The last 25 years in the grocery industry have been defined by a handful of big M&A deals—and dealbreakers—as grocers sought to compete with giants like Walmart. From the acquisition that bred industrywide panic to the deal that spelled disaster for a megamerger and the quieter consolidation that actually worked out, these are the M&A moves that shaped grocery’s past and and likely its future. Kroger and Albertsons Many of Kroger and Albertsons’s deals in the early 2000s would eventually come into play during their own failed effort to merge. In 2006, SuperValu, alongside CVS and Cerberus Capital Management, agreed to buy Albertsons for $17.4 billion, a move that hit many snags, particularly during the recession. The companies ultimately sold some chains, including Albertsons, to a Cerberus-headed investor group in 2013. Then in 2015 came one of the quarter century’s biggest transactions: Albertsons bought Safeway in a $9.4 billion deal. To gain FTC approval, the two divested 168 stores, most to small Washington-based chain Haggen. That move proved disastrous for Haggen, which crumbled under such rapid expansion, closing stores and selling many back to Albertsons in 2016. Ghosts of these M&A mishaps lingered over Kroger and Albertsons’s yearslong attempt to complete the biggest supermarket merger in US history, which they announced in 2022. When Kroger said it planned to offload 400+ stores to distributor C&S Wholesale Grocers—which only ran about 160 stores at the time—to gain FTC approval, regulators drew similarities to the not-so-great Haggen situation in 2015. That Haggen move remains “a cautionary tale,” Sujeet Naik, analyst at Coresight, noted. “It continues to shape how regulators scrutinize large consolidation in the grocery industry today,” he said. Keep reading here.—EC | 
