Albertsons – Supermarket Outlook – 16 June 2021
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Specialist:
Title:
Moderator: Nyree Hinton (NH), Third Bridge Sector Analyst
Lee Dayton (LD)
Former VP, Corporate Development & Strategy at Albertsons Companies Inc
Agenda:
1. Post-coronavirus supermarket operating environment
2. Retail grocery competitive landscape dynamics
3. Supply chain inflation impacts on Albertsons (NYSE: ACI)
4. Pricing strategy and market share outlook
Contents
Q: Could you give an overview of the retail supermarket industry’s structure, touching on the competitive
landscape? How have they evolved over the last few years?
Q: How has coronavirus altered or accelerated the changing consumer trends you mentioned?
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Q: Could you give a high-level overview of Albertsons’ business? How has it evolved over the last five years? 4
Q: Could you describe Albertsons’ performance during the pandemic? How would you assess the company’s
ability to capitalise on some of the trends you mentioned, given its unique distribution footprint and
location?
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Q: Could you compare Albertsons’ omnichannel investment, technological capabilities and efforts to
reinvent its business vs players such as Kroger, who is world-class at increasing operational efficiency?
Q: Could you expand on Albertsons’ Fresh Rewards programme and how it compares to other types of
reward programmes, such as Kroger’s?
Q: What other cost factors have come into play from the pandemic-induced environment and the huge
demand in retail and across supermarkets? How would you describe the supermarkets’ ability to manage
those costs to mitigate margin compression while keeping volume and profits high?
Q: To what extent is Albertsons reacting to Kroger automating some of its facilities by improving its own
operational capabilities?
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Q: What is the biggest risk to the fundamental traditional supermarket and retail grocery model? Where is
the competition coming from? Is it from the delivery, manufacturing or operational efficiency end? You
mentioned Instacart.
Q: How has the dynamic between retailers and suppliers transformed? Retailers often push out their own
private label products while also limiting SKUs or demanding more from other CPGs, as you said. How has
the balance of power shifted from brand-name CPGs to the marketplace and large retailers such as Kroger
and Walmart being able to dictate how consumers shop?
Q: Could you discuss Albertsons’ private label strategy and how it aims to fill that gap, given other
companies are perhaps being less reactive to new consumer trends within health and wellness?
Q: Are there any categories that you think Albertsons is focusing on as a growth avenue?
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Q: You highlighted the importance of delivering meal kits with maximum efficiency, adding that the data
suggests people don’t necessarily like to go into a store. How does that play into the shopping experience?
Other platforms are revitalising the traditional format, such as Amazon’s cashier-less stores. Do retailers
need to adjust and make the shopping experience more enjoyable? Does Albertsons consider this an
investment avenue? Are players shying away, as you suggested, except those with large capital to deploy? 10
Q: Could you expand on how large entrants such as Amazon have impacted grocery market share and
industry consolidation?
Q: Could you touch on Walmart’s delivery and drive-up and go-only stores, including Albertsons ability to
reorganise in this omnichannel format? Does the omnichannel experience apply to all retailers or do they
each need to focus on a unique twist?
Q: How should we interpret the players entering the pharmacy business, especially some of the larger
chains?
Q: What are your best- and worst-case scenarios for Albertsons’ over the next 6-12 months?
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Albertsons – Supermarket Outlook
Transcription begins at 00:00:00 of the recorded material
NH: Welcome to Third Bridge Forum’s Interview entitled Albertsons – Supermarket Outlook. I’m Nyree
Hinton and I will be facilitating today’s Interview with Mr Lee Dayton, former VP Corporate Development and
Strategy at Albertsons Companies, Inc.
Lee, before we get started with today’s Interview, please state I agree or I disagree to the following statement:
You understand the definition of material non-public information and agree not to disclose any such
information, or any other information which is confidential, during this Interview.
LD: I agree.
NH: Thank you, Lee. Could you start with an overview of your background?
LD: I was a career changer out of Kellogg from a sales role at IBM. I was at IBM for seven years, I covered
PepsiCo, primarily their international bottling division, for five of my seven years at IBM. I went to Kellogg,
switched into investment banking, joined Solomon Brothers in San Francisco and that’s where I met Bob
Miller, the Chairman Emeritus of Albertsons. He was the Chairman and CEO of Fred Meyer. We acquired
Smith’s Food and Drug, we acquired Ralphs and Quality Food Centers in a three-way transaction, and then we
sold the company to Kroger. During that period of time I was an associate and then a vice president and was
involved in all of the modelling board presentations of all the related transactions so M&A, equity, debt,
everything like that, liability management. Right place, right time for building my skills. Then I switched
firms, I kept in touch with Bob and then I changed jobs. I switched from an investment banking career after
seven years to equity research sales, and I joined Ken Moelis when he did the build-out at UBS. Then I
basically called on middle-market hedge funds. Some large, some you’d recognise, and I pitched ideas so I put
my IBM sales skills and my investment banking analytics and came up with my own ideas to pitch to clients,
which I did very successfully.
