Grocery Update #63: Southern Exposure Part 2: Publix, Lowes and Fresh Market.
Also: A Breakthrough Week For The Milk With Dignity Campaign.
Discontents: 1. Dedication to Journalists. 2. Migrant Justice Milk With Dignity Update. 3. Southern Exposure Part 2: Publix, Lowes and Fresh Market.
1. Dedicated to Journalists Worldwide.
This issue is dedicated to journalists around the world who risk their lives to bring the truth to light every day. Last year was the deadliest year on record for journalists, and this year shows no signs of letting up, with 124 such correspondents killed, and over 80 killed by the Israeli military in Gaza. Journalists are increasingly being targeted and imprisoned all around the world, in Sudan, Haiti, Turkey, Russia and Mexico.
For more information, please see The Committee to Protect Journalists.
2. Breakthrough Week For The Milk With Dignity Campaign.
Migrant Justice recently had a breakthrough week in their long-running campaign to bring Hannaford Supermarket into the Milk with Dignity Program.
Migrant Justice is a Vermont-based, farmworker-led organization bringing justice and dignity to essential dairy farmworkers- the cows don’t milk themselves. Their Milk with Dignity Program was influenced by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) Fair Food Program. These worker-driven social responsibility programs (WSR’s) are designed and led by farmworkers and have been proven by a ten-year longitudinal study to be the most effective framework for protecting human rights in corporate supply chains, more so than fair trade. By leveraging consumer-facing campaign pressure, WSRs create legally binding frameworks and enforcement mechanisms with corporate product buyers that ensure fair pay and prevent forced labor, harassment and sexual violence on farms. Hannaford store brands milks are not subject to any such oversight and have been linked with labor and ethical sourcing concerns.
Responding to Migrant Justice’s campaign, the company has announced a comprehensive “Human Rights Impact Assessment” of the conditions in its dairy supply chain, which will include interviews with farmworkers and a review of the Milk with Dignity Program. And after five years encountering consistent refusals to meet, Migrant Justice had its first meeting with a company executive to begin a dialog about Milk with Dignity.
In a bold new step in the campaign, Migrant Justice also filed an international human rights complaint with the Dutch government over the supermarket chain’s failure to remedy systemic human rights violations on the farms producing Hannaford-brand milk. The complaint has been submitted to the Dutch National Contact Point of the OECD Guidelines on Multinational Enterprises for Responsible Business Conduct; it extensively documents Ahold’s violations of the guidelines. The Dutch body will now begin an investigation into the complaint and may bring Migrant Justice and Ahold together to find a resolution.
Migrant Justice announced the filing of the complaint from the Netherlands, at the annual meeting of Ahold Delhaize shareholders on April 9th. After speaking to supporters and press at a rally gathered outside, a delegation entered the meeting to engage directly with Ahold executives and board members. Migrant Justice was able to gain access to the closed-door meeting with proxy votes assigned by two allied investors: Domini Impact Investments and United Church Funds. While the company celebrated over $100 billion in sales by raising executive pay and increasing shareholder payouts, Migrant Justice brought the issue of farmworker rights to the fore.
After citing statistics from a recent survey of over 200 immigrant dairy workers, Migrant Justice representative Marita Canedo addressed Ahold’s executives:
The survey results clearly show systemic abuse and point toward the need for those at the top of the supply chain, including Ahold Delhaize, to take greater responsibility by working with farmworkers to join Milk with Dignity… It is our sincere hope that Ahold will avoid the unnecessary expense and reputational damage of a formal human rights investigation by engaging in good faith dialogue regarding Milk with Dignity.
Ahold Delhaize USA CEO JJ Fleeman responded to Migrant Justice’s questions by offering a meeting, the first time in the years-long campaign that the company has done so. He also announced to shareholders and the public the undertaking of a “Human Rights Impact Assessment” of the Northeast dairy supply chain and invited the participation of Migrant Justice. The assessment will be conducted by an independent organization, include interviews with dairy workers themselves, and result in recommendations to the company on how best to address rights violations in the supply chain. Fleeman ended his remarks by noting: “We look forward to continued dialogue and partnership.”
