The supermarket conglomerate said on Monday that it has hired former Walmart U.S. and Air New Zealand CEO Greg Foran to be its new chief executive, filling a corner office that has sat empty for almost a year. Foran is the executive whose hands-on style and high standards revitalized Walmart’s mammoth grocery business a decade ago. Wall Street clearly loved the appointment: Kroger shares shot up as much as 8% on the news.
Kroger was ranked No. 27 on the 2025 Fortune 500 list on the strength of $147 billion in revenue. But the company has been a hot mess lately. Almost a year ago, CEO Rodney McMullen resigned abruptly because of an undisclosed ethics violation related to his personal conduct. A number of other Kroger top executives have since left the company, too, creating a leadership vacuum at an already dicey time: Kroger is trying to figure out how to attract cash-strapped consumers battered by inflation. Compounding Kroger’s problems was the blocking in 2024 of a $24.6 billion merger with Albertsons, which it was banking on to expand its footprint in the notoriously slow-growth grocery industry.
Enter Foran. The New Zealand native led Walmart’s U.S. business, more than half of which comes from grocery, and revitalized it between 2014 and 2019. Known for his candor, Foran once famously told reporters that most of Walmart’s stores were not up to standard, breaking with a company culture that didn’t prize such directness. He focused on basic but crucial touches like widening aisles in the food departments to make them seem less cluttered, and adding space for fresh food as part of a broader strategy to improve the big-box store’s selection of produce and meats.
On the nonfood side, Foran focused on improving Walmart’s once notoriously uneven customer service by raising the pay of hundreds of thousands of workers. He added regional managers for more local control and reemphasized Walmart’s 10-foot rule, which requires staff to greet any shopper within that distance (a practice first introduced by late founder Sam Walton). Foran also was instrumental in equipping Walmart stores with e-commerce, allowing it to outpace Amazon in online grocery delivery in particular.
At Air New Zealand, where Foran became CEO in February 2020 just as the pandemic was going to bring the airline’s revenue to $0, the executive’s folksy manag