Then in 2015, after 20 years on Wall Street, I made one phone call. I called Bob Miller and I landed at
Albertsons. I moved my family from Greenwich to Boise, four teenagers, and I led corporate development and
strategy and I focused on everything outside of the box. If it was a vanilla supermarket acquisition, I wasn’t
involved in that. I worked on Instacart, Greycroft, Quotient, everything like that. Right Aid sales synergies, the
mergers that didn’t happen, things like that. There was all sorts of news out there about mergers that
Albertsons was involved in with Cerberus and I usually led the sales synergies efforts on that. We also looked
at cannabis, some of our shareholders, Jay Schottenstein in particular, was the money behind Green Growth
Brands, so we looked at cannabis too and it’s singularly focused on the customer. I then left in 2019 when Bob
went from Chairman to Chairman Emeritus, and I worked on a cannabis roll-up, which is what I’m currently
doing right now. That’s my story.
[00:03:33]
Q: Could you give an overview of the retail supermarket industry’s structure, touching on the competitive
landscape? How have they evolved over the last few years?
LD: The structure has really been impacted by changing consumer behaviour, and the number one focus is
that the consumer’s most valuable commodity is time. That’s the push behind e-commerce. Albertsons was
early, via the Safeway acquisition, the Safeway.com on the West Coast. That was a very early pioneer and that’s
the number one driver. If you’re able to get your grocery goods without actually going into the store, you’re
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perfectly fine with that. You’re concerned about price, quality, consistency, and again, how they get delivered
to you is relatively straightforward. There’s a market belief that people like going to the store. That’s actually
not what the data shows. The data shows that individuals want to maximise their time, that’s why you see all
the investment in e-commerce and Drive Up & Go delivery. That’s the structural change.
The structural change is that it’s going from a delivery system where the customer went in and picked the
goods off of the shelf, where everything is optimised around that model, to one where the good gets delivered
to the customer. That’s the sea change. That’s allowed the rise of Instacart and all the other delivery
methodologies, and that’s why Amazon is in Whole Foods. Food is such a large part of consumers’ purchasing,
it’s about USD 800bn, probably well over that now given the pandemic, but that will probably slip back a little
bit. Supermarkets are uniquely positioned to deliver fresh prepared foods. I’m sure everyone has purchased a
chicken from Costco, and that’s just the start of where the trend is going. That’s what the industry structure is.
There are incumbents that haven’t changed and then there’s the rise of the competitors such as Instacart, and
then you see the new entrants such as Amazon and then the existing folks such as Kroger, Albertsons, H-E-B,
Costco, etc, modifying their business models as fast as possible to meet the changing consumer requirement.
[00:06:13]
Q: How has coronavirus altered or accelerated the changing consumer trends you mentioned?
LD: The largest trend has been that delivery has been accelerated by, my guess is 3-5 years. Before, delivery
was on a relatively slow growth path. If you look at the mean of the growth of online e-commerce in grocery, it
was relatively slow. That’s the problem with looking at the mean instead of by market. For Albertsons, the
mean being across the entire US is absolutely meaningless because Albertsons tends to be in urban markets,
Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Chicago, metro Washington, metro New York, Boston.
Those are urban environments, those are early adopters of technology, so comparing that to Ohio, Michigan,
doesn’t matter. You need to be very technology-focused. That would be the number one trend, is e-commerce.
How do you reorient your business to meet the customer in an e-commerce and omnichannel environment?
What do I mean by omnichannel? Omnichannel is just that you need to have the goods and services that
you’re providing, the way the customer wants to purchase it, meaning the way she wants to purchase it. I’m
specifically using female pronoun in that. The majority of groceries in the United States, it’s a female customer
25 and older, college educated, medium to high disposable income. That’s the paradigm that you’re solving
for. That’s your customer, so that drives everything. It drives the store site, it drives the store selection, it
drives everything. That’s the number one trend. Everything else is secondary, there are other trends such as
natural and organic and healthy, but that’s relatively straightforward and easy to solve if you’re a food retailer.
The hard part is how do you deliver the goods to the customer in the most efficient way possible?
[00:08:53]
Q: Could you give a high-level overview of Albertsons’ business? How has it evolved over the last five years?
