Grocery Update #62: Southern Exposure, Part 1: Food Lion and Kroger.
Big Grocery Squares Off In The Deep South.
Discontents: 1. Four Questions With Brami. 2. Southern Exposure, Part 1: Kroger and Food Lion Square Off In The Southeast.
1. Four Questions with Aaron Gatti, Founder of Brami.
What inspired you to start Brami?
The original seed of Brami was planted during the time I spent at my grandparents’ farmhouse in Italy growing up. I spent about a quarter of my life there. I remember thinking even as a kid that I needed to somehow bottle up the joy I felt around food and bring it back to the U.S. We ate traditional farm-to-table meals: extra virgin olive oil pressed from the olive trees outside, vegetables picked that morning by my grandmother from her orto (garden). My relationship with food there was nothing short of magical. Everything was equally delicious and nutritious, made from simple, whole ingredients. The guilt or anxiety I often felt around food in the U.S. felt a million miles away.
Later in life, I was always struck by how Americans viewed Italian food as indulgent or unhealthy, basically the opposite of what I experienced. And when it comes to pasta, which is our biggest product line, it pains me that it’s seen that way. Italians eat four times more pasta than Americans and yet live longer, healthier, happier lives.
The more immediate spark for starting Brami came when I introduced lupini beans to my now-wife about 10 years ago. I loved them as a kid but didn’t know much about them. Her reaction was: “Wow, they’re like the Italian version of edamame! How do I not know about these? I’m always looking for high-protein snacks!” That kicked off a deep dive. We learned that lupini beans have the highest density of protein and fiber of any crop on the planet, and they’re incredibly sustainable and farmer-friendly. It checked every box for me.
So from there, the vision became clear: introduce this underappreciated whole food to create ingredient-focused products that are both delicious and nourishing. In a way, I’ve been chasing that childhood dream ever since—democratizing the dolce vita I grew up enjoying in Italy.
What makes your supply chain and product offerings stand out from competitors?
It's such an exciting time in the pasta space right now. The recent history of pasta in America feels like a dramatic Italian opera, full of tragedy. For so long, the category has been dominated by low-quality pasta that no Italian would consider pasta. In Italy, real pasta is made exclusively with durum wheat, using a mix of biodiverse heritage seeds, milled and stored to exacting standards, and extruded almost always through bronze dies.
Here in the U.S., lower standards in part led to the perception of pasta as unhealthy, as if all pasta were akin to processed white bread. Not true of real pasta, which is incredibly nutritious! And the reaction to that was in large part an explosion of gluten-free pasta options, even for consumers who are not celiac. But as is so often the case, the innovation is far worse than the real thing. Many of those pastas are heavily processed, engineered with gums or binders, and made with flours that are far less nutrient-dense than durum wheat. Cue the opera singers lamenting our national pasta crisis.
Authentically made pasta is nutritious in its own right. And now we’re seeing a pasta renaissance. Inflation has driven people to cook more at home, and pasta is one of the easiest, most family-friendly meals. At the same time, people are leveling up by buying premium pasta or seeking out wheat pasta with added benefits.
That’s where Brami comes in. We’re uniquely both: a premium Italian durum wheat pasta made to the highest standards, and a functional pasta enhanced with ultra-nutritious, whole-milled lupini beans. Our vertically integrated supply chain means we even do our own milling and storing. The result is a pasta that’s truly functional without the usual compromises, packed with protein and fiber, made the traditional Italian way with just simple, whole ingredients. No one else is doing that.
What kind of challenges have you had getting on/staying on shelf?
Since we launched this latest iteration of our pasta, our experience getting—and staying—on shelf has been really positive. Pasta buyers know there’s a huge gap in the market. On one hand, people feel guilty eating conventional pasta. On the other hand, most "better-for-you" pastas fall short on taste, texture, or value. Wheat-based pastas with added nutrition like ours actually drove 101% of the dollar growth in the MULO pasta category over the past year.
