set, priced by the same merchant, and a basket study that ranks retailers on private label is measuring the very shelf position a national brand is negotiating for. When a merchant’s price image is judged on Great Value and bettergoods, the branded item’s role in that conversation differs from what it was when the comparison ran on national brands.

For 3P Marketplace sellers, private label pressure is lighter because Walmart’s own brands are largely a 1P shelf phenomenon. The analogous mechanism is Buy Box competition, which prices a seller out within days rather than at the next reset, and which no basket study captures at all. A 3P seller reading this comparison should understand it describes a competitive arena they are not in.

Kroger announced on July 1 that it will acquire Giant Eagle for $1.65 billion, adding roughly 197 supermarkets and about $9 billion in annual sales, with closing expected in 2027. Chief Executive Officer Greg Foran cited the target’s “reputation for fresh products, pharmacy, private label and customer loyalty.” Four attributes, and one of them is the shelf a national brand does not occupy.

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