Albertsons Companies, Inc.

Open full sized image

The Albertsons name has survived decades of acquisitions, a corporate breakup, and an attempted merger with rival Kroger.

© Caroline Brehman—EPA-EFE/Shutterstock.com

Albertsons Companies, Inc. is an American grocery retailer that operates more than 20 supermarket chains, including Albertsons, Safeway, Vons, Jewel-Osco, ACME, Shaw’s, and Tom Thumb. The company traces its roots to 1939, when Joe Albertson opened his first grocery store in Boise, Idaho.

Through decades of expansion, acquisitions, and corporate restructuring, Albertsons grew from a regional supermarket chain into one of the largest food and drug retailers in the United States. As of 2026, the company operated more than 2,200 stores in 35 states and the District of Columbia. It is headquartered in Boise, and its common stock trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol ACI.

Albertsons sells groceries, general merchandise, and health and beauty products. Many stores also include pharmacies and gas stations. The company offers online grocery shopping through websites associated with its various chains, as well as home delivery and curbside pickup.

Private label products are a significant part of the business. Albertsons sells more than 14,000 such products under the Signature SELECT, O Organics, Open Nature, Lucerne, and Primo Taglio brand names. In fiscal 2025, private label products generated $16.9 billion in sales. The company also operates 22 distribution centers and 19 manufacturing plants, where it makes some of the products sold in its stores.

Joe Albertson entered the grocery business while attending the College of Idaho. He started working as a clerk for the Safeway grocery chain and eventually supervised more than a dozen stores. In 1939, he left Safeway to start his own business, partnering with L.S. Skaggs, a former Safeway executive, and Tom Cuthbert, Skaggs’s accountant.

Open full sized image

The first Albertsons store advertised ample parking and separate departments when it opened in 1939.

© The Idaho Statesman/Newspapers.com

The first Albertsons store opened in Boise on July 21, 1939. At 10,000 square feet, it was unusually large for a grocery store at the time and included separate produce, meat and fish, and bakery departments, as well as an ice cream shop. The store employed nearly 30 workers and generated more than $170,000 in sales during its first year.

Albertsons continued growing during and after World War II. In 1945, Albertsons Corporation was formed, with six supermarkets and annual sales approaching $3 million. As suburban shopping centers spread during the 1950s, Albertsons became a familiar tenant alongside other retailers. It also experimented with larger stores that combined groceries and drugstore products. In 1951, Albertsons opened a 60,000-square-foot store that sold both groceries and drugstore products. By the middle of the decade, the company had expanded into Idaho, Oregon, Utah, and Washington.

In 1957, Albertsons expanded its drugstore business by acquiring Sugarhouse Drug in Salt Lake City and adding pharmacies to more of its grocery stores. Two years later, Albertsons became a publicly traded company.

Albertsons expanded rapidly during the 1960s. The company opened its 100th store in 1963 and entered Southern California the following year by acquiring a 14-store chain. By the end of the decade, Albertsons operated more than 200 stores in nine states.

In 1969, Albertsons formed a partnership with Skaggs Companies, a drugstore business with roots in the same Safeway organization where Joe Albertson had worked. The companies combined Albertsons’ grocery operations with Skaggs’s drugstore business to develop larger stores that sold food and pharmacy products under one roof. The partnership ended in 1977, when the companies divided the stores they jointly owned.

Open full sized image

Joe Albertson, pictured in 1980, built his namesake grocery business into a multistate chain.

© Denver Post/Getty Images

As the chain grew, Albertsons also built a distribution system to supply its stores. It bought a Boise wholesaler in 1972 and opened large distribution facilities in California and Utah during the decade. Sales exceeded $1 billion for the first time in 1975, and by the end of the 1970s Albertsons operated 365 stores.

Expansion continued during the 1980s as Albertsons opened larger stores with pharmacies, bakeries, delicatessens, and other departments intended to create a one-stop destination for shoppers. The company also introduced barcode scanners at checkouts and continued expanding its distribution network. By the end of the decade, Albertsons had 523 stores in 17 states, supported by seven distribution centers.

Albertsons continued to grow during the 1990s by opening stores and buying other grocery chains. In 1992, it acquired 74 Jewel-Osco combination food-and-drug stores in Arkansas, Florida, Oklahoma, and Texas. By early 1994, Albertsons operated 676 stores in 19 states and had annual sales of more than $11 billion.

Its biggest expansion came with the acquisition of American Stores Company, the parent of the ACME, Jewel, Lucky, Osco Drug, and Sav-on chains. When the deal was struck in 1998, the companies expected the combination to have more than 2,470 stores in 37 states and annual sales of about $36 billion. The acquisition also brought Albertsons into the stand-alone drugstore business on a much larger scale.

