How many times have you heard that jingle? I would bet I have heard it a thousand times over the past ten years. it has been burned into my “little grey cells” to quote Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s brainy detective. The jingle is relatively new in terms of the company’s marketing strategy. I wondered how long has the Kroger company been in Chillicothe?

Bernard “Barney” H. Kroger and partner B.A. Branagan had four stores in Cincinnati where they sold coffee and tea under the name The Great Western Tea Company. Kroger had begun selling coffee and tea door to door in 1873 at age sixteen. By 1883 he bought out Branagan’s interest in the business, and added a line of groceries to his stores and began baking bread in-house. By 1902 he incorporated as Kroger Groceries and Baking Co. with forty stores. Kroger bought a butcher shop and became the first grocery to have an in-house meat department in 1904. The concept of self-service grocery stores took hold in the US in 1916 when King Cullen, a former executive of both A&P and Kroger companies, opened the first Piggly Wiggly store in Memphis, Tennessee. Spurred by the world food demands during WWI, the United States government established the Food Administration to improve food quality in the US and to expand the amount of food the US shipped to our allies and poor countries not involved in the war.

Kroger expanded rapidly in the 1920s, opening a Chillicothe store in the Daugherty Building on the SE corner of Second and Pine Street in 1925. Barney Kroger sold his business chain of 5,575 stores in 1928. The store was moved across Pine Street to the Caldwell building in September 1933. The company was renamed Kroger Company in 1946 and has operated under approximately thirteen other brand-names since that year. In 1960, Kroger Company began adding a pharmacy to their stores. In 1966, Ralph Coletta constructed a new building on the NE corner of Fourth and Chestnut across the street from Weber Funeral Home, specifically for Kroger. Kroger moved into the new building and remained there until 1983. Wes Williamson, who had begun working at Kroger in 1965, had risen to be the Manager when the new facility on South Plaza Drive was opened as a Super Store. The new pharmacy operated under the name of Super-X. 

As with most major businesses, financial success is clearly a goal. Kroger has had many setbacks since 1883. Annual revenue of one billion dollar seems to be a benchmark of how successful a business is. Kroger Co. reached that figure for the first time in 1952. In 2003, when the Chillicothe store was remodeled, Kroger had 290,000 employees and reported $53.9 billion in sales. In its 2021 annual earnings report, Kroger reported they employed nearly 500,000 employees, served eleven million customers through 2,723 stores, and had $138 billion in total sales, not counting fuel sales. Not too shabby! It looks like there is a lot of “Krogering” going on. 2023 will be Kroger’s ninety-eighth year in Chillicothe. Keep an eye open for what Kroger does in 2025.