Progressive Grocer Unveils Its 2024 Category Captains

These CPG companies show themselves to be masters of sales growth across the store

By Progressive Grocer Staff

12/17/2024

Store assortments and merchandising strategies may have changed over time, but one thing that hasn’t changed is the commitment of certain CPG companies to work with their retailer partners to boost the sales not only of the companies’ own brands, but also those across the entire category, and ultimately throughout the entire store.

The 17 companies chosen by Progressive Grocer as its 2024 Category Captains have more than fulfilled this commitment, providing cutting-edge research, profound consumer insights, helpful guidance, and more to enable grocery retailers to rethink their approaches and up their games in creative ways with regard to a range of categories. Along with higher sales, these moves have led to deeper, more fruitful working relationships between those suppliers and retailers, which in turn have each strengthened their respective engagement with the consumer.

Read on to find out how the following Category Captains earned their places among this year’s best sellers.

Abbott Nutrition

A national retailer had a market share gap of five points ($27.5 million) in the oral electrolytes category. Abbott conducted research to evaluate shopper behavior and purchase patterns to define a category strategy, with the aim of driving category growth and market share. The oral electrolytes category is a growth driver in the market, with the number of brands having increased 400% since 2019. Shoppers expect to find these products in three to four locations in the store, based on need state, with 83% expecting to find them in the beverage aisle. Abbott added to the retailer’s warm-beverage aisle new competitively priced Pedialyte products catering to different usage needs to drive awareness and penetration and capitalize on the increase in adult usage. The result: Pedialyte achieved the No. 2 share position in the isotonic warm-beverage set, behind Gatorade, and total buyers purchasing oral electrolytes has increased 4% since the launch.

Chiquita

In 2023-24, Chiquita’s EZ Vent Box accelerated expansion and transformed banana management for retailers, streamlining the transition from pallet to display. The packaging minimizes bruising, enhances back-room efficiency, provides an efficient ethylene vent and ensures consistent ripening through its advanced airflow. Additionally, handling time has been reduced to just a few minutes, saving stores significant labor each week. The solution effectively addresses labor challenges, minimizing shrink and improving the customer experience with high-quality bananas. During the same time frame, Chiquita launched diverse brand-building campaigns to strengthen consumer connections across various touchpoints. These campaigns employed stickers, boxes, digital platforms, out-of-home (OOH) advertising and social media to keep the brand relevant. Chiquita also partnered with key retailers for OOH co-branded campaigns to drive category attention and surprised in-store shoppers with Miss Chiquita visits. The introduction and expansion of permanent secondary displays to almost 2,000 stores secured cross-category as well as impulse shopping.

Filippo Berio USA Ltd.

The extra-virgin olive oil (EVOO) category has experienced a 25% increase in dollar sales and a 4.4% volume increase, with Filippo Berio making the largest contribution, adding more than $51 million in dollar sales. The brand’s refreshed EVOO lineup offers guidance on flavor profiles and a product for every cooking occasion. Filippo Berio supported this flavor expansion through press releases, in-store and online activations, and social media campaigns. Additionally, the company has the No. 1 branded pesto in the total U.S. food market. The category has grown 3.1% in dollar sales and 1.6% in volume, with Filippo Berio again making the largest contribution, adding $1 million-plus in dollar sales. It offers the most extensive pesto selection in the market: eight flavors, including the first certified plant-based/vegan variant and an organic offering. To drive awareness, the company launched an integrated marketing campaign encompassing public relations, in-store activations, retail media and social media content.

Flowers Foods

Flowers Foods collaborated with a major regional food retailer where it had distribution voids due to geographical challenges to its direct store delivery (DSD) system. Together, the retailer and Flowers created a new supply chain distribution method outside of its DSD network to deliver fresh, not frozen, packaged bread of its nationally recognized Nature’s Own, Wonder and Dave’s Killer Bread brands. The new distribution network uses the retailer’s existing transport system, a method unique to Flowers, given the highly perishable nature of its products. The collaboration also gave Flowers exclusive manufacturing rights to the retailer’s store-brand bread items. Flowers’ category team delved into store-level performance to determine demand expectations of its various brands, broke down sales expectations to determine necessary space allocation by store and by segment, and then developed new store-level schematics for spring 2024 that optimized category sales for the retailer, benefiting all bread brands, including store brands.

Fresh Express

Heeding data showing that 83% of consumers are concerned about food prices and are building smaller baskets even as they eat more meals at home, Fresh Express collaborated with its retail partners to re-examine the depth and frequency of produce promotions, including value-added salads. To boost unit sales of items that appeal to shoppers for convenience and nutrition reasons, the brand made data-driven recommendations, like moving from “three for” multiples to “two for” or single buys, offering deep discounts and cross-promoting to build baskets. In addition to highlighting ways to optimize product usage while also reducing food waste, Fresh Express focused on product innovation in this evolving marketplace. The brand rolled out new globally inspired flavors to draw younger shoppers and supported the launch with planogram support, product tracking and panel insights for in-store and digital marketing campaigns. These aligned efforts helped boost dollar and unit sales and grew market share.