Our original product line, our pouched lupini beans, had a more challenging journey to find their ultimate home. We launched them as a new, healthy snack, and retailers naturally placed them in the functional snack set. But that was a tough fit. Everything else in the set was dry and crunchy, but our lupini beans are pickled. That experience really taught me how much shelf placement shapes consumer expectations.
Eventually, we noticed people were using them more as salad toppers, and Whole Foods moved us to the Shelf-Stable Veggie aisle. That’s when we found true product-market fit. There was a painful year in between, when we weren’t in Whole Foods at all, but getting back in—and finding the right shelf—made all the difference. I really have to thank the incredible Shelf-Stable Veggie buyer who believed in the product and gave it a second life.
What is your vision for a better food supply?
I just hope we continue moving toward simple, high-quality, whole foods. I’d love to see us get off the fad diet hamster wheel. From my experience growing up in Italy, it sometimes feels like we’re constantly trying to reinvent the wheel when it comes to food. One day it’s “this is good,” the next it’s “this is bad.” More of this. Less of that.
I’m not saying there isn’t truth in some of it, but it’s confusing, and exhausting. I think we’d all be better off focusing on foods that are made from varied, real, whole ingredients—ideally cooked with love and enjoyed with levity, surrounded by your given or chosen family.
It also means not always buying the cheapest option, which I know is a hard ask right now. But when you look at the bigger picture, the cost of fad diets, processed food, and the long-term healthcare impacts of poor nutrition, spending a little more on quality food ends up being the more economical choice.
And hopefully, if more people choose to spend that way, it will push the market to continue to raise its standards, to everyone’s benefit.
2. Southern Exposure. Part 1.
The Southeastern grocery market is its own thing.
Not as diverse in terms of grocery retail as the Northeast. Not as crunchy or Kroger’d and Albertson’d as the West Coast. Not as Heb’d as Texas. The southeast is a grocery battle ground, with a diverse and growing population, discounters, mass merchants, regional supermarkets and natural/specialty chains all going at it. It is a huge market for Walmart, which dominates much of the region. But Walmart is Walmart, still the center of the grocery universe, the supermassive black hole about which all else rotates, willingly or not. We are all just in the Walmart accretion disk. And the Southeast is also the home of Publix, which monopolizes Florida, has captured the hearts and minds of millions of customers and makes life difficult for everyone else all up and down the lower I-95 and eastern I-10 corridor. Discounters such as Aldi and Lidl are also jockeying for position, while east coast multinational Ahold-Delhaize weaponizes its value positioning with Food Lion. It is an exciting place to document grocery market dynamics in action, if you are a grocery nerd. And a place where shoppers seem to have more big supermarket options every year, the industrial food system self-replicating between in monotonous abundance. This week, we take a look at two of the leading grocers in the Southeast, how they are competing, where they stand out and how they may be vulnerable. Hang on to your hats.
Food Lion.
I have always found Food Lion to be Ahold Delhaize’s most compelling retail division, a real fighter brand for the nation’s sixth largest grocery chain. Giant, the other Giant, Martin’s and Stop & Shop all kind of blend together in my mind, no disrespect to the thousands of clerks and cashiers and merchandisers who make them tick every day. Hannaford is a bit of an outlier though, I have only been in a couple of them, and a while back, and I mostly associate them with refusing to sell farmworker audited Milk With Dignity, which is lame. The cows don’t milk themselves, y’all.
