This project was created in just two weeks in collaboration with Lauren Berend, Gokul Reghunath, Suraj Singh, and Tram Anh Tran, for the Annual 84.51 Case Competition at UC Lindner, 2025. My team would agree that I took a natural leadership position in the project, by guiding the strategic direction and spearheading both primary and secondary research initiatives.

Our team is proud and grateful to have claimed First Place in the competition, judged by a panel of seasoned professionals from 84.51.

You can view the entire presentation as a pdf here. We were advised to memorize most of our talking points, rather than putting them on the slide, so some of the details may be missed.

The following visuals are slides from our final presentation. Unfortunately, many labels in data visualizations
had to be obscured to protect sensitive information. 

Our directive was simple: 

Create a strategy for product category growth for Kroger, in an underperforming category.

However, as we dug into the immense dataset (7 million rows of real Kroger data), we began to ask each other:

What is a "category"?
What is "underperforming"? 

These terms were left up to us to define.

Health Conscious and Price Sensitive are two segments built into Kroger's shopping data. We could see that shoppers who fall into both segments are more likely to buy potatoes, and therefore should be our target market.

One of the other ways we "used our feet" was to go into five Kroger stores and three Walmart locations in order to compare their potato merchandising displays.

It was immediately clear that Walmart focused on maximizing, highlighting and exaggerating product diversity, while Kroger focused on displaying a high volume of its biggest seller over all else.