Trade promotion

And I think it's worth taking the time to find those buyers at these retailers that actually care.

What role do your trade dollars, your trade spend, particularly how you deploy within promotions but also let's also talk about marketing you know digital you know traditional marketing you know let's talk about the soft side of the business a little one you know what roles those play um and how the business is doing

A big part of the reason that we've done this deeper, not wider strategy is because we just didn't have a marketing budget.

So everything that we did had to be highly targeted and had to generate a return.

Anything that

doesn't turn more product.

And if you can show your retail partners that you're investing in in growing their category versus investing in these like kind of one-time marketing type spend and shift those dollars in these negotiations towards working trade spend versus non-working, then everybody wins.

It's just, it's always a tough conversation.

And because legacy has built, built in silos, this is automatically retail media has been built against the, the retail team and not overall broader looking in terms of what else is going on, how does the brand wanna build, um, broader, you know, what's going on with creators, how do we bring that into the retailer.

Um, and ultimately, like, what's been rolled over year on year is, like, a lot of trade spend being in promotional depth and frequency.

But as consumers are looking for discovery, like, I feel like there's a move away from price.

Like, consumers are, yes, they're value conscious, but they're moving away from price in that they become desensitized to all these promotions day over day.

Then what really pushed Kroger over the edge? Several reasons initially popped up into my head, and I'll say them in the order of what presumably was least to most offensive towards Kroger.

In an image of a document allegedly shared with Kroger staff titled Red Bull Energy Update, it noted that Red Bull was cutting its second-half 2026 trade spend by almost half.

Since grocery retailers can make a significant portion of their financial return and profitability through trade marketing, that reduction level from a massive CPG brand undoubtedly hurt, but could be explainable and understandable in the absence of pricing actions.

However, as I've already mentioned, Kroger knew Red Bull was simultaneously raising prices.

The willingness to drop Red Bull proves Kroger is okay to risk short-term category contraction to protect their long-term shelf pricing.

Kroger recognizes that Red Bull real estate, whether ambient, on shelf, grab and go, cold placement, or incremental branded coolers, is extremely valuable to any challenger, even the largest like Monster Energy, Celsius, Alani Nu, or the trio of KDP energy drink brands.

Therefore, most if not all of those challengers fully realize how this untouchable brand era ending shifts negotiations, making them more willing to play ball on aggressive sales agreements and promotional trade spend to capture more national market share.

But let's open the aperture for this last portion of the content.