Kroger hasn’t exactly been doing a whole lotta winning lately in the Grocery Wars. You know… the never-ending battle for America’s grocery dollars where Walmart is the muscle, Costco is the cult leader, and Kroger has been… well, kind of wandering the frozen aisle like it forgot what it came in for.

Since their longtime CEO, Rodney McMullen, mysteriously resigned back in March… under circumstances the company will only describe as a “personal conduct violation” (something juicy we’ll probably never know)... Kroger’s kind of been drifting in the wind. They don’t have a permanent CEO, have a recent failed $24.6B merger with Albertsons, and a stock that’s been irrelevant.

And while the board insists the incident had “no impact on financials, operations, or other associates,” Reddit detectives have filled in the blanks. One guy wrote, “He probably had a DUI. He looks like an alcoholic.” (We’re not saying that’s true. But we are saying that’s exactly what someone on Reddit said.)

Anyway, let’s get to what happened today… Kroger’s stock jumped 8%. Which, for a grocery store stock, is like if the self-checkout machine suddenly said “I love you.” Turns out, Kroger quietly had itself a day.

Even with all the executive conspiracy theories, Kroger rolled up to earnings like it had something to prove… and actually delivered. Adjusted earnings per share came in at $1.49, beating Wall Street’s $1.45 estimate. Same-store sales rose 3.2%, handily topping the 2.3% projection. Revenue was just a tad under expectations at $45.12 billion, but honestly, that didn’t seem to matter. Investors were more focused on what the company raised… specifically, its full-year sales forecast. Kroger now expects identical sales growth in the 2.25% to 3.25% range, up from the previous 2% to 3%.

That bump in confidence sent a signal…  Kroger might still be standing in the shadows of Walmart and Costco, but it hasn’t given up the fight. E-commerce sales jumped 15% year over year, proving they’re still putting effort into the digital cart too. And while they’re closing around 60 underperforming stores, they’re opening 30 new ones (sort of like trimming the dead branches so the tree doesn’t fall over). CFO David Kennerley (who just got the job in April) pretty much said, “Yeah, the economy’s weird, but we’ve got momentum. Will you just look at that stock price go?”

This doesn’t mean Kroger is suddenly going to run laps around Costco’s $1.50 hot dog combo or match Walmart’s super low pricing engine. But they don’t need to. Kroger’s strength has always been in its consistency (if you live in the midwest, you know what I’m talking about). Kroger sells food to people who still eat three times a day and that’s a durable business model if we’ve ever seen one (unless AI starts replacing food).

They’ve got more than 2,700 stores under banners like Fred Meyer, Ralphs, and Harris Teeter. They produce their own private-label goods, which come with fatter margins. Their forward price-to-earnings ratio is under 15. And they’re one of the few grocers that still write shareholders a thank-you note every quarter… in the form of a 2% dividend, which they’ve increased for 19 straight years.

And oh yeah… Warren Buffett owns 50 million shares of Kroger. That’s not nothing… especially when you realize he doesn’t own a single share of Costco or Walmart anymore. In a world where Buffett can have his pick of grocery giants and still says, “Yeah, I’ll take the one with the mysterious CEO exit,” it says something.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News doesn’t hold positions in companies mentioned in the article.