Welcome To The Checkout Grocery Update!

A Brief Primer For All Of Our New Subscribers!

Apr 07, 2025

Welcome To The Checkout Grocery Update!

We are so excited to have you on board! We have hundreds of new subscribers this month, so we figured we’d roll out the welcome mat, and give our current readers a little refresher too.

First things first, make sure we don’t get sent to your spam folder. Spam is treif.

Next: Flag these newsletters and move them to the top of the pile. This is the essential, unfiltered analysis on the $1.1 trillion U.S. grocery industry. There is nothing else like it. We work hard to give you quality writing every week (and deeply appreciate our paid subscribers).

Why are we doing this? Because we have an insider’s take, we’ve lived and worked in the industry, on both sides of the buying desk, in stores, backrooms, warehouses, farms, farmer’s markets and cafe grease pits since the mid-’90s, and we have a lot to say. We started this as a podcast, and have over 180 episodes up.

And we want consumers, producers, academia, policy makers, activists, media and, especially, folks from the industry who are dedicating their lives to feeding people, to have a platform that isn’t owned by some big conglomerate or self-censored to appease vested interests. Empathy and solidarity, y’all.

And while we will always have some things to say about current events, we won’t get distracted by the spectacle. Things have been crazy in the grocery world these last few years. Price inflation, profiteering, consolidation and antitrust, workers pushing back, new trends and products meeting consumer needs for sustainability, health and wellness, etc. And, oh boy, are we in for some fun times ahead.

So here are ongoing priorities and focus areas:

(1) Supporting Grocery Workers.

We are going to maintain a broad focus on working conditions, wages, safety and job security for people working at all levels of the grocery supply chain. We will continue to platform working people and let them speak for themselves, while providing intellectual and contextual ammunition to unapologetically support their goals and needs for better jobs and livelihoods.

And what do we mean by grocery workers? This could be anyone in the supply chain that brings your food to your pantry. Farm labor, logistics and trucking, warehousing, manufacturing, retail, delivery. Undocumented, H2A, or full citizenship. Union and non-union. Blue collar and white collar. Category managers, inventory specialists, data analysts, even those IT folks debugging your laptop. If you sell your labor to survive and that labor brings food to grocery shoppers, then The Checkout Grocery Update is here for you.

(2) Highlighting Indie and Cooperative Retail.

At heart, this is a retail newsletter. Retail is where all of this rubber meets the road. We aim to fill that gap with first person, unfiltered, excrutiatingly detailed research on the grocery sector. The grocery sector is heavily consolidated, complicated, competitive and crrrrazy. We will do deep dives about the bigger established chains, what they do right, what they don’t, how their business models warp the marketplace and what needs to be done to build a grocery industry that can be more fair, sustainable, innovative and holistic.

We will also be putting a focus on retail formats that are owned by and for the people, such as “high road” entrepreneurs that pay living wages and good benefits, consumers and community owned stores, workers or employees owned enterprises, or even public agencies. We will be critical too, there will be plenty of tough love, but we will only punch up.

(3) Platforming “BFY” Emerging Brands.

We love good food. And we really love food brands focused on innovation and sustainability. They are the future. There are over 100 categories of products sold in grocery stores. Many categories are monopolized by a handful of monopolies that work closely with retailers to stay on top and deflect and absorb threats to their dominance. Such concentration of ownership and wealth makes grocery aisles so boring, nor ready for a chaotic climate and shifting consumer priorities, like GLP-1s or zoonotic pandemics. Or these freakin’ tariffs, LOL, jeez, FFS.

We like those upstarts and disruptors, especially folks with inspiration and ideas to change the food industry beyond their little category niches, who are building supply chains more diverse and anti-fragile than the homogenous food monopolies dominating store shelves. This is true “better for you”, aka “BFY”.

We will be platforming the brands that are truly making the world healthier, more just and sustainable.

(4) And Food Pricing (Is Always Bullshit).

Over the last few years, we have contributed over a dozen articles to the public dialogue about grocery prices, particularly in Forbes and here. We have had hundreds of thousands of views on these pieces, speaking to the NYT, WSJ, Bloomberg, The Guardian, WaPo, CNBC, Perfect Union (a couple times), and will continue to put the time into understanding and analyzing grocery pricing trends. In our previous life, we spent a dozen years negotiating costs and retail prices while balancing huge gross margins across thousands of brands and tens of thousands of products. Pricing was a huge part of our job in running a five billion dollars a year business unit. There is no one else in the world writing about pricing that has this breadth of relevant experience.

And this is an area with very little cohesive public understanding, and there is a lot of silly economic theory and dogma about pricing, a lot of mythology about how prices are set, why prices go up or down, who sets prices and how prices need to be changed to enable greater food access and communication of actual real-world value. We will be writing about pricing a lot, including new inflationary pressures like tariffs and Avian flu, who is benefitting from higher prices, and how public policy is influencing what consumers pay on shelf. Remember: pricing is always, always bullshit. We have the receipts.