Grocery Wars: Walmart's Great Value vs. Target's Good & Gather

If you shop for groceries at Target, you’ve no doubt noticed the rapid rollout of Good & Gather, the retailer’s newest line of store-brand products.

(Image credit: Getty Images)

If you shop for groceries at Target, you’ve no doubt noticed the rapid rollout of Good & Gather, the retailer’s newest line of store-brand products. Get used to it. Target expects to have some 2,000 private-label grocery items under that banner by the end of the year, ranging from organic produce and quick meals to snacks and drinks.

Store brands are big business. Supermarkets saw $75 billion in private-label sales in 2018, a 1.5% uptick from the previous year, according to a study by the Food Marketing Institute. Sales for mass merchants, including Target and Walmart, soared to $5 billion, up 7.4%.

The launch of Good & Gather is squarely aimed at Walmart and its popular (and dirt cheap) Great Value store brand. How’s Target competing on price so far? To find out, we shopped Walmart and Target stores in Northern Virginia to compare private-label prices on an assortment of grocery staples. Here’s what we found.

Bob Niedt
Contributor

Bob was Senior Editor at Kiplinger.com for seven years and is now a contributor to the website. He has more than 40 years of experience in online, print and visual journalism. Bob has worked as an award-winning writer and editor in the Washington, D.C., market as well as at news organizations in New York, Michigan and California. Bob joined Kiplinger in 2016, bringing a wealth of expertise covering retail, entertainment, and money-saving trends and topics. He was one of the first journalists at a daily news organization to aggressively cover retail as a specialty and has been lauded in the retail industry for his expertise. Bob has also been an adjunct and associate professor of print, online and visual journalism at Syracuse University and Ithaca College. He has a master’s degree from Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and a bachelor’s degree in communications and theater from Hope College.