On the same day that the Migrant Justice delegation spoke out at Ahold’s shareholder meeting, dairy workers and allies rallied at the Hannaford Supermarket headquarters in Scarborough, Maine. Farmworker leaders presented testimony of abuses in Hannaford’s supply chain and announced to the U.S. press the filing of the international human rights complaint.
The following day, the Migrant Justice European delegation – accompanied by supporters from the Dutch Agroecology Network and environmental organization Milieudfensie – traveled to the Ahold Delhaize global headquarters in Zandaam, Netherlands. On the heels of the previous day’s intervention at the shareholder meeting, farmworkers and allies brought thousands of postcards signed by Hannaford customers demanding Milk with Dignity. As the Dutch press looked on, company representatives accepted the box containing thousands of postcards.
3. Southern Exposure: Part 2.
Publix, Lowes and Fresh Market.
The American South is its own thing. Dirty south. Southern charm. Southern comfort. Misunderstood, like its brutal, beautiful history. Not ignorant and uncouth and segregated, like so many stereotypes. Diverse and vibrant, young and colorful, close-minded and bigoted, queer as fuck, and also Pentecostal, Baptist, Muslim, even secular. The Spring Break coast and the Third Coast, that gulf of whatever. The best food in the nation, with some of the most iconic regional cuisines in the world, developed and perfected by the descendants of Black slaves, European and Latin American immigrants, Native Americans, all that barbecue, Tex-Mex, Cajun-Creole, nowhere else in North American is there such terroir and deep culinary legacy. The South is the future of the U.S., like it or not. That’s where the people are going, with the disgusting heat and humidity, archipelagos of hog manure lagoons, recurring climate disasters, extreme poverty and inequality, gargantuan oil and petrochemical refineries, union campaigns and union busting, gorgeous coastlines and rolling mountains, endless highways, stagnant, corrupt Old Money and glinting ultramodern tech and manufacturing hubs. The South is rising, just not how anyone expected.
The grocery industry of the American South reflects, strengthens, even reifies these contradictions. Diverse and consolidated, staid and innovative, conventional and specialized, there are many grocers leveraging the growing population, low prevailing wages and big consumer dollars to expand their market share, consumer base and product offerings.
While Walmart dominates many metro markets and Harvey’s/Winn Dixie, Kroger and Food Lion gobble up huge swaths of consumer dollars, and dollar stores and discounters are always following the poverty and low wages, Publix still owns Florida, with 60% share, and there are also independent chains like Lowes, and Fresh Market, a more upscale specialty/gourmet chain. It is always fun times grocery nerd’ing down south. Yee ha.
Publix. Green Machine.
Publix welcomes me with a big green sign. Publix is green. Their logo, their branding. so green. The store is a new format, like the dozens of new ones sprouting all over the southeast from Publix, almost a carbon copy of the clean, sharp, new one in Decatur that I frequent when in Atlanta. Publix, the employee owned behemoth, three times the size of Whole Foods, twice the size of HEB, dominating Florida before the humid, swampy peninsula is swallowed by rising seas, and putting forward a compelling, mid-market strategy with premium retail pricing and a unique customer experience everywhere it goes, even if the product mix is the same standard conventional assortment with your basic organic and natural need to haves, you know the deal.
This store is ultramodern, a 180 degree different feel than brutalist Krogers down South or that brighter than a thousand suns Food Lion up the road, a chic, sleek, technologically eco-friendly model with coolers and bunkers that light up as you go, unsettling at first, but you feel like you are on the set of the Jetson’s, even with that same mass produced food assortment as everyone else, national brands, occasionally local faves, cheap and plentiful private labels and a few specialty products. Diversity in American grocery means we get a dozen or even hundreds varieties of the same old shit.
