Kroger to Sell Groceries on Alibaba

The third largest grocery retailer in the US, Kroger Co, taps into the Chinese market by opening a grocery store on Alibaba’s Tmall Global marketplace.

The grocer will be selling organic products under its Simple Truth brand which has been responsible for generating sales over the last five years. In fact, it has reached $2 billion in sales this year.

Kroger Looks To The East

The partnership is mutually beneficial to Kroger and Alibaba since this is the first time that the former is selling its products beyond the US, and choosing Alibaba as a sales channel for expansion only means it has confidence in the Chinese eCommerce site’s ability to bring it sustainable growth.

“Ecommerce enables Kroger to quickly scale to reach new customers and markets where we don’t operate physical stores, starting with China. We anticipate Chinese consumers will love our brands – starting with Simple Truth products – just like our American customers do. Kroger is proud to continue to lead the way in making natural, organic and free-from products more mainstream and accessible. Sharing Kroger’s exclusive brands and status as a food authority the world over is exciting.” – Yael Cosset, Kroger’s Chief Digital Officer

On the other hand, Alibaba has long been seeking to partner with US retailers and make their products available on Tmall.

“We are very pleased to be working with Kroger to bring their Simple Truth products to the Chinese market through our Tmall Global platform. We are always looking to deepen collaboration with our brand partners to create more value for them and we look forward to a fruitful relationship with Kroger.” – Alibaba spokesperson

This is the first big move we have seen from a grocery chain ever since the Amazon acquisition of WholeFoods last year.  However it is surely seen as a noticeable snub to Amazon by going after their biggest competitor in the East.

What do you think of Kroger and Alibaba’s partnership? Let us know in the comments below or over in our Facebook Group.

Dave Furness

Dave is a Co-Founder of eSeller365. For over 10 years he has been involved with eCommerce with a particular interest in the marketplaces and the huge opportunities available for sellers when utilizing a multi-channel strategy. After a year of being the UK’s youngest eCommerce consultant, he built an education platform called UnderstandingE that showed the world how to utilize Magento as the “Third Generation of Multi-Channel software”.

Dave has also created a YouTube channel dedicated to entrepreneurship and eCommerce as well as a podcast dedicated to mental health awareness. When Dave isn’t working his main interests include learning and playing Chess, researching the Crypto and NFT space, and trying to find the nearest beach.