LD: It’s pretty simple. Albertsons was built through acquisition, so as you continue to add on geographies, you
take best practices and you proliferate those into the targets. Then, if you find something at the target, you
proliferate that out. Albertsons is uniquely positioned, given its urban footprint, to capitalise on a lot of the
trends that the industry is going through. Prepared foods, for example, that’s pretty straightforward to do,
because Albertsons has a large self-manufacturing business and self-distribution business which means,
importantly, they have real estate in very key locations. You can put up a cloud kitchen or something like that
on one of those sites and you could deliver food out of that. It’s all about what is the customer eating, broadly
defined, and then given the urban environment again, it’s much easier to do e-commerce in an urban
environment than it is to do it in a rural environment, just because the way you can make money in e-
commerce is, no surprises, having the trucks fully loaded and as many trips as possible. Everything else is, you
can solve secondary.
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Then the last point that Albertsons has, which is an absolute requirement, is that all of these urban locations
have natural barriers to entry. There’s no more land in San Francisco, California, to put a 40,000-50,000
square foot supermarket in. Safeway has got all the good sites, and when you have all the good sites, that
means you have the convenient locations for customers. That means you can have the goods ready for when
she drives in or walks in and picks up her goods and leaves. That maximises her convenience and minimises
her time. She’s not going to get in the car and drive across to Oakland and pick up her goods, or she’s not going
to wait around for you to deliver your goods from Oakland when who knows what’s going to happen with
traffic? It just doesn’t work like that. That’s the number one benefit of Albertsons. Then the other benefit you
have of Albertsons, you have a tremendous own brands portfolio. You have a tremendous self-manufacturing
ability inside the company and things like that, so you have scale. You’re not as big as Costco and Walmart and
Kroger, I get that, but you’re big enough, so that’s what matters.
[00:11:44]
Q: Could you describe Albertsons’ performance during the pandemic? How would you assess the company’s
ability to capitalise on some of the trends you mentioned, given its unique distribution footprint and location?
LD: The challenge is that, during COVID, there’s a lot of noise in the numbers and is that market share
sustainable? In my opinion, and this is my guess for the entire industry, is that it may not be sustainable,
because once you do a stock-up trip, you’re not going to continue to behave in that fashion. The centre of the
store will continue to come under pressure and I think you see that in what the comp store projections are for
this year for Albertsons and the rest of the industry. The focus needs to be on the perimeter of the store, which
is the fresh and natural, and that’s where you’ll be able to continue to gain share with the client. By the way,
that’s where most of the profit is, no surprise, is in the fresh side of the store. That’s why they have certain
departments, that’s why they want you to walk the ring of the store as you’re actually walking in the store, so
that’s why the store is laid out that way. They put the meat in the back because there’s money in the meat
counter and they want you to walk past a whole bunch of other things. That’s probably the number one issue,
is that I’m not sure they’re sustainable, but again, what you’ve gained through the pandemic is, if you just take
the investments, say, Kroger and Albertsons have made in their loyalty programme, is you now know what
customers bought and when they purchased it and how much they purchased.
If you can flip them to delivering it via a box showing up on the door for all your pantry items, things that are
shelf-stable, that’s the home run. It’s much cheaper delivering it directly from a warehouse in a box than
having it go on the truck to the store, unload it and then put on the shelf, because all of that loading and
unloading is done by union workforce. That adds a tremendous amount of cost and there are all sorts of work
rules which are not as flexible as you’d think. If you can take the customer data and then contact, say, my
family and say, “You purchased this in the store because it was a pandemic and you were scared and you
wanted to grab it off the shelf, but now can we send goods and products to you via the UPS or whatever, or
even do it via our delivery vehicles on a milkman basis where you deliver in the neighbourhood? Would you be
willing to do that?” That’s the real game changer. You see that in Instacart’s public announcements where
they’re looking at dark stores and things like that. That’s the reason why they’re doing that, because they’re
going to take those customers and they’re going to provide them with another alternative and then it’ll be
interesting to see how much of that sticks. That’s the challenge with COVID.
NH: How much of it do you think will stick?
LD: That’s a great question. I think the food portion of it, meaning the cook-at-home and everything, I think
that’s going to be pretty sticky. I think folks who have gotten used to cooking at home, they’ll go out again, but
restaurants are under pressure finding labour, so that’s a benefit to supermarkets. I would hope that, of the
pandemic, at least 75% would stick. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t. You see Walmart, Albertsons, Kroger
all making investments in e-commerce to do that. You saw Albertsons announce the Google partnership this
morning. They just announced the new Chief Merchandising Officer from PepsiCo. I think she’s going to be
world class. You see Albertsons and the rest of the industry recognising that. The secret in the grocery store
industry is the profitability. Once you hit a certain level, there’s a lot of leverage in the business model. No
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surprise. You see it in the numbers when you saw the pandemic, when you saw all the throughput go through.
Given the investments in technology, specifically customer loyalty, because once you have the customer’s
buying pattern, if you can flip their centre-store or pantry item goods to an omnichannel approach where you
can deliver it at your convenience and their convenience via a delivery vehicle which you already have, or via a
third-party warehouse or something like that, that’s to be seen, but I would hope that at least 75% would stick.
