Ok, when I said retailers should take note of how great the experience was with The Peach Truck, I didn’t mean to literally copy the concept.
Apparently, Cincinnati-based Kroger was taking notes of the Nashville-based business model a little too well.
The Peach Truck co-founder and owner Stephen Rose took to social media after seeing a Google Alert about Kroger’s peach promotion. The photos in the news alert showed an employee holding boxes of Kroger-branded peaches, a Kroger-branded truck, and people picking up peaches in a parking lot.
Kroger’s peach promotion was eerily similar.
“That’s nothing we can protect,” Rose said, in a video on the company’s social media channels. “There’s nothing we can do about that.”
But the images were TOO similar.
“However, I was shocked at the image they used,” he said. “The image looks super familiar to me for several reasons. I recognized the person in the photo. That’s our team member, Michael from last summer who sold peaches for The Peach truck.”
It wasn’t just a coincidence. Rose brought up the images showing they were copies of The Peach Truck’s marketing materials, edited with Kroger’s branding.
“Kroger, you’re a multi-billion dollar corporation…do you really need to take our marketing and re-edit it on top of taking our business model? Can you please explain to us how this is OK,” Rose asked, in the video.
After seeing the video on multiple platforms, and searching for the images in question, I had a hard time believing this happened.
I thought to myself, “There’s no way Kroger would do something so amateur.” This had to be some kind of satire or hoax.
Color me surprised, because when I reached out to Kroger for a comment, a spokesperson sent me an emailed response:
“We were embarrassed to learn about this. You could say we have peach on our face! While these images were not approved to be shared as part of our marketing campaign, they should never have been created in the first place. We have removed the images from our system. We apologize to The Peach Truck and wish them nothing but success.”
Wow. Just…wow.