Publix is vibes, though, and presence. Great private label pricing, branded promotions everywhere, lots of organic and gluten free and UNFI-ready emerging brands, but also, just so much vibes. Sleek, future-tense, well-lit but not blinding, aisles and categories comprehensive but not overdone, prices, reasonable but not the cheapest in town, no insult pricing to claw back loss-leader product margins like at Whole Foods or Sprouts. But you can see that Publix is very intentionally attempting to be a bit more upscale, high-touch for a mass merchant superstore still selling like 90% of the same shit as everyone else. Just vibes.
Produce is neat, clean, sterile. They have ample fresh fruits and vegetables. The cooler is packed, faced and fronted, the ambient tables not stacked above their limit, all the fruits perfectly placed and round and lined up in their sections, some glamour shots of sliced kiwis, cucumbers, chard leaves, green to match the green “Produce” sign, the green tints on the walls, the lime green soffets above the staffed service counters, the green Publix logos everywhere, green like the collards, napas, kale, leeks, broccoli crowns, romaine hearts and fresh cabbages in the upright cooler. So many cabbages. Vibes.
The aisles are long, the floor a polished white speckled stone, the overhead lights perfectly tracking along the center of the aisle, leading you forward, a 90 degree distinction from the perpendicularity of the lights at Food Lion and Kroger that somehow made it all feel so caged and panopticonesque.
And lo and behold, a “BFY”, better for you, clean label endcap, a full display of Zevia, zero calorie sodas. Now a publicly traded company, Zevia have been making sodas a whole lot less awful, with no high fructose corn syrup or artificial colors, and they have come a long way since my team launched them as a Whole Foods exclusive back in 2008, way before Bobby Jr. was pressuring Big Food to get rid of artificial colors, way before he was promising to cure all of our autisms in awkward language reminiscent of the early 20th century eugenicists, eugenics being an All-American tradition that inspired the Nazis, Zevia was cool and frothy way before all this #MAHA froth was justifying food safety testing staffing cuts at the FDA, setting the food system back a hundred years, so you can now eat shit and die free of Uncle Sam’s pesky oversight, The Jungle’s Upton Sinclair rolling over in his grave a century and half after documenting the health and safety violations so rampant in our food supply that it justified the creation of public food safety oversight, or instead we must regulate whether or not underpaid service workers should buy artificially colored-soda with food stamps and pay ICE agents to zero dark thirty immigrant farmworkers and steelworkers to gulags in El Salvador, even though Biden was still deporting more and faster, because the Venn Diagram between folks who think Venezuelan hairdressers with autism awareness tattoos are MS-13 gang members who should be locked away in President Nayib Bukake’s gulags, and, those folks holding measles parties, and those who think Bobby Jr. is going to “cure” autism, is, well, likely a perfect circle.
And Zevia’s not terribly bad tasting, especially the root beer and cream soda, a little chemical-intensive bug spray flavor-wise, but still, stevia can be polarizing, and at least it is not a high fructose sugar bomb. And the new packaging design is sleek. Zevia, “BFY” before it was cool. Nice to see, Publix.
Ah. And there. It was only a matter of time. A Pepsi/Dr. Pepper endcap, split between their eponymous brands and the ever-present Mountain Dew’s radioactively-hued liquid crystal meth. The beverage barons dropping irresistible trade dollars on the Publix category buyers, bid farewell to your glycemic index, hello diabetic coma. Someone lend me some food stamps so I can buy some Dew with them and trigger the MAGA bro-flakes and the wellness influencers. Then again, the stuff tastes like effervescent toilet water filtered through the main reactor at Chernobyl, so maybe not.
A cereal endcap, old meets new, Catalina Crunch and Magic Spoon, two millennial, special diet faves, with a cut-in shelf of Life Cereal that we all grew up on, the nostalgia somehow making the whole display appropriate and relevant and accessible.