Customer behaviour, once it’s changed, it does not snap back. Think of your own personal behaviour,
mainframe computers vs PCs vs laptops vs smartphones. Once you get hooked on a smartphone, you’re not
going back to whatever. Again, that’s how I would think about it.
[00:18:54]
Q: Could you compare Albertsons’ omnichannel investment, technological capabilities and efforts to reinvent
its business vs players such as Kroger, who is world-class at increasing operational efficiency?
LD: Yes, I recognise Rodney McMullen is world class. I’ve known Rodney a long time. Rodney was CFO when
we sold Fred Meyer to Kroger, so I have a lot of respect for Rodney and he’s made all the right moves. Ocado is
a brilliant stroke. When I was unable to successfully complete a transaction with Ocado, we went and we were
talking to Greycroft, the venture capital company, which has offices in New York and Los Angeles, and they’re
primarily a tech-based VC firm. We stood for USD 50m single limited partnership fund. The goal of that was to
ingest technology faster. You’ll see a recent press release where Albertsons announced the partnership with
Fresh Rewards. Fresh Rewards is a loyalty programme that works across multiple retailers and they just got a
valuation of USD 1bn-plus and raised several hundred million dollars. That was my recommendation in
answer to how to beat 84.51, so that’s the old dunnhumby asset in the data game. When you’re behind, you
have an advantage in that you don’t have a legacy infrastructure or bias, but you need to then take a chance, so
that’s what we did. That’s what we did through Greycroft. There are all sorts of investments that were made
across the tech stack, with the goal of driving sales exponentially. With something like Fresh Rewards, you are
getting data that you didn’t necessarily have previously. It’s tremendously powerful to managing the business
on a neighbourhood basis, because you’ll see what’s happening.
In Chicago, you’ll see where your customers are buying what they’re buying and you’ll see all of the different
banners, so it’s an incredibly powerful tool. That’s one of the ways that Albertsons is leapfrogging the
competition. If you just do a me-too, it doesn’t work. I always viewed that, “We don’t have anything so we
don’t need to transition from an existing platform. We can go right to the state-of-the-art solution today, and
then they’ll have to try and catch us.” That was my answer to how to attack Kroger, and that goes for Walmart
and Amazon too. That’s why we bought Plated, the meal kit company.
[00:22:26]
Q: Could you expand on Albertsons’ Fresh Rewards programme and how it compares to other types of reward
programmes, such as Kroger’s?
LD: Fresh Rewards works across multiple retail banners, so it’ll work at Kroger, it’ll work at Albertsons, it’ll
work at Target, it’ll work at Trader Joe’s, it’ll work at all of them. It basically is using technology to ingest the
receipt that you get, either electronically or paper, and then it loads all that in and manufacturers or investors
and such, they support it and everything. I think, you guys have to check me on this, Kraft Heinz is an investor.
The large CPG companies want to see all the data too. They want to see, “Where’s ketchup selling by channel?”
Who’s buying it at Target vs Sam’s vs Jewel-Osco? Again, I’m just using Chicago as an example. Jewel-Osco is
Albertsons’ banner in Chicago. That’s the secret (inaudible 23.42). The technology allows you, as a customer,
to generate rewards across your multiple shopping platforms. Customers don’t go to one store anymore. They
go to, basically, 4-5.
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[00:24:03]
Q: What other cost factors have come into play from the pandemic-induced environment and the huge
demand in retail and across supermarkets? How would you describe the supermarkets’ ability to manage those
costs to mitigate margin compression while keeping volume and profits high?
LD: The number one challenge there for Kroger and Albertsons is the UFCW. In California, there are two
large unions. Then you see what the local communities have done, where they’ve dictated that you have to
have front-line worker pay of an additional USD 4 an hour, which is probably about 10% of what the fully-
burdened hourly cost is, somewhere in that neighbourhood. That’s why you see Kroger closing, I know they
only closed a few stores, but that was just to send a message. That’s the number one issue that you have, is that
you have a workforce that is very highly compensated. The work rules are very rigid. That makes it hard to
change your business model, as the consumer is changing around you very, very quickly. That’s the number
one issue with margins. Then the other issue you have is you have price. You’re not going to be able to take
price like you did during the pandemic, so prices are going to have to come down, and then that’s just going to
exacerbate it. You see that. That’s why same-store sales are forecasted to be down. There are some issues you
can do with mitigating the margins, but the long-term trend will be that Walmart will start to take price,
because they will want to maintain the share. Then Costco will do the same. You can only be a certain
percentage above an average basket. There’s all sorts of Wall Street research out there that does basket stuff
that I used to read and follow, but that’s going to be the issue.
[00:26:46]
Q: To what extent is Albertsons reacting to Kroger automating some of its facilities by improving its own
operational capabilities?
