Kroger history

In 1884 Kroger opened his second store.

Kroger, a former coffee-and-tea salesman, soon bought out Branagan’s interest, and by 1885 he had a chain of four groceries.

Barney knew it would be simpler and more convenient if they could buy everything at one stop from one store, so 1901, Kroger became the first grocer in the country to establish its own bakeries, followed by integration of the meat department.

By 1902, the Kroger Grocery and Baking Company had been incorporated.

In 1912, Kroger made his first long-distance expansion, buying 25 stores in St Louis, Missouri.

Kroger also followed this policy and, in 1913, began delivering its groceries with Model T trucks instead of with horse-drawn wagons.

The company introduced another innovation in 1916 with the beginnings of self-service shopping.

By 1920 the company had begun a process of rapid expansion beyond the Cincinnati area.

Steady expansion to 1927 gave this company a system of 3,749 retail units integrated with manufacturing and wholesaling divisions.

Kroger sold his shares and retired from the business in 1928.

Kroger became a very prosperous company and, by 1929, had opened 5,575 stores.

Morrill also began the Kroger Food Foundation in 1930, making it the first grocery company to test food scientifically in order to monitor the quality of products.

Since its founding in 1936, JM has played a significant role in shaping the content and boundaries of the marketing discipline?

In 1947, Kroger opened its first egg-processing plant in Wabash, Indiana, in order to further ensure egg quality.

By 1950, annual sales had grown to more than one billion dollars.

In 1952, Kroger sales topped $1 billion.

Beginning in 1955, Kroger began acquiring supermarket chains, expanding into new markets.

In January 1956, the company bought out Big Chain Stores, Inc., a chain of seven stores based in Shreveport, Louisiana, later combining it with the Childs group.

During all the acquisitions, in September 1957, Kroger sold off its Wichita, Kansas, store division, then consisting of 16 stores, to J. S. Dillon and Sons Stores Company, then headed by Ray S. Dillon, son of the company founder.

In 1960 the company began its expansion into the drugstore business, with an eye on the potential for drugstores built next to grocery stores.

The first SupeRx drugstore opened in 1961 next to a Kroger food store in Milford, Ohio.

In October 1963, Kroger acquired the 56-store chain Market Basket, providing them with a foothold in the lucrative southern California market. (Prior to this time Kroger had no stores west of Kansas.)

In 1964, Jacob Davis, a former congressman and judge and a vice-president of Kroger, replaced Hall as president and CEO. Davis concentrated on the manufacturing branch of Kroger.

Sara Miller McCune founded SAGE Publishing in 1965 to support the dissemination of usable knowledge and educate a global community.

All of these chains adopted the Kroger banner in 1966.

During hearings for the 1967 Meat Inspection Act, several chains were exposed for selling adulterated processed meats.

James Herring became president of The Kroger Company in 1970 and began to take Kroger into the superstore age, closing hundreds of small supermarkets and building much larger ones with more specialty departments.

Kroger built an ultra-modern dairy plant (Crossroad Farms Dairy) in Indianapolis in 1972, which was then considered the largest dairy plant in the world.

In 1978, Lyle Everingham, who began his career as a Kroger clerk, became CEO. The company sold Top Value Enterprises and opened Tara Foods, a peanut butter processing plant, in Albany, Georgia.

In 1979 Kroger became the second largest supermarket chain in the United States.

By 1980, sales had grown to ten billion dollars a year.

In 1981, Kroger began marketing its Cost Cutter brand products.

In 1982, Kroger sold the 65-store Market Basket chain it had operated for several years in southern California.

In 1983, 100 years after our company’s founding, Kroger merged with Dillon Companies Inc. in Kansas to become a coast-to-coast operator of food, drug and convenience stores.

In 1985, Kroger outbid Rite Aid for the Hook's Drug Stores chain, based in Indianapolis, Indiana, and combined it with SupeRx to become Hook's-SupeRx.