Publix store brand pasta labels, austere, tasteful, matched in price to Kroger and Food Lion, with a green ribbon on top and a mostly white box with green and black sans serif fonts. Simplicity in design, even European, even moreso than Simple Truth. The pasta sauce set instead goes upmarket, with a firm mix of Prego, Ragu, Classico, alongside Rao’s, Carbone, Victoria and other specialty brands north of five dollars a jar. You can make a spaghetti dinner for five bucks or for fifteen, up to you.
Publix brags about who makes its private label. Here, it is a public label. Publix label. Their sausage made by a trusted supplier in Florida, Premio Foods, their organic chicken from the venerable Farmer’s Focus of the Shenandoah Valley, Virginia, the first supplier storytelling yet in this vibrant and busy metro market, not like that time at Kroger they had pictures of farmers they were not buying anything from. Authenticity.
A full door of a frozen brand I never heard of, Barber Foods, stuffed chicken breasts and other proteins, probably the deepest cut in the Publix assortment. A deep freeze bunker of processed meats and plant-based meat alternatives, competing for shelf space, packaging eye-catchiness, level of processing, fat, salt and protein ratios, with beefy Bubba Burgers and Jenni-O’s sharing space with plant-focused Beyond Meat and Impossible for those willing to eat lower on the food chain, nutrient dense, climate-friendly, umami rich cattle feed analogues that cut out the middleman (i.e., cattle).
The frozen doors light up as I walk buy, showering the merchandise in bright fluorescence, the Amy’s entrees glowing with dewey hoarfrost, or maybe just condensation from poor air filtration. The motion detection lights are disconcerting, startling even when I am not paying attention. I don’t like seeing lights flash on and off in the middle distance of my peripheral vision. I get the eco-friendliness, and they also help the products sparkle and catch your eyes, especially as your ocular rods and cones are activated by the changes in brightness and color, like sunlight falling on your prey in the savannah or a hidden herb revealed beneath the underbrush. I try to move slower, to sneak up on the lights like my paleolithic ancestors would have, and then step backward just before I get within range of their sensors. Other customers give me the side eye and avoid me. My wife says she can’t take me anywhere, so I shop alone. AKA, fun at Publix.
A bold sign above the 60 foot run of the dairy case, in between glamour shots of green popsicles, palm trees, palm fronds, “I Love Green #Publix”. #Vibes.
Gallon milk, $3.75. Not playing the price game, are we? Drive a couple miles to save fifty cents at that big, darkly shelved and brightly lit, smelly old Kroger? Nah.
The eggs section is wiped out. It is 6 P.M. on a Tuesday. Not even a sign apologizing, or blaming Cal-Maine’s market share-hoarding price gouging and blatant profiteering, or trying to convince me their high quality standards meant they couldn’t find enough eggs. Just blown out. An exasperated couple throws up their hands, let down by mighty Publix. I tell them that Fresh Market had plenty of eggs three hours ago, and quite a few were under six bucks a dozen.
Ah, the Frito-Lay section. Probably merchandised by the same well-trained, long-tenured DSD (direct service delivery) jobbers servicing the Kroger up the road. It’s more or less the same endless expanse of chips. Abundant, redundant.
An endcap antidote to Kroger’s Uncrustable display, this pasty ultraprocessed pastry cosplaying as a sandwich. A massive endcap of Nature’s Own Honey Wheat, Skippy peanut butter and Welch’s grape jelly. Not exactly health food, but actually food, actual sandwiches. I was more of a Jif bro back in the day, these days I’m all about Nuttzo or Once Again. But anything’s better than Uncrustables.
More actual food on the endcaps. This time, dinner, Ragu pasta sauces for $2.99, Ronzoni’s blue box pasta for $1.99 and Bertolli Olive oils, pre-tariff blend, $12.99. Around the corner is the largest spice section I have seen since my meanders in New Orleans a few months back, twenty feet of jars and pouches and boxes and bags, branded, private label, value tier, private label, national brands, organic, premium, and options for the more particular palate and specialized chefs.
