Kroger ’embarrassed’ after being caught copying The Peach Truck

Ok, when I said retailers should take note of the quality of experience with The Peach Truck, I didn’t mean to literally copy the concept.

Apparently, Cincinnati-based Kroger was taking note of the Nashville-based business model a little too well.

Stephen Rose, co-founder and owner of Peach Truck, took to social media after seeing a Google alert about promoting Kroger peaches. Photos from the alert showed an employee holding boxes of Kroger brand peaches, a Kroger brand truck and people picking up peaches in a parking lot.

Kroger’s peaches promotion was eerily similar.

“It’s nothing we can protect,” Rose said in a video posted on the company’s social media channels. “There’s nothing we can do about it.”

But the images were TOO similar.

“However, I was shocked by the image they used,” he said. “The image looks very familiar to me for several reasons. I recognized the person in the photo. It was our team member Michael from last summer who sold peaches for The Peach truck.

It wasn’t just a coincidence. Rose referred to the images showing that they were copies of The Peach Truck marketing materials, published with the Kroger brand.

“Kroger, you’re a multi-billion dollar company…do you really need to take our marketing and re-edit it on top of our business model? Can you please explain to us how everything is okay,” Rose asked in the video.

After seeing the video on multiple platforms and searching for the footage in question, I had a hard time believing this was happening.

I said to myself, “There’s no way Kroger is doing something this amateurish.” » This must have been some sort of satire or hoax.

Be surprised, because when I contacted Kroger for comment, a spokesperson emailed me a response:

“We were embarrassed to learn of this. You could say we have peach on our faces! Although these images were not allowed to be shared as part of our marketing campaign, they should never have been created in the first place. We have deleted the images from our system. We apologize to The Peach Truck and wish them nothing but success.

Wow. Just wow.