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Acosta Group has appointed Joe Mueller as Chief Retailer Partnerships Officer, a newly created position focused on strengthening retailer relationships and advancing collaboration across the retail ecosystem. Mueller brings over 35 years of experience from Kellanova and Kellogg Company, where he most recently served as Vice President, Industry and Customer Development. In his new role, Mueller will work with agency leadership teams across Acosta Group's Omnichannel Sales & Services organisation to strengthen retailer relationships, identify growth opportunities, and provide retail marketplace insights. "Strong retailer relationships are fundamental to helping our clients grow," said Mark Rahiya, Group President, Omnichannel Sales & Services at Acosta Group. Mueller's appointment reflects the company's continued investment in strategic partnerships that drive growth across the retail ecosystem.

Acosta Group: national brands, Private Label lift fresh together. Share via: ORLANDO, Fla. - Freshness gets a product considered, but the brand often gets it chosen. That was the central message from Acosta Group during a June 8 session at the IDDBA Show at the Orange County Convention Center, where two company leaders unpacked new research on how shoppers weigh national brands against private label across the fresh perimeter. In "Rising Together: How Brand and Private Label Synergy Drive Growth in Fresh Prepared Foods," Kathy Risch, senior vice president of thought leadership and shopper insights, and John DuBois, vice president of fresh foods, U.S., argued that the question facing retailers is not national brand versus private label. It is how to use both, because, as DuBois put it more than once during the presentation, "all tides rise together." Inside the research. The findings come from Acosta Group's "Fresh Insights: Why Brand in Fresh Requires a Different Lens" study, conducted in March 2026 among 2,226 U.S. shoppers ages 18 to 79 who had purchased fresh bread, shredded cheese, refrigerated salsa or refrigerated pasta within the prior three months. Roughly 250 shoppers evaluated each product concept. Respondents were drawn from the company's proprietary Shopper Community of more than 40,000 demographically diverse U.S. household shoppers. Risch said the team deliberately went narrow rather than wide, concentrating on four highly shopped dairy, deli and bakery categories so it could measure how brand behaves when shoppers face real trade-offs. Freshness and price lead, but brand shapes the choice. When shoppers were asked what matters most in fresh, freshness or quality ranked first at 69 percent, followed by price at 66 percent and brands at 52 percent. Those fundamentals set the baseline, Risch said, but brand becomes a more powerful factor the moment shoppers are forced to choose between comparable options, especially in categories where quality is harder to judge by sight. The pull of national brands showed up clearly in forced-choice testing. Across the four categories, shoppers preferred national brand concepts 61 percent of the time over store brand concepts. National brands also carried a 17 percent higher "fair price" perception overall, with shoppers pegging a fair price at $5.90 for national brand concepts versus $5.03 for store brands. Risch also noted that shoppers want national brands present in the perimeter. In the research, 82 percent said it is important that the fresh area of the store include well-known, nationally advertised brands, a signal that assortment, not just price, drives how shoppers judge the section. The impact of brand was far from uniform. Refrigerated pasta emerged as one of the most brand-influenced categories, with national brands outperforming on appeal, trust and preference. Cheese showed the widest price gap, with shoppers expecting roughly a 32 percent higher price for the national brand. Salsa told a different story: shoppers rated store and national brands similarly on quality and appeal, yet still reached for the national brand more often at the final moment of decision. Generation mattered, too. Millennials and Gen Z showed the greatest willingness to pay a premium for national brands in fresh. Gen Z assigned national brands a 21 percent higher fair price than store brands, the largest gap of any generation studied. Acosta Group's segmentation found that national brand seekers made up the largest group at 44 percent of fresh shoppers, followed by occasion-driven explorers at 30 percent and private label loyalists at 22 percent, alongside a convenience-first practical segment. One of the study's most striking findings, Risch said, was that even private label loyalists assigned national brands a higher fair price for certain fresh occasions, underscoring the difference between an everyday default purchase and a higher-confidence occasion buy. A halo effect across the department. The research also pointed to a halo effect when the two brand types sit side by side. Most shoppers said that seeing a familiar national brand alongside a store brand made the section feel more trustworthy, rather than diminishing the store brand. In the concept testing, the national brands shown included names such as La Brea Bakery in artisan bread, BelGioioso in cheese, Buitoni and Rana in refrigerated pasta, and Sabra in dips and salsa, each paired against a generic store brand equivalent. DuBois said national brands expand reach and bring new shoppers into a category, while behaving like higher-value buyers once they choose, purchasing more frequently and at higher units per trip. Store brands, he said, remain essential anchors for everyday value, margin efficiency and loyalty among price-focused shoppers. All tides rise together. In an announcement accompanying the research, Mark Rahiya, group president of omnichannel sales and services, said the strongest fresh strategies leverage both brand types. Store brands anchor value and everyday loyalty, he said, while national brands expand category reach, strengthen trust and attract incremental, higher-value shoppers. DuBois closed on the same note, telling the audience the takeaway is not that one brand type is better than the other. "Ultimately, all tides rise together," he said.