LD: Great question. Once Ocado selected Kroger, Kroger and Ocado formed a strategic partnership. We went
out and formed a strategic partnership with Takeoff Technologies, which is a micro fulfilment centre solution.
Think of the Ocado sheds as mainframe computers. Incredibly efficient but very large, so you need a fairly
large footprint. The Takeoff Technologies solution, which is powered by Knapp, which is an Austrian-based
company, that’s the little bots that move inside the delivery centre there, you can put those in 10,000-15,000
square feet. You can take a 45,000 square foot store, section off part of it, put it behind a glass wall, put a lot of
cool blinking lights and everything, and then use that as your delivery hub. It’s incredibly efficient, and so
that’s the solution that I recommended and implemented that Albertsons deployed in response to Kroger. The
other tremendous benefit that Albertsons has that Kroger does not have, besides being in urban environments
and the ability to section off parts of stores, is that it has a fantastic dark store inventory. You can see that. It’s
published in the 10-K. There’s a dark store rent footnote. You can look at that and say, “What would you do
with a dark store?” There’s a great article. If you Google Lincolnwood Chicago Walmart, you’ll see that
Walmart purchased the former Dominick’s and is doing dark store delivery and Drive Up & Go. You cannot get
good real estate these days in these urban centres or, if you do, it’s not entitled for what you want to do with it.
Grocery stores, especially dark stores, they are. You have opportunities like that. Like the recent Albertsons
acquisition of Kings and Balducci’s in New Jersey. I used to live in New Jersey. Kings had some great
locations, Acme has some great locations. If there’s one store within a certain radius of another, you could take
one dark and just do delivery only out of it. When you do delivery out of a dark store, it’s not organised like a
grocery store. It’s organised the way you can pick the goods the fastest to have the fastest throughput time,
fastest pick time. Again, that’s where you see Instacart in these press stories, talking about dark stores. Not
going to take 100% credit for giving them that idea but myself and my boss, Shane Sampson, who was the
Chief Marketing and Merchandising Officer at Albertsons, we spent a lot of time with the guys at Instacart
talking about this. That’s the key to the Albertsons success, in my opinion.
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[00:31:00]
Q: What is the biggest risk to the fundamental traditional supermarket and retail grocery model? Where is the
competition coming from? Is it from the delivery, manufacturing or operational efficiency end? You
mentioned Instacart.
LD: Great question. The biggest risk is to individuals and then small companies that are coming up with
models that are resonating with consumers. This sounds obvious, I get it, but grocery delivery now, everybody
accepts is a given. Instacart is now, there are no surprises with Instacart. Everybody gets it. The next part of
that would be, like there’s a very good company in San Francisco called Good Eggs. We track them quite a bit
and I talk to the team there quite a bit. There’s another one called Farmstead. I talk to that young man quite a
bit. What they’ve done is they both have different approaches. Good Eggs is very much on the fresh approach,
where you get very fresh, natural, healthy products that you can name. People today want to eat what they can
pronounce. They’re into healthy taste, natural and, of course, price. That’s Good Eggs. Then Farmstead has
basically said, “We’re going to curate the selection for you,” meaning, “We’re only going to have 5,000 SKUs,”
or whatever the number is, which is a pretty small amount, or maybe it’s even less. “Our value prop to you will
be we’ll have limited SKUs but we’ll have very good prices and the product quality will be as good or better
than you can get out of the store.” Again, that works. Those were two that I would follow.
A lot of those entrants are coming now out of the Bay Area, just because that’s where the intellectual capital
resides. While all of those solutions sound very easy and everything, the technology behind it to get it to work
and to be profitable is quite difficult. That’s where we focus on that. Boston would be another area. Takeoff
Technologies is out of Boston, so we spend a lot of time in Boston talking to them. There’s a lot of engineering
talent in a company like Takeoff, so they have a lot of also cool ideas. As far as interfacing with the customer,
which is key, that would have been out of the Bay Area. Those were the two that I followed closely, and still
follow.
[00:33:49]
Q: How has the dynamic between retailers and suppliers transformed? Retailers often push out their own
private label products while also limiting SKUs or demanding more from other CPGs, as you said. How has the
balance of power shifted from brand-name CPGs to the marketplace and large retailers such as Kroger and
Walmart being able to dictate how consumers shop?