But Food Lion is a beast. King of the retail jungle, top of the food chain, etc., just add your big feral cat pun here ____, we have plenty more. Probably Ahold’s leading regional chain most likely to go head to head with Walmart and occasionally come out on top. Which is surprising for an Ahold Division. Their other banners are middle market, conventional, somewhat generic, broadliner supermarkets, with their huge stores, vast aisles, category captain arrangements, and very visible Big Food Consumer Brands Association Packaged Food Monopolies dominating their shelf sets, the massive slotting fees they charge suppliers for the privilege of sitting on shelf, their strong private label placements in multiple value and middle market price segments, a better than average perimeter of freshly stocked and rotated produce and full service, skillfully merchandised meat, poultry and seafood, and their extensive smattering of organic, special dietary focused, all-natural and higher attribute packaged foods punctuating pretty much every category in the store. They are also mostly unionized, so that is a big plus one, with many stores under contracts with UFCW locals who have ensured tens of thousands of blue collar jobs with decent wages and benefits, even pensions, although new contract talks are coming up and the last round was a doozy. Remember friends, we never cross picket lines.
But drop into the middle of any Giant or Stop & Shop center store and really, how different is it than your typical Albertsons banner, your Pavilions, Safeway, Tom Thumb, Vons or Acme, your boring AF but completely adequate Randall’s, or your middling, heartland, suburban Kroger banner, your Mariano’s, QFC, Smith’s, even most King Soopers these days. Abundance and monotony, so much, yet so much of the same, everywhere, over and over. Your local supermarket. Your big neighborhood grocery store. Not your shoppy shop. There is no emotional baggage here. This is purely functional with Ahold Delhaize. Formulaic. Homogenous. Sku rationalized. Category managed. Assortment optimized. Competent, technocratic. They get the job done, every day, it’s not sexy.
But just like Kroger has some stellar divisions- I can confidently put forward Kroger Cincinatti or Kroger Atlanta as top tier, and I still have a soft spot for Fred Meyer, where I once bought my ancient, beloved Dickies jacket- but Ahold Delhaize has its fighter brand. Food Lion. The mane event.
This location is apparently a training store, a Fresh Market manager next door told me. It has a low profile center store shelving set up so you can see straight across the expanse, easily 50,000 square feet, a bit disorientingly large. Low shelving like Sprouts, but inside out, with endless aisles of packaged foods in the middle and a pretty decent produce and perishables area along the perimeter. But Food Lion is not mid.
Food Lion goes for the jugular in pricing and value perception. Sale signage everywhere, in bright yellow highlights with blocky black lettered numbers and red “Hot” blue “SALE!” language literally everywhere the eye tracks, like the whole store is shouting in primary colors what you need to buy and for how much, easily the most shouty and ecstatic sale signage this side of Wegman’s, and I do love my Wegman’s.
It's not a creative assortment at Food Lion. Front endcaps, fully stacked. Doritos or Cheetos 2/$7 or Pepperidge Farm cookies 2/$6. Oreos 2/$4. Hunts and Ro-tel cans 4/$5. And two liter bottles of red label Coca Cola, buy one get one free, stacked on a merchandisable pallet the same way it was shipped from the bottler to the warehouse to the truck onto a forklift and then a pallet jack which rolled it carefully here to the front of the store, ten feet from the phalanx of cash registers so what’s your excuse why you aren’t buying one, two or four. Thankfully, I am immune, I prefer seltzer, too cool for this Hot SALE!
Produce is less exclamatory, but the sale signs nonetheless persist, $1.69 broccoli crowns, $1.19 carrots, .49 cabbage, nice cheap, nutrient dense roughage from the California Central Valley or maybe southwestern Arizona, Coachella, Kerr County, Salinas or Watsonville. The wet rack is black, clean and neatly arranged, kale and collards slightly overflowing but everything else skillfully laid out. No mold, no funky odors. It’s nothing to write home to Mom about but it will keep you healthy and well fed and not break the bank. That is not insignificant these days. Just some decent quality, modestly priced produce, even some organic, sans glyphosate residue. We should all be so lucky. Food Lion knows their audience.
