What a new Acosta study reveals about trust, differentiation, and the future of grocery retail
Virtually the entire grocery industry has spent the past several quarters thinking about what consumers are no longer loyal to. We’ve been talking about it a lot lately.
Whether that’s national brands, weekly shopping routines, traditional supermarkets – even individual retailers. Loyalty has become the proverbial greased pig everyone is trying to catch.
The evidence for ‘disloyalty’ is everywhere. Even at a slower pace, private labels continue gaining market share. Consumers shop more stores than they used to, and they compare prices more aggressively. Consequently they switch brands more readily.
The modern grocery trip is increasingly fragmented. Yet a new study from Acosta Group suggests there remains one important exception.
Fresh food.
I had the opportunity to sit in on a presentation by Acosta’s Kathy Risch, SVP of Shopper Insights & Thought Leadership and John Dubois, VP of Fresh Foods during IDDBA. The talk; How Brand & Private Label Synergy Drive Growth in Fresh Foods, was a great data heavy look into shopper behavior.
One theme emerged repeatedly throughout the discussion: consumers continue evaluating fresh categories differently than much of the rest of the store.
The research, based on a survey of more than 2,200 U.S. shoppers who purchased bakery bread, cheese, salsa, or refrigerated pasta within the previous three months, found shoppers were significantly more likely to associate fresh brands with quality, consistency, and trustworthiness.
Most notably, national brands in fresh categories scored 17% higher on “fair price” perception than brands elsewhere in the store.
That finding is particularly interesting because it runs counter to much of the industry’s prevailing narrative. As previously mentioned, consumers are becoming less loyal, less predictable, and increasingly price-driven. Yet Acosta’s research suggests shoppers continue looking for trusted signals when evaluating fresh products.
As Kathy Risch says, “Freshness and quality are table stakes, but trusted brands still serve as an important confidence cue, particularly when shoppers are weighing trade-offs or purchasing products where quality feels harder to judge.”
In fact, one of the more surprising findings presented was that Gen Z shoppers exhibited some of the strongest positive perceptions of national brands in fresh categories, suggesting younger consumers may not be abandoning brands as much as they are becoming more selective about where brands matter.
That finding hints at something important about the future of grocery retail.
Anyone Can Build an “Electronic Moat”
For years, retailers have pursued competitive advantages through technology. Loyalty programs and mobile apps, E-commerce, retail media networks, artificial intelligence, digital coupons, and personalized offers. Don’t get me wrong; these are important investments.
But they’re easily replicated. If you can launch a loyalty program and improve your app… so can the competition. Sooner or later, everyone else can – and must – do the same.
Even prices have become easier to compare. As we all know, consumers can check prices online, browse digital circulars, compare promotions, and switch retailers with unprecedented ease. Fresh is very different.
Think about how consumers actually talk about grocery stores.
When shoppers describe why they love a particular retailer, they rarely start with canned vegetables. Nobody drives twenty minutes for paper towels or raves about a cereal aisle.
But they absolutely will drive farther for exceptional produce or pay more at a trusted butcher.
They will choose one store over another because of a bakery, deli, prepared foods department, specialty cheese selection, or meal-solution program. Ask shoppers what they love about Wegmans and you’ll likely hear about the prepared foods, bakery items, produce, and cheese.
Ask about Whole Foods Market and the conversation quickly turns to produce quality, fresh offerings, and specialty departments. Despite Trader Joe’s massive private label selection, shoppers still promote their unique refrigerated items, cheeses, and new meal ideas.
Stores Are Carving Out Identities on the Edges
In a mass market environment a store’s identity increasingly lives along the perimeter. The Acosta findings help explain why.
Fresh categories require consumers to make quality judgments that go beyond simple price comparisons. Shoppers evaluate appearance, freshness, taste, ingredients, sourcing, preparation, and consistency. They’re buying products, but they’re also purchasing confidence.
That distinction came through clearly during the presentation. Researchers repeatedly noted that shoppers use brands as quality cues in categories where product performance cannot be fully evaluated until after purchase.
A can of vegetables is relatively straightforward. A loaf of artisan bread, specialty cheese, refrigerated meal, or prepared food item is far more experiential. Consumers are making assumptions about taste, freshness, quality, and consistency before they ever get home.
Trust helps bridge that uncertainty.
Perhaps even more interesting, Acosta’s data signaled that fresh is not a zero-sum battle between national brands and private label. Instead, the data suggests both can work together to elevate shopper confidence within a category. Strong brands create trust signals, while strong private-label programs reinforce value perceptions.
I think this might be the most important insight here when we’re hearing a lot about how national CPG and center store grocery are facing a lot of headwinds.
Consumers may buy store-brand pasta, but still spend freely on premium sauce. They’ll trade down on paper products while splurging on fresh seafood. They may buy private-label canned vegetables and then treat themselves to an artisan loaf of bread or a restaurant-quality prepared meal.
The result is a shopper who is increasingly selective about where value matters more and where quality outweighs. Consumer shopper habits are revealing that their impression of value is not synonymous simply with low price. And that matters more now than ever.
Destination Categories for Split Trip Shopper
Consumers today routinely split their grocery spending across multiple retailers. A household may stock up at a club store, grab pantry staples from a discounter, order household goods online, and still visit a traditional supermarket for produce, meat, bakery, deli, or prepared foods.
That reality weakens traditional notions of loyalty but it strengthens destination categories.
The winner might not necessarily capture every trip, but they’ll get the ones where consumer perception of quality matters most. The fresh category often determines who wins those trips.
That is particularly important for regional supermarket operators across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. Retailers like Wegmans, McCaffrey’s, Kings, ShopRite operators, and many independents are competing against organizations with larger technology budgets and national scale.
Yet they continue winning shoppers because consumers perceive meaningful differences in quality, freshness, service, assortment, and execution.
The Acosta study doesn’t merely tell us that fresh categories remain important. It tells us something far more significant: consumers continue applying a different standard to fresh foods than they do to much of the rest of retail.
When almost everything can be copied, compared, digitized, or discounted and shoppers fragment their spending across channels, retailers may discover that the greatest competitive advantage isn’t capturing every trip… It’s maintaining trust.
Trust remains stubbornly difficult to replicate – And that may make fresh grocery’s last true competitive advantage.
