Kroger fills approximately 322 million prescriptions annually through its roughly 2,200 in-store pharmacy locations, making it one of the five largest pharmacy operators in the United States by prescription volume. That fact appears in a company most people associate with grocery shopping — and that gap between perception and reality is the most useful frame for understanding what Kroger actually is. The company is the largest supermarket chain in the United States by revenue, operating more than 2,700 stores under nearly two dozen banner names — Kroger, Ralphs, King Soopers, Fred Meyer, Harris Teeter, and others — generating $150.0 billion in fiscal year 2024 revenue. Founded in Cincinnati in 1883 by Barney Kroger, who sold the company in 1928 for $28 million before his death, the entity now employs 430,000 people under CEO Rodney McMullen and operates one of the most sophisticated grocery data operations in retail. That data operation runs through 84.51°, a subsidiary named for the precise longitude of Cincinnati. It processes transaction data from tens of millions of Kroger Plus loyalty card holders, enabling targeted promotions, supplier negotiations, and pricing decisions that competitors without similar data infrastructure cannot easily replicate. The private-label program, branded under the Our Brands umbrella, spans more than 37,000 individual products and generates estimated annual revenues exceeding $30 billion, making it one of the largest private-label operations in global food retail. The attempted $25 billion acquisition of Albertsons — which would have combined the two largest US supermarket chains — was blocked by a federal court in February 2025 on antitrust grounds after the FTC argued it would harm competition in dozens of local grocery markets. The deal's collapse returned Kroger to its organic strategy: expanding the private-label program, growing the pharmacy and fuel businesses, and defending market share against the continued encroachment of Walmart, Costco, and Amazon Fresh.