Each cooler door along the back wall, stocked with cold cuts, bacon, sausages, a regular old processed tube steak meat fest, has its own sale sign, meaning that the merchandising and promotional planning is so well aligned that the merchandisers make sure that each section has at least one segment on sale, all funded by the supplier. It’s something any grocery nerd would notice and appreciate, but obviously it is working for the customers too. The place is pretty packed, on a mid-day mid-afternoon when I like to do visits, I am not a morning person after almost fifteen years of waking up well before the ass crack of dawn and store visits at mid-day is my way of assuming that I should have pretty clear line of site for photos. But no, Food Lion customers are not cooperating. They just have to be shopping now, in my field of view, walking slowly, filling their carts with all these sale items, making sure this Ahold division is carrying its weight in their multinational P&L.
The center store aisles would be endless except that they are all bisected in the middle, so there is a center thruway with additional endcaps, meaning more slotting and placement fees, but also more ways to zig and zag through the store and not wear down the soles of my aging Doc Martens, tired of treading over one hundred linear feet per aisle in boringly straight lines.
The blindingly bright overhead lighting flows perpendicular to the layout of the aisles, a row of yellow and red “priced low” signs hanging from the ceiling all along the middle thruway, each with its own sale item highlights with price, $1.39, 2/$5, $2.99, with hundreds of yellow and red sale tags sticking out from the shelves at a slightly downward angle, so the pricing faces up to the customers, emphasizing with hammerhead-like subtlety of the vast price savings herein. I read one big Hot SALE BOGO sign too fast and thought it said Hot To Go, although I am more partial to Pink Pony Club, shoutout, Chappel Roan.
There is not much to be said of the thousands of products in the aisles, nothing that hasn’t been said before, like the Food Lion brand gallon milks that are $3.49 a gallon, and amply signed with WIC bib tags. There is nothing really that new and interesting under the Food Lion sun, it is standard Ahold-Delhaize maximalism. Tightly stocked and merchandised by highly skilled clerks, assortment managed and plannogrammed by some of the best in the business, even with the obvious noxious influences of big food spending dollars. The opposite of Aldi austerity, mixed with a discounter-adjacent pricing strategy. Just endless Campbell’s, Utz, Coke, Pepsi, Beech-Nut, thousands of products with WIC approved tags, Frito Lay, Stouffer’s, Food Lion frozen foods, Tombstone pizza, Tyson chicken and Nature’s Promise private label organic products. It’s a doozy, and it works, Food Lion maintains dominant market share positioning in dozens of Southeastern metro grocery markets. The place is packed.
Food Lion, still the main event.
Kroger Southeast.
Kroger is always Kroger. Yes, they have their banners that could use a bit more TLC and have seen better days, before their operational budgets and CapEx were strip mined to bankroll the failed merger with arch-rival Albertsons, now suing and countersuing each other for various breaches of whatever, budgets gutted to provide handsome payouts for shareholders and executives of the foregone McMullen era, so don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out Rodney.
Kroger also has some strong fighter banners, more price and value oriented in some markets or a bit more upscale and quality driven. Kroger does best when it stands out. Harris Teeter in DC, a bit more upscale and high touch, analogous to Whole Foods or Wegman’s, the delivery trucks ubiquitous on the beltway. Dallas and Houston Kroger, toe to toe and even dominating HEB and Albertsons. Kroger Atlanta, a brutalist merchant, all big blocks of value tier products and deep discount pricing, ably competing with Aldi and Lidl and Walmart, and underselling Publix on many items. Kroger may sometimes seem to be phoning it in, but they should not be underestimated.
But it is all still Kroger, category managed and planned out of Cincinnatti, with a pretty consistent, even homogenous assortment from region to region and store to store. Compelling but not exciting, even as they overachieve on DEI promises and diversifying their supplier base. Just stand in the middle of any of their stores and you could be in Kentucky or California, Washington State or Washington D.C., Chicago or Salt Lake, competent but scarcely undifferentiated from Jewel-Osco, Acme or Vons, Giant, that other Giant, Mariano’s or QFC. Abundant and redundant.
The store leads with a foyer display of both Coke and Pepsi twelve pack can BOGOs. Pick a winner here folks, the category manager could not turn down that promotional trade spend.
