Only a grocery nerd would walk into his neighborhood Publix, notice that mustard had moved to the end of Aisle 3 and immediately start wondering why. But that’s exactly what happened to me recently. The longer I walked the store, the more interesting it became. Candy had moved. Water had moved. Soda had moved. Chips had moved. This wasn’t a typical category reset. Entire aisles appeared to have been reconsidered.
After 15 years working in the CPG industry, I’ve watched hundreds of resets. I’ve seen brands gain facings, categories expand and entire sets rebuilt during normal reset cycles. What I couldn’t remember seeing was this many seemingly unrelated categories moving at once. That’s when I stopped looking at the changes individually and started looking for the connection between them.
It started with mustard. Aisle 3 contains cake mixes, salad dressing, spices, sugar and condiments. Mustard, previously positioned toward the middle of the condiment section, had moved to the end. More interesting was what surrounded it. Mayonnaise was now next to mustard, followed by hot sauce and ketchup, with BBQ and steak sauces completing the progression.
For decades, ketchup, mustard and relish were practically inseparable on grocery shelves. That’s how we traditionally thought about condiments, but shopper behavior has evolved. Mustard and mayonnaise have a natural relationship around sandwiches, while ketchup, BBQ sauce and steak sauce fit more naturally into grilling and meal occasions. Hot sauce has evolved from a niche product into an everyday flavor enhancer capable of crossing multiple missions.
Maybe that was coincidence. Then I kept walking.
Aisle 5 had been dramatically transformed. Candy and greeting cards, previously located near the end of the store, had moved there. Bottled and sparkling water left Aisle 5 for Aisle 6, which previously housed chips and soda. Aisle 6 is now essentially a beverage destination, bringing bottled water, sparkling water and carbonated beverages together.
Then I reached Aisle 9. Salty snacks, including chips, had moved there and were now adjacent to beer. Paper plates, cups, paper towels and other household products previously occupying that area had been relocated to Aisle 11 alongside baby products.
The chips-and-beer adjacency particularly caught my attention. Beer and potato chips aren’t part of the same category, but they frequently belong to the same occasion. Watching a game, having friends over or grilling on Saturday afternoon can put both products into the same basket. From a traditional category-management perspective, they’re separate businesses. From the shopper’s perspective, they’re part of the same mission.
Merchandising Should “Ask” This Question
That’s the question this reset raises for me. Traditional category management often asks, “Where does this product belong?” Basket-driven merchandising asks something different: “What is the shopper trying to accomplish when they buy it?” Those two questions can produce very different stores.
I don’t know whether loyalty data, basket analysis, traffic patterns, corporate merchandising strategy or some combination drove these decisions at Publix. But viewed together, the changes raise an interesting question: Are retailers beginning to let shopper behavior redraw traditional category boundaries?
Grocery retailers certainly have the information to do it. Loyalty programs and digital ordering provide visibility into which products consistently travel together, when they’re purchased and how those relationships change by household, season and occasion. The opportunity goes far beyond sending another personalized coupon. Basket insights can potentially influence assortment, merchandising, adjacencies and even how customers navigate the physical store.
There are risks. Moving familiar products can frustrate shoppers, while space limitations, operational considerations, vendor relationships and established shopping patterns still matter. Nobody enjoys walking to the spot where an item has been for five years only to discover it’s suddenly three aisles away. Any major reset needs to create enough incremental value to justify disrupting those habits.
That’s precisely why this Publix reset caught my attention. Retailers don’t casually move this many categories across valuable shelf space. Something drove those decisions, and after 15 years studying grocery categories, I’m fascinated by what these changes may tell us about the future of physical merchandising.
Maybe I’m reading too much into where Publix moved the mustard. That’s entirely possible, and probably something only a grocery nerd would spend this much time thinking about. But the larger question is worth asking.
The planogram tells you how the retailer sees the category. The basket tells you how the shopper sees the store.
Maybe the next great grocery reset isn’t about finding a better place for the product. Maybe it’s about building a better store around the basket. 