LD: It’s a very contentious relationship but both sides need each other. Everyone is going to come to an
agreement sooner or later. It’s just a question of what the economics are and those tend to change on a rolling
three-year basis, give or take. The benefit is that the retailers have tremendous power and they pay very
(inaudible 35.08), that’s not new news. That continues to go on. The CPGs will buy a certain amount of linear
feet, so to speak, and then they’ll make sure their products are positioned the way they want them and then
that’s what the retailer gets. Gets the money and gets the products and hopefully the product is what the
customer wants to buy. That’s the big challenge right there. Is the customer buying the products that the CPGs
are selling? Most of the tension comes from if a national brand wants to stock a product that customers are no
longer buying and it doesn’t drive the traffic to the store, so I could use that linear space for something else
that’s more bespoke, that’s more on-trend, that’s natural, organic, healthy, specially ethnic, something like
that, that would actually get people in the store vs an extra water, if you will. You walk down the aisles, just
pick an aisle, you can say ketchup, you can say water, you can say bread, you can say potato chips, you can say
whatever and you’re like, “Why are they carrying all these? Who’s buying them?” The fact of the matter is that
a grocery store carries about 45,000 SKUs of product, not all of them are turning the same, so why don’t we
start to de-SKU or SKU rationalise parts of the aisles and then free up that space for more on-trend items that
you’re finding at Expo East, Expo West and over in Paris at the food show there, that customers will pay for
and will drive them into the store?
They’ll be like, “Wow, cool. Look, I found that.” If you’ve ever been to a Wegmans, that’s kind of the business
model, or an Eataly in New York City, that’s the business model. That’s the tension between the two because
they just want to put in a long run, meaning, “We’ll ship you X number of truckloads of water and you can put
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it on the shelf,” and everything. “Nobody’s buying it.” Okay, because you don’t need all those variants of water.
You need three, something like that. That’s the challenge. Again, that’s why you see large… Like PepsiCo
bought KeVita, the kombucha drink. We were one of the test markets for KeVita. We’re happy to put it on our
shelves and then say, “Listen, guys, Pepsi, this is really blowing up here. It’s really good. San Francisco and Los
Angeles, you guys should buy this and then put it in 2,300 stores.” That works for us. That’s where it really
works and then the basic stuff is, “Do you carry Diet Doctor Pepper sugar-free?” Like, “Okay, sure, I guess I
have to,” but you get the idea. I think I mixed my manufacturers between Coke and Pepsi, but you get the idea.
[00:38:26]
Q: Could you discuss Albertsons’ private label strategy and how it aims to fill that gap, given other companies
are perhaps being less reactive to new consumer trends within health and wellness?
LD: I’m not sure I agree with the second part of your statement that others aren’t on-trend. I think everybody
is on the private label trend. It’s very simple. You just are basically trying to shadow what the customer is
doing and then find a contract manufacturer or use your self-manufacturing facilities to offer the customer an
alternative at a much lower price point. Therefore, the margin goes up quite a bit. Again, very straightforward
and it’s just a data game. You’re just looking at your internal and external data, trying to spot trends and then
saying, “If this is on-trend, how do I manufacture it? What can I manufacture it for? Is the quality close
enough?” That’s really where it tends to break down, is on a quality basis. Some of these goods are very hard to
knock-off on a similar quality that the customer doesn’t notice. That’s what you want. Great private label
business, growing like crazy, the new Chief Merchandising Officer from PepsiCo, that’s a brilliant hire. She’s
going to absolutely get that business going. There’s no reason why the private label business can’t be as
meaningful like it is at Costco. I have nothing but good news to say about the private label business, and this
goes for Kroger too. It’s just a great business. Especially because you have underutilised manufacturing assets
in great locations, that if you invest the capital there, you can start to make a lot of this stuff yourself if it
works, if the math works.
[00:40:51]
Q: Are there any categories that you think Albertsons is focusing on as a growth avenue?
LD: Yes, the best complement strategy there is what Kroger has done with Home Chef. I have a lot of respect
for Rodney’s acquisition of Pat Vihtelic, the CEO of Home Chef, and what they’ve done. You saw them in
investor day, that that’s now a USD 2bn brand. That’s an own brand. That’s an incredible success story and
that’s where the market is going. You acquire something like a Home Chef, which is meal kits, you then sell
them in store, you add Murray’s Cheese to it, which they own, which is another own brand. You then pair it
with wine, which they don’t own, obviously, but you get the idea. You then extend the Home Chef line into
other parts of the store and that’s how you continue to grow. You’re basically swapping that out on various
pieces where you can extend the line. Albertsons has done it with Plated. You can go into Safeway in northern
California and buy own-brand items which have the Plated brand on them. That’s a great way to have an
alternative at a different price point for your customers, and the quality is as good, maybe even a little better in
some cases. Then you can develop your own line of sauces, pastas, you get the idea. You can do all that. In all
of these categories, even if it’s a relatively benign category like pasta, pasta boomed during COVID. It may or
may not sustain, but it doesn’t matter because you introduced a new brand and you then captured a larger part
of the customer spend at a much better price point, and you cut back the pasta incumbents like the Ranas and
the Buitonis and whatever. That’s how that business works. You’re a fast follower.
NH: How does that translate to the pet food category?