Publix always has signs and pictures of their store managers. Despite the size and breadth of the stores, this always gives them a down home, neighborly feel, like the supermarkets I grew up with in The Bronx. It’s nice to know the names of the staff responsible. I give a nod and give a brief salute to their images, well done folks, a pleasant, clean and comfortable shopping experience, of the most middling product assortment in such a sleek, ultramodern setting. Good vibes, Publix. Good vibes.
Fresh Market.
There is a Fresh Market nearby. I went there earlier, but leading with them didn’t fit the narrative. I admit, I have always had the warm and fuzzies for Fresh Market. My stores in Florida competed with them many years ago and I never found them too intimidating, but they executed well and I liked going there. Not a threat, a mild competitor and a place to learn and see another flavor of retail.
Fresh Market exists in a world of their own, with few peers in their particular niche in the eastern, southern and lower midwestern parts of the U.S., a large scale gourmet/specialty chain with a similar pricing strategy and assortment philosophy to 2005-era Whole Foods, less crunchy than Earth Fare, not as ambitious and expansionist as Sprouts, but still competent, premium and proud, and still more accessible than your typically independent upscale gourmet market.
Fresh Market was also a destination for some old school Whole Foods veterans of my era who flew the coop during the years when Target and Walmart execs steadily moved into 550 Bowie Street, compromising just a bit on the product philosophy and a whole lot on the operational model and employee experience, greasing the treads for the Amazon takeover in 2017, and the current state of Amazon retail, whose founder wants his employees to wake up terrified every morning, whose retail and warehouse clerks are forced to attend captive audience trainings to keep unions out while sustaining industry leading injury rates and working second jobs to make ends meet, even while their productivity underwrites celebrity space flights, Jeffy Jeff’s 400 foot yacht and Katy Perry’s prosaic musings on the nature of existence. So there is that sort of old school, high touch, high quality and high sourcing standards vibe at Fresh Market, without the pressure to match price on higher attribute products to Walmart and Kroger and compress margins, reduce expenses and sacrifice service and experience. It is pricier, premium, non-union, but at least feels more honest.
Visually and sensorily, it is a welcome change from the bright, sterile, primary colored blunt force value communication of Food Lion, and eco-modernist techno-greenness of Publix, as effective as those are. The floors are faux wood panel, warm brown and cleanly polished. The lighting is warm too, tracks and overhead lamps, yellow-gold more so than incandescent white. The opening display in produce is a bouquet of spring flowers, even though it is technically still winter, but the South only has two seasons, endless summer and WTF, with a gift wrapping section under its own green and white vertically striped awning.
Fresh Market is premium, but they have members-only prices now, with savings on hundreds of items, so it says on a sign in produce above a wooden bin of extra large, extra shiny Honeycrisp apples. The produce wet rack is nominally better looking than Food Lion’s, skillfully displayed with plenty of organic greens and vegetables arranged nearly perfectly vertical, stems down, and bountiful piles of lettuce, cabbage and broccoli. The ambient produce racks are all milled wood, soft accents, pushcart-style fixtures, nostalgic for something that must have been simpler, more communal than the sterile, strip mall commercialism that birthed modern grocery culture. The big center deli case also has a massive green and white striped awning, the upright coolers housing take and bake pizzas, sliced olives, pickles, charcuterie, sandwiches, stacks of cut parmigiano, thick tubes of salami. The olive bar is clean, fully stocked, with big serving spoons in each tray of peppers, olives, giardinera, all very neat, tasteful and quite delicious looking, displays built by the skilled hands of thoughtful merchandisers. So much about premium is just in the presentation.
The full service butcher case smells clean and is neatly stocked, with each cut hand-laid and well-spaced on black butcher paper, much of the beef dry aged, the pork looking fresh and pink. It is at this point that a store manager stops me, inquires about my photos and note taking. I explain myself. Turns out we know some folks in common, some of my old Whole Foods colleagues who took up residence at Fresh Market HQ for a time. I am allowed to proceed.
