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 last decade. 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, ex-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 in 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 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 non-food side, Foran focused on improving on 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 re-emphasized Walmart’s 10-foot-rule, which requires staff to greet any shopper within that distance of them (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 management style was on display again: He famously learned the ropes by serving as a flight attendant on a few flights. He left that company last October.
Kroger executives have said in the past year that they wanted a CEO who would bring fresh perspectives, and they will clearly get that from Foran. True, Kroger’s business in more complex than Walmart’s in some ways, in part because it owns a number of retail chains, including Fred Meyer and Ralphs. And it has gone through a tumultuous period during which it cut roughly 1,000 corporate jobs, consolidated regional divisions, and shuttered underperforming stores and e-commerce fulfillment facilities. Kroger did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In 2022, Foran distilled his approach in a Fortune interview. “You’ve first got to decide what sort of culture you want the business to operate in, and you’ve got to be able to demonstrate that through your actions and behaviors,” he said.
Kroger clearly needs a steady hand and a CEO unafraid of shaking up a culture and making major moves, and in Foran, Kroger will be getting that—if he leads like he did in previous jobs