Potato Revenue Growth at Kroger

This project was created in just two weeks at the end of Spring Semester 2025 with Lauren Berend, Gokul Reghunath, Suraj Singh, and Tram Anh Tran, under the guidance of Professor Steven Jones, for the Annual 84.51 Case Competition at UC Lindner. Thanks to our team, and the feedback of a few 84.51 mentors in two advisory meetings, our team is proud and grateful to have claimed First Place in the competition.

You can view the entire presentation as a pdf here, but there is much information that has been redacted with an overlay so as not to reveal any sensitive information. We were also advised to memorize most of our talking points, rather than putting them on the slide, so some of the details will be missed.

I will highlight some of my takeaways and proudest moments of the project below.

This is a slide from the presentation we were given at the start of the competition.

Our directive was simple: 

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

However, as we dug into the immense dataset (7 million rows!), we began to ask each other - What is a "category"? What is "underperforming"? These terms were left up to us to define.

After much deliberation, we chose to create a strategy for Potato revenue growth. At first we tried to create benchmarks for every product category we were given, but the industry benchmarks available were not equally applicable. Some had issues with the timelines of the data, others included too many or not enough products in their category. 

We chose Y/Y Revenue Growth as our internal measure of performance. Then considering the worst performing product categories, we found that Potatoes had the most impact on revenue, and therefore would give us a greater ROI for our growth strategy.

I knew it would be a bit of a risk to call our client's product "rotten", but in this particular scenario I wanted to boldly show the unfortunate truth about what customers were saying, and juxtapose that with Kroger's tagline. After hearing the general feedback that the judges gave all groups at the end, I would have considered softening the wording of the headline on this slide.

The qualitative information in online reviews of Kroger and Walmart potatoes proved to be a wealth of information, which helped us to understand that we needed to deliver potatoes to the consumer more quickly, before they had a chance to "go bad".

From the start of the competition, the hosts of the competition told us to "use our feet". Several teams, including us, took this to mean going in-store to view displays, but I wanted to take this even further. I knew that we would be able to get some of the most valuable information with primary research. I visited my local Kroger multiple times in order to interview some of the employees restocking produce, as well as the Assistant Store Leader. The latter interview helped me understand that switching suppliers is a normal and regular occurrence for Kroger produce, which led me to making this recommendation. 

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 displays.

I had also found a reference document from Potatoes USA (a specialized market research organization), which outlined best practices for potato displays, backed by data. Because of these insights, we were able to compare Kroger and Walmart displays to this standard.

One of our primary recommendations was a refresh of potato display strategy, in order to maximize and exaggerate product diversity.

Our other main recommendation was to expand the offerings in the  Simple Truth line of potatoes (which aligns with two rising consumer segments in the dataset), and prioritize them in displays instead of pushing them to the side where they are difficult to find.