LD: Pet food is game over. Petco is one. Chewy.com or whatever. The Freshpet idea, home run, I love that
idea. We put the Freshpet coolers in the middle of the dog food aisle and had the fresh food in there and that
drove traffic from both ends of the aisle. Outside of that, I don’t see how you’re going to make large inroads in
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pet food at a supermarket. Even Tractor Supply is now selling pet food, so you have all these other alternative
channels, but the main one is Chewy and Petco, especially Chewy.
[00:44:32]
Q: You highlighted the importance of delivering meal kits with maximum efficiency, adding that the data
suggests people don’t necessarily like to go into a store. How does that play into the shopping experience?
Other platforms are revitalising the traditional format, such as Amazon’s cashier-less stores. Do retailers need
to adjust and make the shopping experience more enjoyable? Does Albertsons consider this an investment
avenue? Are players shying away, as you suggested, except those with large capital to deploy?
LD: No, you definitely need to make the store more experiential and there are some very simple things you
can do. Part of the reason why we purchased Plated was to cook meals for customers in the store and serve
them food as they were shopping. I know it sounds simple, but it’s a very easy way to get the customer into the
store, and then they’ll stay, and then they’ll usually buy more. That’s what the data shows. If you’re in the
store, I give you a small sample plate of a Plated meal, I offer you a glass of wine if you’re of age, you get the
idea. I’m driving traffic to the store. It’s something experiential. It’s something you can’t get online. That’s the
whole game right there. Do things in the store that you can’t get online. It could be popcorn, it could be fresh-
baked cookies, it could be tortillas. We have a large number of stores within ethnic areas. Get the ethnic food
providers in there. Get the best ethnic food provider in your store making meals for customer takeaway, thing
like that. That’s the benefit that you can do in the store that you cannot do online. Imagine if you could walk
into your local supermarket and the best Chinese restaurant in town is cooking food right there, or sushi, or
whatever, or pizza, you get the idea. That’s the benefit. Then you can put that in a cloud kitchen, if you have a
manufacturing facility nearby and generate more, but you get the idea. That’s what you need to do in the store.
That’s where the business is ultimately going to go, because that’s the point of difference that you have.
I referenced Eataly and Wegmans. Those were two that we followed very closely. Whole Foods does a great job
at this. I don’t know if they’re going to continue it under the Amazon ownership but certainly that was
something we followed up until they got bought by Amazon. You go in, you sit down, they have a great coffee
bar. You can get a growler to-go of alcohol or whatever, you get the idea. Stuff you cannot do online, that’s the
key.
[00:48:18]
Q: Could you expand on how large entrants such as Amazon have impacted grocery market share and industry
consolidation?
LD: I don’t think you’re going to continue to see consolidation, because I don’t need to buy stores anymore. I
can do what Rodney is doing with Ocado. I can drop in an Ocado shed in Florida where I have no stores and be
an absolute disruptive monster in the market. I think that’s a brilliant move. It’s something that the math is
just off the charts good for something like that, because your employee count is less, you don’t have to invest in
stores that you have to maintain and, blah, blah, blah. That’s where I think the market is going, is that you
don’t need to build a lot of new stores. You still need to keep your fleet at a certain level so it’s enjoyable for
customers, but you need to invest in, your tech spend has to go way up and then you need to have your
remodel spend go up in order to put in all of this technology in order to deliver the goods to the customer. I
don’t think you need to see further consolidation in the industry.
There’s not a lot of great assets out there, in my opinion. Unless one of the big private chains who’s available,
like Meyer or Hy-Vee or H-E-B or Publix, but I doubt it. I can’t see those guys. Why would they bother?
They’re already big enough. Very possible. Then on the West Coast you have Stater Bros, Raley’s, Save Mart.
Those are all in private hands. I guess if the families wanted to sell but, again, what am I buying if I’m the
acquirer? I’m buying a bunch of stores and union workforce and then, don’t forget, when you buy a
supermarket these days, you get the pension liabilities. It seems like a lot of work. Why don’t I just buy a dark
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store, open something and then away we go. That’s my thoughts on that.
[00:51:15]
Q: Could you touch on Walmart’s delivery and drive-up and go-only stores, including Albertsons ability to
reorganise in this omnichannel format? Does the omnichannel experience apply to all retailers or do they each
need to focus on a unique twist?
