Kroger CEO McMullen studying Main & Vine expansion
Kroger Co. opened a new concept store late last year near Tacoma, Wash., called Main & Vine. Its top executives have been touting it to show that Kroger, the nation’s largest operator of traditional supermarkets, is studying innovative ways to sell fresh food products to customers.
What they haven’t said is when or even if they’ll expand the concept to other markets, including Kroger’s home base of Cincinnati. So when I got a chance to sit down with Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen last week for a 45-minute, one-on-one interview, I asked him when Kroger, the nation’s largest operator of traditional supermarkets, will expand the Main & Vine concept to other markets. By the way, you can read a lot more from my interview with McMullen in this week’s edition of the Business Courier that comes out Friday.
Main & Vine is focused on fresh and local food at reasonable prices. It provides customers with recipes and information about how to prepare meals. Main & Vine features an events center in the middle of the store that offers cooking demonstrations and food and drink tastings. It also has chefs in the store preparing a meal that customers can buy and take home to eat.
McMullen said Kroger is still in the learning stage with Main & Vine.
“That store has only been open a couple months,” he told me. “We’re still learning what parts of the store the customer likes and what parts the customer isn’t as enamored with. There are already changes we’ve made based on that initial customer feedback and changes in terms of some of the products we carry.”
Kroger’s style is to study a concept at one or two locations before rolling it out more broadly, McMullen said. It did that with its ClickList online order and customer pickup service, which was only available at its Liberty Township store for months before it expanded it to numerous markets across the chain. Kroger has offered grocery delivery to customers’ homes in Denver for years, but that service hasn’t reached the level of success to cause Kroger to expand it across its chain of 2,778 stores in 35 states and the District of Columbia.
“It’s trying to learn on a small scale and understand what works,” McMullen said. “We would scale after that. This isn’t any different. There are elements we’re starting to learn at Main & Vine. Every night, we have a person preparing a meal, and you can try it and you can buy it. Once they started to understand what we have there, the customers are starting to engage in that pretty aggressively.”
Kroger is also taking some of Main & Vine’s concepts to its traditional stores, McMullen said. It will be redoing the menus in its Marketplace stores, where customers can actually eat in the stores, based partly on what it learned at Main & Vine.
The key, McMullen said, is to be open-minded and willing to learn from a new concept like Main & Vine.
“Everything you do will help you learn and improve from where you are,” he said. “You just have to be humble enough to use it.”
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