But it is a short reprieve. I make it up and down the packaged food aisles, spices, condiments, lots of greatest hits, actually differentiated and interesting products not found elsewhere in the metro area, top specialty selections from indie wholesaler Chex Foods and the usual selection of emerging brands from their monopolist rivals UNFI or KeHe, your natural/specialty/gourmet selection of Organicville, Stonewall Kitchen, Primal, some artfully packaged and not very cheap private label items, Brianna’s, top shelf Maille mustards, Rick’s pickles, Chosen avocado oils, Frantoia sicilian olive oils, premium crackers and cookies, Pacific soups and DeCecco pastas, several shelves of Rao’s sauces, Organic Valley half gallon milks, Elmhurst Almond and Cashew Milks, Zeal Creamery Grassfed whole milks, and the cheapest eggs in the market, with a few skus of dozens at $4.99, better even than Food Lion, when quite unexpectedly another staff member glowers at me and asks me to either stop taking photos or leave. No convo, no negotiations. I don’t want to mom and dad him and let him know his boss already greenlit my little adventure, but my wife is next door in an independent bookstore and I decide it’s time to take a break from grocery nerd’ing for a bit and actually nerd it up and go see if they have any copies of the Iain Banks’ Culture series that I still haven’t read.
I snap a couple more pictures on my way out, because I just can’t follow directions, or maybe because I just loved the dark wooden pergolas over the registers, framing the point of purchase racks, with baskets of flowers, so tastefully arranged. Premium. On brand.
Lowes.
Lowes Foods is the same family as that other Lowes. Let’s get that over with. But instead of being akin to Home Despot’s beta level competitor, Lowes grocery stores are a locally owned behemoth in the Southeast, with their own unique feel and go to market strategy, not much exciting about the product assortment, yet probably the most distinct and differentiated operator in the area. Abundant, redundant, but different, too.
The foyer feels like a barn. Stacks of wood, custom wood fixtures, flowers on display benches, wooden barrels. It’s late by the time we get there and they are closing soon.
The store is big, with large lamp-like fixtures holding most of the lights interspersed at regular intervals and occasional tracklights for emphasis where needed. Not too bright. The store was festive, probably the most fun since some of the local operators in New Orleans and Metairie I frequented, like they wanted to be here selling food and they wanted you to be here buying food, a much more light hearted feel than robo-Publix or the Food Lion/Kroger Godzilla versus King Kong vibes. A display of butterfly shaped party balloons welcomed us in the door, festooning a cooler of vegetable preps that would make my friends at Marcellus Foods quite stoked.
The deli case and cheese shop have basketball balloons attached, framing the pretzel chips, stacks of mustards and various take out containers on display. The store leading, quite randomly, with a mix of displays and quirky impulse products, with no clear department signage until you walk further in and see the highly stylized headers for the bakery section, “The Cakery” in swirly pastry shop fonts with pastel background highlights, a wooden rooster hanging from a fan dangling a huge egg with dancing yellow chicks on each of the four fan blades, all fifteen feet off the ground. This place is wild. Just so random.
A local products display. Both the wife and I make a beeline over there. We love seeing local products in stores far afield. This is literally the first such display we have seen in this metro market, and this is the seventh store on the itinerary (and not all were worth a write up). Nothing too exciting on display, granolas, cookies, barbecue sauces, but it’s nice to see.
The specialty cheese section has a black awning with serif fonts with round light fixtures in the ceilings like the holes in Swiss cheese, aptly named, The Cheese Shop, held up by columns shaped like a stack of massive Parmigiano Reggiano wheels. Or maybe they are real parm wheels, I didn’t smell check. I was too busy price checking and admiring the neatly stacked cheese, specialty crackers, bottles of wine and Prosecco, none of which I would actually consume, being both alcohol and dairy averse, but the merchandising is a joy into itself. The shop has its own little dining area, artfully arranged wooden tables and benches inviting you to order here, consume here, but keep the area clean, which it is. Spotless.