Frieda’s Branded Produce

One might say that Frieda’s brings the passion to category management. One standout program focused on the specialty produce company’s passion fruit, grown by a women- and family-owned farm in Okeechobee, Fla. Frieda’s worked closely with a national retailer with a strong presence in the Southeast to create a program that shared the story of the grower and the fruit. The teams got the story directly, as the brand and retailer visited the farm in an immersive experience that laid the groundwork for tailored merchandising concepts. Those concepts included in-store displays, educational point-of-sale signage, and a QR code on the shipper that links consumers to usage tips and the grower’s background. This deeply rooted approach led to the launch of new products like a passion fruit 3-pack and expanded Freida’s share of the grower’s crop. Frieda’s passion fruit outgrew the category by more than 100 points in unit, volume and sales growth from June 2023 to June 2024.

Gallo

Gallo may have a history of tradition, but its forward-thinking approach to products and promotions is garnering fresh attention and sales. The company’s nontraditional wine-based ready-to-drink (RTD) offerings improved dollar sales trends in the wine category, stemming declines from -1.5% to -0.03%. The RTD product, ViBE by Vendange, is unique in that it’s a sweet, wine-based pre-mixed cocktail with broad appeal, including among those who haven’t traditionally engaged with wines. Available in such popular flavors as Blue Raspberry Lemonade and Fruit Punch, the product was buoyed by a comprehensive marketing strategy and both digital and in-store elements like pop-up bins in c-stores, grocery point-of-sale materials, Instacart banners and Instagram ads. The product leads competing RTDs with a 26% repeat rate – a rate that’s helped by the product’s price point at 50 cents below other offerings. Other impressive stats include a 65% lift to the cart and a 44% lift to incremental purchases.

The Hershey Co.

The Hershey Co. puts plenty of planning into category management efforts for products that are frequently unplanned purchases. One outstanding example is the CPG’s focus on beacon end caps and permanent secondary displays, which catch shoppers’ eyes and, ideally, their share of spend. Recognizing that displays prompt three in 10 unplanned candy purchases, Hershey enhanced visibility on beacon end caps, especially those leading down the confection aisle, which have been shown to drive 2.4 times stronger conversion versus other types of candy displays. The company tested beacon end caps in nearly 300 stores and found that those merchandising areas led to a 7% average dollar lift for those specific SKUs, a 2% bump in basket penetration and a 150-basis point increase in dollars, which was three times that of stores without such beacons. Accordingly, Hershey is adding another 200 of these beacon end caps by the end of 2024.

Hormel Foods

Stalwart CPG manufacturer Hormel Foods is helping to push forward the in-aisle snack nuts category, which has seen declines despite growth in general snacking. The Hormel Foods Shopper Insights team collaborated with brand and retail teams at Dollar General to uncover the factors influencing the decline and the challenges facing shoppers. The two companies used these insights to create a strategy to revitalize sales and re-engage shoppers in the category, introducing a new 6-ounce peanut segment that offered value and convenience with peggable packaging, as well as popular flavors previously found in other product types. After finding that flavored cashews were attracting new, younger shoppers, the team also recommended adding these items to the Dollar General assortment and was able to develop a best-in-class planogram tailored to Dollar General’s small-format, limited-SKU environment. The result was a refreshed shelf layout with improved brand blocking, assortment and shopability.

Kraft Heinz

In an effort to ignite growth in the sauce and Mexican categories, Kraft Heinz launched consumer-driven, data-backed initiatives to help drive sales growth and improve shopper engagement. Last year, the company partnered with retailers to reorganize the flow of the sauce and condiment aisle, based on insights from Kantar and Mastercard Test & Learn analysis, redesigning the aisle layout to improve shopper engagement and implementing shelving principles that enhanced product visibility. Kraft Heinz also worked with retailers to redesign the Mexican food section, aligning the layout with how consumers make decisions, and reflecting the sequence in which shoppers select wraps, fillings and toppings for mealtime. Both initiatives have delivered strong results, emphasizing the role of sauces, dips and condiments in driving growth across both categories. The sauce and condiment aisle reorganization boosted sales across multiple subcategories, while the Mexican category growth initiative increased shopper engagement and brought new, younger households into the store.

Mars Food & Nutrition

Mars Food & Nutrition introduced insight-driven omnichannel merchandising solutions to retailers throughout the United States and Canada in fall 2023 to help enhance rice and grains category sales. By investing in new shopper research that examines in-store motivation and decision-making hierarchies, as well as product selection factors, the company revalidated the consumer decision tree for the category, developed effective merchandising principles, and used digital insights to create search and navigation solutions to boost sales. Subsequent in-market tests with national retailers showed improvements in basket size and transactions in the rice and grains category. Additionally, Mars implemented digital navigation and search optimization solutions to help retailers maximize the effectiveness of their online platforms. Further, the company optimized shelf placement to highlight better-for-you options, which helped increase dollar sales and transactions at one national retailer.

