"Customers Don't Buy Assortment. They Buy Items." What Foran's Mindset Shift Means for Your Brand.

Category Strategy

On June 18, during his first full earnings call as Kroger's CEO, Greg Foran said something that every CPG supplier selling into Kroger should read twice.

He was talking about Our Brands performance — private label gaining share, new items resonating with customers — when he said this:

Those last four words are the ones worth sitting with. Not just in Our Brands. Frankly, across the entire store.

That is Kroger's new CEO telling his organization, his investors, and anyone paying attention that the era of carrying items because they fill a slot in a planogram is over. Every item — yours included — now has to justify its existence on its own terms.

This post is about what that actually means for how you show up as a supplier.

What Item-Level Thinking Means Operationally for Kroger

Foran came to Kroger from Walmart, where he ran the U.S. business for six years and is credited with one of the cleaner operational turnarounds in recent retail history. He is not someone who makes casual remarks on earnings calls. When he says Kroger is changing its mindset to think more like item-level merchants, that is a signal about how Category Managers will be evaluated, how assortment decisions will be made, and what the bar looks like for items that want to stay on the shelf.

Item-level thinking, in practice, means a few things happening inside Kroger that you should plan around:

Category Managers will face more pressure to justify every slot. When leadership is talking publicly about items earning their place on the shelf, that language flows down. Category Managers who carry items because they have always been there, or because a supplier has a strong relationship, will find that rationale increasingly difficult to defend internally. The question they will be asked is what the item does for the customer, not what it does for the supplier.

Assortment rationalization becomes more likely, not less. Foran explicitly framed item-level discipline as something Kroger needs more of. That is a polite way of saying there are items on the shelf right now that have not earned their place. Some of those items belong to your competitors. Some of them may belong to you. The suppliers who understand which category they are in will be better positioned to respond.

The data conversation shifts from volume to value. Item-level thinking is not just about sales velocity. It is about what role an item plays for a customer in a specific moment. An item that sells modestly but brings a unique customer into the category, or drives a basket that includes higher-margin items, has a story to tell. An item that moves units but is functionally interchangeable with three others in the same section has a problem.

The Question Your Items Need to Answer

Foran used three examples when he made that statement: the Garlic and Herb Rotisserie Chicken, the Black Diamond Watermelon, the Guatemalan Antigua Coffee. Notice what those items have in common. Each one is specific. Each one is named. Each one is differentiated enough that you can picture the customer who wants it and cannot get exactly that thing somewhere else.

That is not an accident. He was not citing the best-selling rotisserie chicken. He was citing the garlic and herb one. The item with a reason to exist.

The question every supplier should be asking about every item in their Kroger assortment right now is simple: if my Category Manager had to stand in front of Foran and explain why this item is on the shelf, what would they say?

If the honest answer is "it sells okay" or "we've always had it" or "it rounds out the set," that is not an item-level answer. That is an assortment answer. And Kroger just told you they are done thinking in assortments.

What This Means for How You Sell

If Kroger is moving toward item-level thinking, the suppliers who thrive in that environment are the ones who bring item-level stories. Not category stories. Not brand stories. Item stories.

That means a few things change about how you prepare for a category review or a KOMPASS submission.

Lead with the customer, not the product. The strongest item-level story starts with who buys it and why, not with what it is. Foran's examples were specific because specificity is what separates an item with a purpose from one that just occupies space. Your sell-in story should be able to name the customer — not a demographic profile, a real shopping occasion — and explain why this item serves that customer better than anything else in the set.

Know your item's job in the category. Every item plays a role: it drives trial, it anchors a price point, it brings a customer into the category who would not otherwise shop it, it drives repeat visits, it builds the basket. If you cannot articulate the job your item is doing, your Category Manager will have a hard time defending it when assortment rationalization conversations happen during a KOMPASS review.

Differentiation is no longer optional. Items that are functionally interchangeable with private label or with a category leader are the most exposed in an item-level environment. If your item cannot point to something specific — an ingredient, a format, a use occasion, a customer segment — that makes it genuinely different, the conversation about whether it earns its shelf space will not go in your favor.

Use Kroger's own data to make the case. 84.51° and the syndicated data available to Kroger's Category Managers tells a rich story about basket composition, household penetration, and repeat purchase rates at the item level. Suppliers who walk into a category review having done that analysis, and who can show their item's contribution in terms Kroger's own systems confirm, are operating in the same language Foran is now asking his organization to speak.

Your Job Is to Arm the Category Manager

Here is something worth saying plainly: your Category Manager is not just evaluating your items. They are being evaluated on them. When Foran walks a store, or when a Category Manager sits down with their department coordinator or merchandising team to review the set, the question is not going to be what the supplier said about the item. It is going to be what the Category Manager knows about it.

That is where your role as a supplier changes in an item-level environment. You are not just selling an item. You are equipping a person to defend it.

The best supplier partners understand this dynamic. They do not walk into a category review and hand the Category Manager a sell sheet. They walk in with a story that the Category Manager can carry into the next conversation with their boss — one that answers the item-level questions before they are asked. What customer does this serve? What would the category lose without it? What does the data show about the household it brings in?

Think about it from the Category Manager's side. They are sitting in a meeting with their department coordinator or merchandising leadership who has been told, from the top of the organization, that every item needs to earn its place. They need to be ready to answer for every SKU in their set. The suppliers who made that conversation easy — who showed up with a clear, data-backed item story — are the ones the Category Manager is going to fight for. The suppliers who left the Category Manager to figure it out on their own are the ones who find out about a deletion after the fact.

Arming the Category Manager is not a soft concept. It is a practical one. It means:

Delivering the story in a format they can use. A clean one-page item narrative — customer, role in the category, data that supports it, differentiation from private label and competitors — is something a Category Manager can reference, share internally, and pull up when the question comes. A thirty-slide deck is not.

Doing the data work before you walk in the room. Your Category Manager has access to 84.51° and their own category data. But they have a lot of items to manage. The supplier who pulls the household penetration, basket attachment, and repeat rate for their items — and walks in having already interpreted what it means — is doing work the Category Manager does not have to do. That is the kind of partner who gets time and attention when it matters.

Keeping the story current. The item story you built eighteen months ago may not reflect what the data shows today. If your item's role in the category has evolved, your Category Manager needs to know that before they walk into a review, not after. Regular updates — not just at reset time — are what keep your items on the right side of that conversation.

The Honest Audit

Most CPG suppliers with more than a handful of items at Kroger have at least one that would struggle to pass Foran's test. That is not a judgment — it is just the reality of how assortments get built over time. Items get added incrementally, relationships carry things that data would not necessarily support, and category sets expand until someone decides it is time to tighten them.

Foran just signaled that tightening is coming. The suppliers who do the honest audit on their own portfolio before Kroger does it for them will be better positioned to have that conversation on their terms, not on Kroger's timeline.

The items that earn their place on the shelf are the ones with a clear answer to a clear question: what customer does this serve, and what would that customer lose if it were gone?

If your best items have a great answer to that question, this mindset shift is an opportunity. If some of your items do not, now is the time to find out — before your Category Manager has to.

From Cincinnati CPG Edge, keeping you in the Kroger know.