Acosta Group announces strategic alliance with CommerceIQ. As part of the new partnership, client-focused CommerceIQ experts are joining the Acosta Group Connected Commerce team to accelerate the adoption and use of the CommerceIQ platform. Acosta Group's Connected Commerce team and CommerceIQ have joined forces, harnessing the distinct strengths of both organisations to drive measurable growth opportunities for brands. The alliance establishes Acosta Group Connected Commerce as one of the industry's first AI-driven agency teams. "This partnership enables us to strategically leverage CommerceIQ's advanced technology and AI-driven capabilities with our own omnichannel expertise, resulting in an ability to act faster, think bigger, and deliver stronger results for our clients - critical in today's fast-moving marketplace," said John Carroll, President, Connected Commerce for Acosta Group. Acosta Group works at the intersection of brands and retailers, partnering with over 3,200 clients, including more than 130 billion-dollar brands, as well as retailers across grocery, CPG, and consumer electronics. Its Connected Commerce team provides omnichannel account management, digital shelf management, retail media, full-service Amazon, and shopper marketing services. CommerceIQ is the retail AI platform used by brands to optimise media investments, improve share of search, and drive incremental sales growth. The CommerceIQ platform features AI teammates that continuously analyse hundreds of digital signals to build reports, run optimisations, and deliver real-time recommendations that outperform traditional rules-based automation systems. With a global retail network of over 1,450 partners and a customer base exceeding 2,200 brands, CommerceIQ's platform is trusted to turn data into decisions at scale. In today's connected commerce landscape, brands face an overwhelming pace - making dozens of decisions per minute. This unified technology platform integrates sales, media, and content into a single, actionable system, turning fragmented insights into coordinated dashboards and workflows. "We are gaining a measurable technological edge," said Carroll, "accelerating data stitching and unlocking more time for strategic initiatives, joint business planning, creative problem-solving, and direct customer engagement." Rohan Ganeson, President, CommerceIQ, added, "This strategic alliance will deliver transformative solutions for our shared clients. Moving forward, we will continue to double down on our platform investments, accelerating innovation and delivering best-in-class solutions, with a key focus on advancing agentic AI to unlock new efficiencies across commerce operations." "The additive agency capabilities of Acosta Group provide a powerful advantage to our clients today and looking into the future." As part of the new partnership, client-focused CommerceIQ experts are joining the Acosta Group Connected Commerce team to accelerate the adoption and use of the CommerceIQ platform. "These new associates further strengthen our ability to deliver the most advanced and innovative end-to-end managed services solutions," said Carroll. Carroll and Ganeson emphasised the close alignment between their shared culture of innovation and client-first focus, supporting a seamless transition for both clients and associates and reinforcing shared values and operational continuity. "With this partnership, we are building agency solutions that clients are beginning to seek out now, but will find essential in the immediate future," said Carroll. The Martechvibe team works with a staff of in-house writers and industry experts. View More