The buyout reflected a broader wave of consolidation in the grocery industry as large chains sought greater purchasing power and faced growing competition from Walmart (WMT) and other discount retailers. Regulatory approval required substantial divestitures. In 1999, the Federal Trade Commission required Albertsons and American Stores to sell 144 supermarkets and five supermarket sites in California, Nevada, and New Mexico because of concerns that the combination would reduce competition. At the time, it was the largest retail divestiture required by the FTC.

The bigger company soon faced its own pressures. Albertsons began a restructuring in 2001 that included closing 165 underperforming stores, and in 2002 it exited markets in Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee, and Houston and San Antonio, Texas, closing or selling 95 stores. Competition from supercenters, club stores, and low-price retailers continued to squeeze the business.

By early 2006, Albertsons operated 2,471 stores in 37 states under names including Albertsons, ACME, Jewel-Osco, Osco Drug, Sav-on, Shaw’s, and Star Market. That year, Albertsons was sold for $17.4 billion and broken up among several buyers.

Supervalu acquired more than 1,100 stores operating under the Albertsons, ACME, Jewel-Osco, Shaw’s, and other names. CVS acquired about 700 stand-alone Sav-on and Osco Drug stores. An investor group led by Cerberus Capital Management, a private equity firm, acquired more than 600 Albertsons stores in several western and southern states.

The Cerberus-owned business continued as Albertsons LLC, a privately held company, while Supervalu operated the other major portion of the former Albertsons supermarket business. The 2006 breakup therefore left stores carrying the Albertsons name under separate ownership. The two supermarket businesses remained divided until 2013.

In 2013, the Cerberus-led investor group bought the Albertsons, ACME, Jewel-Osco, Shaw’s, and Star Market businesses from Supervalu in a $3.3 billion deal. The transaction reunited the two major supermarket businesses that had been separated in the 2006 breakup, bringing stores carrying the Albertsons name back under the same ownership.

Albertsons expanded again later that year by acquiring United Supermarkets, a Texas-based grocery chain. An even larger deal followed. In 2014, Albertsons agreed to acquire Safeway, the grocery chain where Joe Albertson had begun his career decades earlier. The $9.4 billion transaction was completed in January 2015 and added Safeway, Vons, Pavilions, and other regional chains to the company. Federal regulators required the companies to sell 168 stores to address concerns about reduced competition in eight western states. The combination created a grocery retailer with more than 2,200 stores and greatly expanded Albertsons’ presence in the western U.S.

Following the Safeway acquisition, Albertsons sought to return to the public markets. The company filed for an initial public offering in 2015 but ultimately withdrew the plan.

Albertsons continued looking for ways to expand. In 2017, it acquired Plated, a meal-kit company, but phased out the business two years later as it put greater emphasis on its private label products. In 2018, Albertsons agreed to merge with the drugstore chain Rite Aid in a deal valued at $24 billion. The companies abandoned the transaction after opposition from Rite Aid shareholders.

In April 2019, Vivek Sankaran, CEO of PepsiCo Foods North America, became Albertsons’ CEO.

Albertsons finally went public in June 2020, selling shares at $16 each and beginning trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol ACI. The offering came during the COVID-19 pandemic, when grocery sales had risen sharply as consumers ate more meals at home and increasingly ordered groceries online.

In October 2022, Albertsons agreed to be acquired by Kroger in a deal valued at $24.6 billion. The combination would have created the largest supermarket merger in U.S. history and brought nearly 5,000 stores under one company. Kroger and Albertsons argued that greater scale would help them lower prices and compete with Walmart, Costco, Amazon, and other large retailers.

Open full sized image

Kroger sought to acquire rival Albertsons for $24.6 billion, but federal and state challenges blocked the deal.

© Scott Habermann/stock.adobe.com

The proposed merger faced opposition from the Federal Trade Commission and several states, which argued that reducing competition between Kroger and Albertsons could lead to higher grocery prices and weaken workers’ bargaining power. To address antitrust concerns, the companies agreed to sell 579 stores, along with distribution centers and other assets, to C&S Wholesale Grocers.

In December 2024, a federal judge blocked the merger, finding that the proposed sale to C&S wouldn’t adequately replace the competition lost by combining Kroger and Albertsons. A Washington state judge separately blocked the transaction under that state’s consumer protection law.

Albertsons sued Kroger after the deal collapsed, accusing the company of failing to take the steps necessary to win regulatory approval. Kroger denied the allegations and accused Albertsons of breaching the merger agreement.

After the Kroger merger collapsed, Albertsons remained an independent public company. It increased its dividend and began buying back shares, repurchasing nearly $1.5 billion of its stock during fiscal 2025.

In 2025, longtime Albertsons executive Susan Morris succeeded Sankaran as CEO after he had spent more than six years in the role. In September 2026, Albertsons named former eBay (EBAY) and Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman executive chair, a newly created position in which she advises Morris and other senior executives on operations and long-term strategy.