Kroger has come under fire for stealing promotional photos from The Peach Truck, a family-owned business that delivers fresh Georgia peaches to people’s homes.
Georgia native Stephen Rose has been selling peaches for 12 years after becoming disappointed with the quality of peaches in Nashville grocery stores.
Then two weeks ago, Kroger Announced your own service to sell Georgia peaches in brightly colored trucks.
Surprisingly, Rose discovered that Kroger, the largest supermarket operator in the United States with 2,700 stores in 25 states, had used images from his company’s Instagram, after receiving an alert from Google.
One egregious example Rose pointed out was the image of one of his employees holding a box of peaches and standing in front of a company truck. The truck, the peach boxes, and even the employee’s shirt were edited to have Kroger colors and logos.
“I was surprised by the image they used,” Rose said in a tiktok video that has gotten almost a million views. ‘I recognize the person in the photo. That’s Michael, a member of our team… who sold peaches for The Peach Truck.’
Peach Truck posted the image on the left to their Instagram in 2021. It showed an employee who was selling boxes of peaches. Kroger is accused of taking that image and editing it to have its own branding.
“That’s the same image, they just edited the photo to change the branding,” Rose added.
Rose also claimed that Kroger took another photo of one of The Peach Truck’s pit stops in 2020.
‘Kroger, you are a multi-billion dollar corporation, yes, billion with a “b”, in dollars. Do you really need to take our marketing and reissue it on top of our business model?
This controversy comes as Kroger announced Thursday that it beat Wall Street’s revenue and profit expectations, while also seeing a 5.1 percent increase in customer visits to its stores.
Rose’s video received thousands of supportive comments, with people telling her to sue or proclaiming that they would stop shopping at Kroger altogether.
“Kroger boycott confirmed,” one person wrote.
Kroger responded to the backlash by removing the offensive photos and apologizing to The Peach Truck.
‘We were embarrassed to find out about this. You could say we have peaches 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,” a Kroger spokesperson said in a statement acquired by KPLC.
‘We have removed the images from our system. We apologize to The Peach Truck and wish them nothing but success.’
‘How do you find out about something you did?’ he said in a later message. video. “It was an intentional copy of our brand, our model, the way we do things.”
Stephen and Jessica Rose photographed 12 years ago just as they were starting the fresh peach delivery business
The company delivers to 25 states and customers have the option of having their peaches delivered right to their door or requesting a local pickup straight from one of their bright orange trucks.
Employees are photographed in front of a company truck during the 2022 peach season.
Kroger won’t do home delivery like The Peach Truck, but it will supply stores in Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky and Virginia with 12-pound boxes of Georgia peaches priced at $20 each.
Any Kroger Instagram post that has to do with its limited-time peach sales has been inundated with comments attacking the company for infringing on The Peach Truck’s copyright.
The Peach Truck, which Rose runs with his wife Jessica, has grown in popularity in recent years, with people across the country clamoring to get their hands on their peaches.
Rose’s company delivers to 25 states, and customers have the option of having their peaches delivered right to their door or requesting a local pickup straight from one of their bright orange trucks.