The store smells a bit stale, old. Not outright moldy, just that patented blend of floor polish, mildewed produce racks, decades old dried meat secretions and various layers of disinfectants that all spells conventional grocery smell in my mind.
Speaking of block letters, produce is profoundly square, the ambient bins all in a row, with two foot high sale signage along the black square displays of apples, cabbages, citrus, tomatoes and potatoes, red letters on yellow background, contrasting clearly with the stacked cardboard produce trays they are attached to.
The lighting is Food Lion thermonuclear, long white incandescently bright LED bulbs along the ceiling at fifteen foot intervals, with a crown of these lightsabers adorning the corners all around the store. The side wall behind the glass-doored upright produce cooler, energy efficient to boost those ESG scores Blackrock and Vanguard still scrutinize despite Trumpian pressures otherwise, is lime slime vomit green, with all caps white on grey “Garden Fresh” spelled out across a twenty foot span, as if the marketing wonks in downtown Cincinnatti absolutely could not have found a more compelling narrative to ably summarize the finer attributes and merchandising strategies of America’s second largest fresh produce retail supply chain, easily over $40 billion a year in turnover, an industrial cold chain of such complexity, scale, precision and efficiency, comparing it to your most productive backyard garden is a laughable metaphor, a silly selling device, like comparing sunlight to your keychain flashlight, or your stacked bookshelf to the Library of Congress.
Kroger puts plant-based meat analogues in the cooler near produce. This is such a supermarket thing to do, with the Tofurky and Daiya and Follow Your Heart and Nasoya and Lightlife and their Simple Truth knock-offs nowhere near the real meats and cheeses that these soy and cashew and almond and soy and vegetable oil emulsified ultra-processed alternatives are trying to draw customers away from, even the worst emulsifier or dairy or meat free option a vast improved alternative to the horrors of factory farming well-represented in the butcher case.
Or bottled water. Plastic bottles shrink wrapped in branded packaging further shrink wrapped in pallet formation, the outer layer of shrink wrap mostly removed to display what must be a 20’ by 20’ superstack of 24 pack bottled water and it is neither hurricane season or peak summer, $3.69 per pack. Adjacent is more Pepsico handiwork, a branded, custom Frito-Lay endcap, the same one you could find at a Safeway or Randall’s or Rouses or Giant/Giant, fully packed out by Frito staffers with several shelves of Lay’s potato chips, 4/$10, in case you need a LOT of potato chips today. That’s also 2/$5, but what’s a multiple of price multiples between friends? A stack of 42 pack Frito lunch box size classics adorns a row of display bunkers filled with ambient snacks and random consumer packaged goods on deep discounts, from Ben’s rices for $1.99 to Mott’s applesauces for $2.49 to Blue Diamond almonds for $5.99 a bag.
A long row of mass market breads, five shelves high, with the best of Bimbo and Flowers Foods that runs headlong into sixteen feet of nut butters, with billboard multi-shelf sets of Jif, Skippy, Peter Pan and Kroger private label, interspersed with Simple Truth, Justin’s and a few other premium, specialty brands and a thorough set of jams, jellies, fruit spreads, preserves and marmalades. PB&J sandwich, anyone?
Kitty corner to the breads are the sandwich meats, the lunch meats, hot dogs and assorted Lunchables, door after door of Oscar Meyer’d nitrite salt bathed processed pork, beef and chicken culled from America’s heartland of thousand, ten thousand and hundred thousand-head feedlot operations, environmental despoliation of the water, soil, air, an anaerobic dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey, the abundant lagoons of shit, Olympic scale pools of pig and cow shit that not even the most demented minds of science fiction horror, King, Barker, Lovecraft, Craven, could have foreseen, the damage to communities and quality of life from breathing aerosolized fecal matter by the metric fuckton roughly on par with the externalized epidemic health impacts of regular sandwich meat consumption, the non-communicable diseases from the salt, fat, lard, tallow, random other ultra-processed ingredients beyond just the artificial colors that has the #MAHA folks up in a froth, the heart disease, high blood pressure, cancer, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, maybe even gout, but damn does some mystery meat bologna on white bread with some yellow mustard sometimes hit the spot, vegan analogues fifty feet behind you in the produce cooler, just in case you have an attack of conscience or just want to try something new and a million times less terrible, and slightly less processed. Applegate meats meet somewhere in the middle, with several skus of organic, grassfed, humanely raised processed sandwich meats that don’t exactly conform to those NOVA Level expectations of harm, and still go great with yellow mustard on some white bread.