Mission Produce

While Mission Produce has been an avocado industry leader for more than 40 years, it entered the mango category in 2021 and recently partnered with a major national retailer to launch a first-of-its-kind ripe mango program in a single division. After finding out via its in-house marketplace intelligence platform that ripeness is a key driver for not only avocado purchases, but also mango purchases, Mission Produce worked with research and development, operations and inventory specialists, as well as mango experts, to build the category for ripe mangoes in the United States and kicked off the program. Mangoes were ripened before delivery as part of the program, which was tailor-made to the store’s merchandising strategy, with a goal to drive sales. Ripe mangos resulted in both greater household penetration and increased purchase frequency during the first six months of the program.

NatureSweet Tomatoes

By earning B-Corp status, NatureSweet has set itself apart as a leader in the fresh produce industry, showing that profitability can go hand in hand with responsible corporate citizenship. This initiative aligns the company’s business model with positive social and environmental outcomes. Committed to sustainable farming practices, NatureSweet uses less water in its tomato production through advanced irrigation techniques and reduces its carbon footprint by optimizing transport and packaging. NatureSweet also focuses on waste reduction in its production process. This includes both organic waste from the tomato-growing process and plastic waste from packaging. Since it became a B-Corp last summer, NatureSweet’s dollar sales have improved by 200 basis points compared with the rest of the snacking tomato segment, gaining 30 basis points in total U.S. multioutlet retail. NatureSweet buyers have increased by 2.2 million, or 7%, to 32.4 million, versus total hothouse snacking tomatoes increasing by only 1.4 million, or 3%.

NestléPurina PetCare Co.

Nestlé Purina has augmented its category management function with a transparent AI planning system, enabling it to rapidly make optimized assortment choices, grow the pet category and empower retail partners with novel learnings. Since implementing explainable AI systems, Nestlé Purina can quickly layer together unstructured data including sales, market factors, customer profiles and planograms. Within a few clicks, the brand inputs a retailer’s goals and accurately projects the performance of different AI-generated or manual assortments at each store, as well as holistically within shopper groups. These impacts are quantified: at the high level to the category and customer, and at the granular level for each individual SKU and planogram’s subsequent sales, volume, rate of sales, loyalty change, and more. Nestlé Purina has enriched its collaboration with its retail partners, offering them meaningful insights that were previously hard to extract. The company can also predict at each store how much increased or decreased space for categories and subcategories will affect the demand of others.

Pharmavite LLC

Pharmavite’s category management team, along with its corporate internal teams, have a deep understanding of the vitamin category. This knowledge helped develop actionable data insights to share with retail buyers, leading to category strength and growth. In the past year, Nature Made introduced Magnesium Glycinate and Zero Sugar Gummies in response to gaps identified in the market. Pharmavite ran always-on digital events via social media and collaborated with retail media partners. Its digital marketing efforts drove additional purchases through algorithmically proven co-purchase opportunities. At the time of publication, the Magnesium Glycinate Gummies were Pharmavite’s No. 1 growth SKU within multioutlet retail in last 52 weeks. Pharmavite continues to address supply gaps for retailers to maintain category sales. It connects directly with retail partners on a weekly basis to coordinate demand planning and keep inventory levels at minimum thresholds. Pharmavite maintains vitamin category growth by supporting retailers through product availability challenges driven by other suppliers.

Pompeian Inc.

Pompeian has introduced innovations to store shelves to address consumer confusion, launching its Made Easy Olive Oil collection comprising four oils highlighting distinct usage occasions: Bake, Fry, Sauté and Drizzle. Pompeian extended these education efforts to retail partners, showcasing the ease of using Made Easy in ads for Walmart and Amazon. As category captain for Amazon and ABCO, Pompeian regularly connects with partners, provides insights to develop category strategy and recommends aisle best practices. Additionally, the company drove brand and category awareness through its Can Your Fat Say That? campaign, a scroll-stopping initiative to make consumers question their cooking oil choices, and why olive oil, specifically Pompeian, is superior. Using paid social media and digital out-of-home, Pompeian drove scale and awareness in and around the store. Through brand lift studies, the ads demonstrated a 5% lift in purchase intent and an 18% lift in brand favorability. Pompeian also increased unit loyalty by 1.9 points.

Sweet Loren’s Inc.

Sweet Loren’s is redefining the future of the refrigerated dough category. With a bold brand story, leading insights and game-changing innovation, the company provides retailers with a solution for driving incremental sales growth. Sweet Loren’s shoppers are the highly sought-after younger generation looking for better-for-you options. According to the company, Millennials and Gen Z spend 44% more per trip on cookie dough, leading the pack in buy rates, dollars per unit and trips. Retailers with limited shelf space rely on Sweet Loren’s to perform. After learning that almost half of shoppers are seeking reduced-sugar options, Sweet Loren’s introduced a “Less Sugar” version of its best-selling product. Consumer insights also led to the launch of a Salted Caramel Chocolate variety, which drove incremental sales and quickly became the No. 2 dollar velocity item in the brand’s portfolio. Additionally, seasonal innovation experienced success with a Pumpkin Spice flavor — 48% of its buyers were brand-new, and half of them came back for more within 12 weeks.