Kroger's Our Brands Is No Longer a Side Business — It's a Direct Competitor

There's a number that should be sitting in the back of every national brand supplier's mind right now: 26%. That's Kroger's private label share of total sales volume — equal to Walmart's, according to Numerator. For a company that has historically been known as a national brand retailer with a strong private label side business, that number tells a different story. Kroger's Our Brands program is no longer a side business. It is a core commercial strategy, it is accelerating, and it is being built with the same operational discipline that new CEO Greg Foran brought to Walmart U.S.

Kroger's Our Brands portfolio now encompasses more than 13,000 items and generates approximately $30 billion in annual sales — produced across 35 food manufacturing plants Kroger operates itself. That's not a private label program. That's a vertically integrated food company sitting inside a grocery retailer.

The growth trajectory is what makes this a 2026 story. Private label dollar sales across the industry grew at nearly three times the rate of national brands in 2025, with store brand sales climbing to a record $282.8 billion industry-wide. At Kroger specifically, Our Brands outpaced national brand growth in every quarter of fiscal 2025, with premium lines Simple Truth and Private Selection leading the charge. Q4 2025 saw Our Brands contribute meaningfully to overall sales growth of 2.1% to $34.7 billion — excluding fuel.

The clearest signal of where Kroger is investing in Our Brands right now is the health and wellness corridor. In January 2026, Kroger expanded its Simple Truth Protein line by 24 SKUs, bringing the total assortment to more than 110 products. New additions span high-protein cereal, beef sticks, protein and electrolyte water enhancers, single-serve cottage cheese, and energy bars — a nearly complete sweep of the functional snacking and beverage space at price points well below comparable national brands.

On the premium side, Private Selection recently added more than 20 globally inspired ready-to-eat and ready-to-cook items — Korean beef bulgogi, chicken parmesan, gnocchi alla sorrentina, Mandarin orange chicken, and seasoned whole-roasted chicken among them. These aren't store brand basics. They're competing directly with premium national brands in the prepared and international food segments.

The tier structure matters for understanding how Kroger approaches the shelf. Our Brands operates across four distinct price and quality levels, each targeting a different shopper segment and competing with national brands at a different angle.

National brand suppliers need to understand the financial logic driving this expansion, because it explains why Kroger won't slow down. Private label products carry a margin profile that's meaningfully better for the retailer than national brands — estimated at roughly 35% gross margin versus around 26% for national brands. Every incremental Our Brands unit sold is worth more to Kroger's bottom line than the national brand unit it displaces.

With Greg Foran in the CEO seat — a leader whose reputation was built on operational efficiency and margin discipline — and Mary Ellen Adcock running the merchant organization with a mandate to grow Our Brands, the financial incentive and the organizational will are now pointing in the same direction. This isn't a trend. It's a structural business priority.

Know which tier is coming for your category.

Kroger's four-tier Our Brands structure means that virtually every national brand on the shelf has a private label equivalent either already there or in development. If you're in health and wellness, functional food, or premium prepared, Simple Truth and Private Selection are accelerating directly into your space. Understanding which tier is competing with you — and at what price gap — is the starting point for any category defense strategy.

Shelf space is a zero-sum game.

Every new Our Brands item added to the planogram takes a slot from somewhere. In categories where Kroger is actively building out its private label assortment, national brands with weak velocity, thin distribution, or limited promotional support become the most vulnerable. If your TDP is soft, your promotional frequency is low, or your item hasn't posted meaningful year-over-year growth, you are the path of least resistance when a Category Manager needs to make room.

Differentiation has to be real, not just claimed.

The era of winning shelf space at Kroger purely on brand equity is over. Kroger's own brands now have strong consumer recognition — more than 90% of its households bought an Our Brands product in 2025. The differentiation story a national brand needs to tell has to be grounded in something the private label tier cannot easily replicate: unique ingredients, proprietary formulations, consumer brand pull demonstrated through actual velocity data, or a marketing investment that genuinely drives incremental traffic to the category.

The Innovation Summit is worth knowing about.

Kroger has launched its inaugural Our Brands Innovation Summit — a program inviting private brand suppliers to pitch innovative products for the Our Brands portfolio via virtual meetings with Kroger buyers. This is Kroger building an innovation pipeline for its own brands at scale. The speed at which Simple Truth went from launch to 110+ items is a preview of what that pipeline can do when it's organized and funded.

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