Kroger opened and had about 50 stores in St Louis until it left the market in 1986, saying that its stores were unprofitable.

In 1987, however, Kroger reduced its involvement in stand-alone drug stores when it sold most of interests in the Hook and SupeRx chains.

Less than three months after BI-LO pulled out, that company decided to re-enter the Charlotte market, and in 1988, Kroger announced it was pulling out of the Charlotte market and put its stores up for sale.

Boys Markets was acquired by the Yucaipa Companies in 1989.

Kroger did, however, purchase 29 Great Scott! supermarkets in Michigan in 1990 and add them to the Kroger chain.

When faced with increased competition in a particular market--for example when Food Lion, Inc. expanded into Texas in 1991--Kroger would simply lower prices and accept the resulting reduced margins.

In addition to the increasing competitive pressures, Kroger's sales and earnings were affected in 1992 by a ten-week strike in Michigan and another work stoppage in Tennessee.

On June 15, 1993, the company announced the closure of its 15 area stores.

Many of these stores were sold to the local grocery chain Red Food, which was in turn bought by BI-LO in 1994.

To free up additional money for the program and further reduce the company debt, Kroger in early 1995 sold Time Saver Stores, a division of Dillon which included 116 convenience stores in the New Orleans area, to E-Z Serve Convenience Stores, Inc. of Houston, Texas.

In 1998, Kroger merged with the then fifth-largest grocery company Fred Meyer, along with its subsidiaries, Ralphs, QFC, and Smith's.

Kroger bought most of these stores back in 1999 and began reverting them.

The Hannaford locations in these markets were purchased from Delhaize by Kroger as a condition of Delhaize's 2000 acquisition of the Hannaford chain, which had previously competed against Food Lion, also owned by Delhaize.

The company's prosperity continued, and it claimed a new sales record of $50 billion dollars in 2001.

A store in Wilson opened in 2002 but closed two years later.

In 2004, Kroger bought most of the old Thriftway stores in Cincinnati, Ohio, when Winn-Dixie left the area.

In 2005, the company began renovating many Kroger Food & Drug stores in Ohio for an expanded and remodeled look, converting them to the Kroger Marketplace format.

On October 5, 2006, a new Kroger Marketplace opened in Gahanna.

Two more stores were planned in 2007, one in Middletown (which opened in April 2007, after the old store was razed and made part of the current parking lot) and one in Englewood.

Two more stores opened in the Cincinnati area, in the Northern Kentucky suburbs of Hebron and Walton which were completed in November 2008.

The second Kroger Marketplace store in Rosenberg, Texas, opened on December 4, 2009.

A Mount Orab, Ohio, store opened in the spring of 2010.

In the Raleigh-Durham area, Kroger closed its North Raleigh store in the Wakefield Commons shopping center on July 9, 2011 because the location failed to meet sales expectations.

A second Kroger Marketplace opened on October 4, 2012, from a rebuilt Scott's Food and Pharmacy in the Village at Coventry on the southwest side of Fort Wayne.

The company announced in April 2013 that full-time employees would maintain their health insurance benefits.

A fourth location opened on October 15, 2014, in Portsmouth, Virginia, at the site of the former I.C. Norcom High School.

On March 3, 2015, Kroger announced it will enter Hawaii, having registered with the state as a new business in February 2015.

In April 2016, Kroger announced that it had made a "meaningful investment" in the Boulder, Colorado-based Lucky's Market, an organic foods supermarket chain that operated 17 stores in 13 states throughout the Midwest and Southeast United States.

On February 7, 2017 it was announced that Kroger Co. had purchased Murray's Cheese.

The sale was closed on April 20, 2018.

In March 2019, Kroger announced it was expanding its service with robotics company, Nuro to Houston, Texas with Nuro's autonomous Priuses.

Kroger's shares traded at over $32 per share, and its market capitalization was valued at US$25.9 billion in April 2020.