A Mexican section, international foods, ethnic foods, Herdez salsas, Old El Paso, La Preferida, La Costena, Ortega, and of course Kroger and Simple Truth private labels of national brand equivalent category leaders, taco shells, refried beans, taco sauces, diced chiles, tubs of salsa formulated to the exact acidity, salt and viscosity of Pace picante.
The aisles are long, endless, disappearing in a far horizon up near the cash registers where windows tease you with the real light of day. The gondola shelves are dark, tall and unkempt, un-fronted, un-faced so late in the afternoon, the bright overhead lights reflected like swirling tidepools in the grey, highly polished concrete industrial flooring, the wavy beams casting dark shadows just three or four packages deep into each shelf, making the plannograms feel cavernous and imposing, like if you reach in for that last box of $1.99 Kroger brand elbow macaroni somewhere back there, some gremlin or gollum will snatch you in and drag you back to its dank lair, deep among the racks of backstock. The line of sight along the aisles is punctuated by hundreds of yellow and red sale tags, Kroger absolutely not messing around with pricing thresholds and value positioning, maintaining its brutalist sentiment, dead stare to the surrounding Walmarts and Food Lion up the road.
And if elbow noodles are not your huckleberry, Kroger brand pasta carries an extensive line of Ronzoni, Barilla, Buitoni knock-offs, with the brands just to the right for price and assortment comparisons. A wall of spices, the jars single faced in tight shelf settings with organic items at eye level, brands below, the font so small on shelf tags you may need some opera glasses to read the descriptions and price per ounce, even decode the tag to gauge the wholesaler or warehouse code.
The world’s largest Pringles section. Or at least the Dirty South’s. So many Pringles, bursting with flavor, that ridiculous mustache, flavors you love, varieties you never heard of, non-communicable diseases you never needed, the Pringles influence so uncanny that Kellanova has inspired Doritos, Lays, Cheetos knock-offs from Frito Lay in that same silly cannister. Followed by the salty snack aisle, which might as well be the Frito Lay aisle, well over 40 feet of bagged, boxed, Fritos, Lay’s, Cheetos, Chester the Cheetah’s, Doritos, Tostitos, Santitos, Sun Chips, Rold Gold, Ruffles, Funyons, party sizes, club packs, snack sizes, in all flavors and colors, Pepsico’s soft drink tail wagged by the salty snack dog, Frito Lay now commanding nearly 60% of the business, perhaps it’s time for a rebrand to the enterprise DBA and stock ticker. A few sets of token Campbell’s/Snyders, Hershey’s Boom Chicka Pop and Pirate Brands, thrown in to maximize revenue creation from slotting fees and promotional spend, as well as operational cost savings from letting the direct service delivery dudes just handle the ordering, stocking and plannogram maintenance. Big Food needs Big Grocery, it is a self-reinforcing system once that supply and revenue cycle gets going. And a few Simple Truth knock-off’s for good measure, the private label value tier always sneaking in where it is most expected, in the high revenue, high margin, high turn, packaged food categories that account for close to one hundred billion in annual revenue.
