Rite Aid Wild Harvest

[Alpha8472]

Rite Aid now has a large selection of Wild Harvest items from Supervalu. I was surprised. This was once an Albertsons brand. The prices are reasonable on most items. The selection of organic and natural foods at Rite Aid is quite good. I was impressed by the price on their organic maple syrup. The rest of the Rite Aid products still use the Big Win brand. I did not see any other Supervalu products.

[rwsandiego]

Rite Aid now has a large selection of Wild Harvest items from Supervalu. I was surprised. This was once an Albertsons brand. The prices are reasonable on most items. The selection of organic and natural foods at Rite Aid is quite good. I was impressed by the price on their organic maple syrup. The rest of the Rite Aid products still use the Big Win brand. I did not see any other Supervalu products.

Sounds like Rite Aid is using UNFI for organic and natural food (which was UNFI's focus before acquiring SuperValu).

Just a bit of history, Wild Harvest was a Star Market brand which started out as a natural food store. The brand was retained as their (and then Shaw's) brand. Alberston's adopted it as their organic brand and then it became a SuperValu brand. Sadly, when Albertsons was sold the legacy Albertsons brands were retained by SVU.

[storewanderer]

Rite Aid has a deal with Supervalu (UNFI now) to just do Wild Harvest product for the time being. It seems like it took many months to finally get the stores stocked. The prices with the 20% off loyalty card or 30% off coupons Rite Aid seems to issue every couple weekends are pretty good.

I think they are selling some of these items online too, but not nearly all of them.

It seemed like Wild Harvest was never developed very well by Albertsons. I always found the brand and packaging attractive. The pricing, not so much. Also many Albertsons Stores simply carried none of the products. They were so far behind Safeway and Fred Meyer back then on the nutrition category. Toward the end they had in-store natural foods aisles with Wild Harvest signage. It was telling when Albertsons LLC briefly carried O Organics from Safeway instead of continuing to pull Wild Harvest from Supervalu with the rest of its private label product (though that was around the same time Albertsons LLC was selling Best Choice stuff in some stores too).

[rwsandiego]

...It seemed like Wild Harvest was never developed very well by Albertsons....

Keep in mind that Albertsons acquired the brand in 2004 (when they acquired Shaw's/Star) and then sold to Supervalu two years later. That's not a lot of time to develop the brand.

[klkla]

...It seemed like Wild Harvest was never developed very well by Albertsons....

Keep in mind that Albertsons acquired the brand in 2004 (when they acquired Shaw's/Star) and then sold to Supervalu two years later. That's not a lot of time to develop the brand.

Supervalu has continued to develop the brand, however. They changed the packaging a couple years ago based on feedback & consumer research and from what I understand it has been quite successful.

[storewanderer]

Does UNFI have a private label of its own? I don't think it does, allowing many chains it supplies with a lot of Natural/Organic branded items to instead order Full Circle from TopCo. Wild Harvest could provide a real opportunity to them.

So far I am noticing some decent sized chains leaving UNFI who were long term Supervalu or Unified customers. The Markets LLC up in Southern Washington was a very long time Supervalu customer and switched to URM (TopCo now). Mar Val in NorCal has also recently switched from UNFI (very long time Unified customer) to C&S. Even Kmart has switched from UNFI to C&S this past summer (not sure how relevant that is, but it is another customer).

Back in a small town in Wisconsin I went into a little (actually it wasn't little- it was a well rounded operation with full perimeter, fuel, and Caribou in-store plus drive through) IGA Store which sat directly across the driveway from some kind of Supervalu/UNFI distribution center. You'd think they would supply it. No, it was supplied by AWG.

[klkla]

Does UNFI have a private label of its own?

The link for their own brands re-directs to Supervalu brands, which I guess they have adopted as their own.

Essential Everyday
Wild Harvest
Culinary Circle
Equaline

https://www.supervalu.com/our-brands.html

I wonder if they have discontinued Springfield? Although the branding was outdated the product quality was very good and the brand is pretty well know in Southern California.

[storewanderer]

Does UNFI have a private label of its own?

The link for their own brands re-directs to Supervalu brands, which I guess they have adopted as their own.

Essential Everyday
Wild Harvest
Culinary Circle
Equaline

https://www.supervalu.com/our-brands.html

I wonder if they have discontinued Springfield? Although the branding was outdated the product quality was very good and the brand is pretty well know in Southern California.

Springfield is discontinued. They are still selling through items. I picked up a few cans and long shelf life dry items up last time I was in the distribution area and some is good out to 2023 (sugar) so it seems to be recent. I don't think UNFI SoCal supplies enough mainline grocers at this point for Springfield brand to be viable. At this point UNFI is supplying a lot of ethnic operators and those ethnic operators are increasingly having their own private label or bringing in other generic type items from various suppliers to serve as private label. I think with the amount of food produced in SoCal or brought up from Mexico, it is easier more cost effective and better for customers for these small chains to just go to the manufacturer or packer and deal directly with them for pallets of paper products, sugar, oil, flour, cookies, canned produce, etc. than order the stuff from UNFI and pay that additional markup.

I am surprised they kept Springfield going as long as they did. The SVU brand line is much more extensive (excellent basic grocery private label line actually), though not so sure about quality or price.

I think Natural Value must have been UNFI's closest thing to a private label, pre-SVU. https://naturalvalue.com/about/our-distributors/