Harris Teeter Celebrates Local Products with HT Home Town Campaign

To better connect its customers with local brand makers, Harris Teeter has launched a new HT Home Town program, which identifies brands that have local connections to various markets within the Harris Teeter footprint.

Featured brands include well-recognized products such as Cheerwine, Krispy Kreme, Duke’s Mayonnaise and Mt. Olive, as well as other brands that shoppers may not either know or recognize as local, such as Counter Culture coffee, Tenda-Bake Pancake mixes, Margaret Holmes canned vegetables and The New Primal jerky.

The new program will “highlight the extensive number of locally produced products available to our valued shoppers on a regular basis,” said Danna Robinson, communication manager for the Matthews, N.C.-based Harris Teeter. “Our end goal is to feature the various ways Harris Teeter supports local communities, not only through important community service initiatives, but also through the products our buyers carefully select for each department.”

The year-long, multi-channel initiative is more than a shopper marketing program, and also includes traditional media like out-of-home, radio, print and FSIs and digital advertising, including Pandora and social networks. In-store execution, meanwhile, includes promotional displays, custom Home Town point-of-sale (POS) materials, flysheets, Home Town identification within weekly eVIC alerts and brand story inclusions within Dish, Harris Teeter’s in-store magazine. 

The campaign further underscores Harris Teeter’s passion for preserving its hometown spirit, and extending that pledge into new communities as the chain continues to expand, including 5.8 million pounds of food donated to local food banks in 2016, and more than $25 million contributed to local schools through its Together in Education program since its 1998 creation.

Each brand featured in Home Town has its own unique story, including Texas Pete hot sauce, which isn’t from Texas, but from Winston-Salem, NC. House-Autry Mills is another Home Town brand that has been a part of traditional Southern flavor for more than 200 years. Other featured Home Town brands are committed to efforts that will preserve the environment, such as Sabra, which produces its hummus and spreads from its Gold LEED-certified facility in Richmond, Va., and which also provides the local community with an, on-site organic garden and education in cooking and nutrition. Eight O’Clock Coffee’s manufacturing team in Landover, Md., conducts sustainability initiatives such as a coffee composting program, eliminating more than 350,000 lbs. of coffee from local landfills. Instead, the compost is put to good use at local farms and colleges to grow produce for the community.

HT Home Town was the brainchild of Charlotte-based brand development firm, Concentric, which first recognized that Harris Teeter shoppers were not making the local connection. "As more and more grocers spread their footprint across each other's markets, it's important to recognize the few long-standing commitments of a truly ‘local’ brand,” said Bob Shaw, president of Concentric. “Harris Teeter and the 33 brands in its Home Town program are part of the fabric of our area and Concentric is proud to bring their interconnected stories to life.” 

A wholly-owned subsidiary of The Kroger Co., Harris Teeter employs approximately 30,000 associates and operates stores in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Maryland, Delaware, Florida and the District of Columbia.