The cookie section is an exercise in maximalism, every sku, customer preference, micro-targeted cookie craving, carved out by customer segment price point and sub-brand. Do you like Oreos or Chips Ahoy? Yes? No? Wonderful! Ten thousand varieties, each one with a gluten-full, gluten-free, private label offering color coded to make sure you know exactly which red, blue, yellow, white or earth-toned packages you prefer, Chip Mates to your Chips Ahoy, Kaleidos to your Oreos, even false Keeblers free of elven slave labor, along with lonely, token, Simple Truth clean label “free from” options dotting the sets like a reflection of your guilty conscience, the cookie manufacturers and private label co-manufacturers creating mulit-generational wealth by selling a half dozen of the same exact thing across multiple brands and category segments with minimal differences other than price points, promotional spend rates, the exact polar opposite strategy of Aldi minimalism, where the Germans just make that choice for you and give three of the cheapest cookies you will ever see, in the same color patterns so you never get confused. But does Aldi have that Chips Ahoy/Hershey chocolate chip cookie collab of the century? Nein!
Gallon milks, $3.29. Kroger is not messing around, best in market this week. And “Guaranteed fresh for 10 days”, with WIC signage. Eggs, still pricey, thanks to avian flu, and billions of ham-fisted USDA subsidy dollars to industrial ag and pathogen-inducing factory farm production methods for all those chicken jockeys, and, of course, because this is America in late capitalism, just a *little* price gouging, supply hiccups, empty shelves and apologetic signs in every store, largely due to record profiteering and supply constraining business practices from egg monopoly Cal-Maine, responsible for over 20% of all egg production nationally, $508 million in net income on $1.4 billion in sales a 36% marginal fuck you to your pocket book, your morning omelet, your sausage egg and cheese on a roll from the coffee cart, damn if those Cal-Maine shareholders are giddy, but that’s what we the consumers are here for, to be the pockets to be picked, to be the unfulfilled demand that inverses your supply curve and price elasticity ever upward, to be the value subtracted by you reverse Robin Hoods in those financialized corporate suites ensuring the highest value is achieved, that of shareholder primacy, just like Milty Friedman, Freddy Hayek and the Chicago School of Economics said so. A little lawsuit saber rattling from the normally big business friendly Trump DOJ and egg prices are magically receding like the Cal-Maine CEO’s hairline. Corporatism, in effect.
The freezer aisles are a geometric wonder, the huge coolers stretching for over seventy feet, the vertical doorframes reflecting the repeating overhead horizontal light fixtures, the perspective disappearing up near the cash registers, exhausting to the eyes, with door after door of Tyson, Smithfield, Lean Cuisine, Marie Callendar’s, Hungry Man, Stouffer’s, Bibigo and Saffron Road, frozen vegetables packed and stacked, ice cream, novelties, wonders that Clarence Birdseye could have scarcely imagined when he was ripping off the indigenous methods of flash freezing foods and industrially scaling them to oblivion, suspending time and space, flavor and nutrient density for over $100 billion dollars of frozen consumer packaged foods every year.
Kroger’s southern stores, so close to Atlanta and Coke HQ, know who pays the rent, the red block of Coca Cola bottles, cases and labels easily twice the shelf set placement of the adjacent Pepsi and Dr. Pepper, a thin wave of blue and Mountain Dew green, with a generous placement of Kroger’s “Big K” value tier soft drinks playing referee in between.
A whole freezer endcap, well shopped and mostly empty of Smucker’s Uncrustables, essentially a frozen pastry cosplaying as a sandwich, you might as well enjoy yourself and just have a donut, or cupcake or danish instead and stop pretending you are eating a real meal, or just go back three aisles and pick up a loaf of Mrs. Baird’s or Dave’s Killer, some Skippy and a jar of Smucker’s grape jelly and just slap together a real sandwich, it takes 30 seconds, two minutes tops, less than the time for a microwave to nuke your freezer burned Uncrustable. Uncrustables, ultraprocessed, not even food.
Another three or four Frito Lay endcaps, side stacks and shippers on extreme markdown mockingly bid me farewell on my egress. I am all Kroger’d out.
peace.