SHAPING SAVE A LOT: How CEO Kenneth McGrath is turning the discount grocer around

This article originally ran in the St. Louis Business Journal on January 7, 2021. 

The time was late 2016. The place: St. Louis. The problem: Save A Lot.

Saddled with debt, the national discount grocer was losing market share to big-box retailers like Walmart, regional players like Schnucks and Dierbergs and fellow small-format value stores like Aldi. Earlier that year, its Minnesota-based parent company, SuperValu Inc., had tried to spin off Save A Lot as a separate company. When that failed, SuperValu offloaded it for $1.4 billion to Onex Corp., a Canadian private equity firm, which promptly began searching for a new CEO who could turn things around.

They found that person in Kenneth McGrath.