Finally, a produce section. I was beginning to wonder where it was. Produce leads with sale signage, low-low prices, with arrows and capital letters, all over the place. They really want you to know how affordable their produce is. And bountiful and fresh, some of the more perishable items lightly stocked at this time of night, like the tomatoes on dark wooden tables, or the root vegetables covered in a blue tarp, like a blanket covering the kids being put to bed for the night. How sweet, sweet Lowes. The apples, like at Publix, are perfectly arranged. Arranging apples is skilled labor. Thank a produce clerk next time you are shopping, anywhere. Or try stacking, rotating, arranging hundreds of apples in a line yourself next time. And doing it quickly, day after day. Clerks have skills. Props to the clerks. Give them a raise.
The wet rack is bright and well stocked. Some stores, like this one, keep products in the cooler overnight and let the early morning crew break it down and rotate the product for the net day. Not much of it is local, and not much of it is really much different from Publix, Food Lion or Kroger, the California fruit and vegetable bowl representing in full force 3,000 miles east. Standard American grocery, at least for now.
Lowes was not kidding about low-low pricing. Just $1.29 for some really cheap chicken thighs. The meat section has some category segmentation, but it leans heavily to value tiers, mass market, factory farmed protein for the masses. Walmart fighters. Most of the chicken is Lowes private label, with some Perdue thrown in for good measure. No feel good Farmer Focus messaging or assortment spruce-ups here. Cheap factory farmed chicken from the sundry feedlot barns we passed coming down the interstate.
The center store aisles are still Big Food central, built with the industrial food sector’s promises of convenience, ubiquity and redundant abundance of Food Lion or Kroger. A blocky four foot set of red and white Heinz ketchup, followed by a bright yellow and yellow-brown four footer of Heinz and French’s mustards with some natural specialty items above eye level leading into hot sauces.
Our first Pepsico display, so precious, headlined with a custom “Barnburner” fiery sign, two liter bottles, buy two get two free, that’s four bottles of soda FFS, who buys that much? Maybe drink some water, or seltzer? The aisle signs are likewise barn themed. I haven’t seen this much barn stylization since HEB in Texas. Lowes’ private label pasta branding is muted wooden earth tones, brownish like the wooden barrels and foyer when you walk in, but the prices are quite a bit higher than Publix, not fighting Walmart this deep in center store. But they are representing Topco brands well, the nation’s largest retailer-owned private label manufacturing cooperative sourcing partner, with both value tier That’s Smart and more premium, organic options from Full Circle giving Lowes strong value options in many categories.
All the stores in this market have had segregated ethnic or international food sections. But only Lowes has a power stack of the original, un-fuckwithable Huy Fong Sriracha sauce, the rooster, with the green top, for $4.99. Now we’re talking, Lowes. And a decent kosher selection, as it’s Passover season and we must have our Manischewitz Matzos and Kedem Gefilte Fish.
Special diets bib tags are everywhere, color coded purple for organic, orange for gluten free, so you can see from fifteen or twenty feet off the flutter of particular attributes in each category, in all aisles across the store. It's compelling. Many stores take this for granted now and let the customer figure it out from the product label. But seeing a flurry of color-coded bib tags up and down the aisle is like breadcrumbs on the trail, a welcome and sensible touch for special dietary needs, especially when also connected with the frequent sale pricing.
Milk, $3.49 a gallon, in the middle of Kroger and Publix, not starting a price war but also not too high to offend price sensitive guests, with local bib tags as well.
The Pringles section is not Kroger level but is all on sale for 2/$4.00, so they win points. Plus they have some obscure skus, pizza and everything bagel, terrible, terrible sounding stuff, I am sure they are irresistible.This is not an endorsement of Pringles per se, I prefer Cape Cod or Siete potato chips, but Pringles are such a quintessential hyper-industrial, ultra-processed stack cannister of Americana, its fun to judge mainstream supermarkets by their Pringles game. H/T to my buddy RP for the new habit. Lowes gets a B in Pringle-istics.