LD: Walmart was someone I followed intimately. The acquisition of Jet.com and the team there was an
absolutely home-run trade for their business, and that gave them the tech stack that enabled all of the e-
commerce platforms. I would say that the challenge if you’re Albertsons or Kroger in following Walmart into
Amazon, but particularly Walmart, is that they have more capital, they have more technology and they have
duration. That primarily stems from the family’s control of the company. They can take a much longer-term
view because they have patient capital. They are the ones that are setting the bar and they’re laying out the
plan. You just need to take their plan and improve upon it for your local thing. What do I mean by that? The
problem with Walmart is that they like to do everything the same, because that’s their model, that’s their
mentality. The Albertsons mentality is totally different. Albertsons runs 12 divisions separately and there’s a
lot of autonomy that the division presidents have. That’s the key differentiator. That’s what I loved about my
job, is that the solution had to be the same about 60%, but the other 40% I could customise for the local
market, be it product selection, be it technology provider, whatever. That gave me the flexibility to optimise
more for the local market, whereas Walmart was much more of a peanut butter approach. The solution in New
Hampshire is the same as in Texas, is the same as in California, you get the idea. You lose a lot of that,
especially from product selection. If I can stock products that are unique to a local market and put them in my
automated facility or Drive Up & Go or on my store shelves, that’s a huge advantage.
That’s not how Walmart operates, so that was the key differentiator. Getting back to the products that she
wants to buy and then just delivering them to her in the most cost-efficient solution which, again, Walmart
was always going to lead on price, but if I could employ a different technology solution, one that’s a little
cheaper, then I could lower the price. That’s just a tremendous advantage, because now I’m that much closer
to Walmart in price. Customers know that these days, because the smartphone has given them 100% visibility
into the pricing across multiple vendors. That’s how you beat Walmart.
[00:55:08]
Q: How should we interpret the players entering the pharmacy business, especially some of the larger chains?
LD: It’s a horrible business. The way you know that is that’s why CVS bought an insurance company. The
challenge with pharmacy is DIR fees. Direct and indirect reimbursement fees. There are a lot of articles out
there on that. Going back to CVS, I’m sure they make money in pharmacy, but they have a PBM. If you’re
Albertsons or Kroger and you’re running a business, you’ll see maybe it draws customers to the store, maybe
not. There are some folks that believe it does. I’m not of that opinion. I would say that real estate could be
better utilised for something that customers want to buy, rather than going and picking up a maintenance med
or something. The other challenge you have is that the distribution of those items into pharmacy, or health
and beauty in general, are what’s called each pick, which means they come out of a different warehouse, which
means they show up in a tote, which means somebody has to individually place those little bottles on the
shelves of the area outside the pharmacy. That’s a union employee doing that. That’s expensive. Pharmacists
are typically the highest-compensated employee in the store, after the store director. That’s another issue.
They didn’t have the techs.
Again, it just starts to compound itself, so not a fan of the pharmacy business in a supermarket. The tell is I
haven’t read Kroger’s annual report. I can’t remember if they took a goodwill impairment on some of their
healthcare assets but, to me, that would always be the tell, as to how the asset was performing, was looking for
goodwill impairments. Let Amazon have that business, or whoever. Express Scripts owned by Cigna. CVS has a
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PBM. Forget it.
[00:57:42]
Q: What are your best- and worst-case scenarios for Albertsons’ over the next 6-12 months?
LD: Six months, I would say that it’s just going to be a fight for maintaining the market share and to see how
the consumer behaves, because no one really knows how the consumer is going to behave post-pandemic. Six
months, I don’t have a good view on the company. Again, it’s very hard to change anything in six months with
Albertsons. The plans they have in place, they’ll continue to execute on those, and those are well-known. For
2022, I would say Vivek has continued to do the right thing, (inaudible 58.37) is higher today and Albertsons
has all the tools necessary in order to take on and win and gain share. The question is does Vivek have the
mandate and do the employees, is there a willingness to change the business? You need a pretty radical
change. What Rodney McMullen is doing at Kroger with Ocado, that’s a radical change. If you put an Ocado
shed in Ohio, surrounded by a bunch of stores, a lot of that business is going to go from the store to the shed.
That’s a tremendous change of mindset in food retail. That’s where you get a lot of organisational inertia and
resistance. Everyone is always worried, “What’s going to happen to the store?” Which is the absolute wrong
way to think about it. You’ve got to ask yourself, “How do I maintain the business with the customer?” That’s
what Rodney is doing. Albertsons has all the tools to do it and they can do it. The question is can Vivek go out
and get it done? I think so, but I don’t know. Rodney had the head start, for sure. He’s been putting these
sheds in for three years, and they’re coming. He’s has specified that he’s going to put one in northern
California, and he’s got one in southern Wisconsin which is going to serve Chicago. The business in Chicago,
the Kroger business, Mariano’s is just not that great.
[01:00:32]
NH: Thanks, Lee. I think that is a great place to conclude. Let me close by saying thank you very much for
your input. Thank you, clients, for joining Third Bridge Forum’s Interview today. If anyone would like to speak
with Lee in a private call or meeting, please let your relationship manager know. Lee, thanks again.
LD: Thanks.
Transcription ends at 01:00:46 of the recorded material
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