And Lowes goes big with Snyder’s too. The snack giant beta, lagging far behind the Pepsico dominance but still objectively huge, Snyder’s/Campbell’s still has its own effective DSD network and legacy brands, including Cape Cod and Late July, and they are to pretzels what Lay’s is to potato chips or Doritos to nacho chips, the brand standard. They also have the first big Utz section I have seen in the area. Utz is more of a Northeast thing, Pennsylvania-centric. Utz and Herr’s, I always get them mixed up. And Wise. Really all terrible, redundant and ubiquitous. And yes, Lowes also has a massive Frito Lay snack parade, leading off with a radioactive-hued four feet of Doritos, leading into Ruffles, Funyons, Lay’s and Cheetos, even Munchos, now that’s an obscure find, fully packed out by those skilled, dedicated DSD jobbers who are obviously working their asses off to keep the ultra-processed grocery supply chain fully functional around the clock. Or the twelve foot run of self-dispensing Campbell’s soups racks that make your soup habit so easy while maintaining category market share dominance. Supply chains, the ubiquitous availability, cheap pricing and obvious need states they define, are self-fulfilling prophecies for our processed food consumption, a consumer/producer dialectic mediated by profit-taking and value extraction up and down the supply chain. Hm. Chips and soup sound good right about now, no?
The Lowes store brand potato chip section is not DSD, it is shopped to hell, with plenty of out of stocks and products out of place. The bags are that calm wooden earth tone, kind of fading into the background, but the sharp prices have obviously kept their velocities up. And like Kroger and Publix, this is Coca-Cola territory, with a massive endcap of twelve pack can cases, a side display of liter bottles and a sixteen foot run of the red bottle, punctuated with a row of Sprite. When you can consider that the acreage needed to grow all that corn syrup is larger than the state of Massachusetts, it all makes sense. Drink more water. Or seltzer.
Not to be outdone, Pepsi has its own custom display endcap up front, in between a Mondelez Nabisco customized cookie cracker endcap and a massive powerstack of some shitty corporate swill beer, ultra-lite something.
Lowes is polite about eggs, they have a friendly sign apologizing for the out of stocks. They still have plenty in stock, some below five bucks, but some of the shelf stock levels are a bit low. They also have plenty of cage free and free range options available, still priced at a premium but not so far out of range of conventional battery eggs in their telltale Styrofoam containers. Easily the best egg pricing, selection and inventory management in the metro-area.
Lowes private label frozen fruits, with bright product shots on that subdued wooden background, a strange branding choice. Likewise, the frozen pizzas, and the sign on their door “Feel good about being bad”, we get a good laugh at that one, not sure how else to react, that is some funny ass frozen pizza marketing. The ice cream doors have their own sass, “Pucker up to clean ingredient”. Ok. So random, Lowes.
There are barn shaped fixtures throughout the store, including overhead along the frozen aisle, with small blue lights hanging from them. It gives the impression of rafters and construction framing, Amish-Mennonite barn-raisings and the pastoralist mythology that is so common in industrial food marketing. The wine section has its own custom flooring, a grey tile that gives it a distinguished offset to the off-white flooring throughout the store. The wine fixture are likewise tasteful, with burlap and wooden bins displaying the vino, and softer lighting and artsy fixtures hanging from the ceiling softening and deflecting the light. There are more balloons along the cash registers, keeping the down-home vibe going, with each of the checkouts having its own signage on a lamppost style upright. You can also buy all your Lowes swag gear, some of it more tasteful than others. (“I like big buns (bread graphic) and I cannot rye”, “my sausage works (gears graphic)” “seasoned butt rubber”). So. Random.
A final display of flowers, balloons and other festive paraphernalia bids us farewell as we exit, the last shoppers out the door before closing, our southern exposure at a close.
peace.