Kroger Co

Anne Marie Sablock said she regularly drives past an Albertsons, a Whole Foods Market and several other supermarkets to shop at the Ralphs on Pacific Coast Highway in Long Beach. The Seal Beach mother of two teens is price sensitive and likes a broad selection of goods. She buys house brands and private label products. "I shop here because there is more choice and better prices," Sablock said as she dropped a box of Ralphs brand instant oatmeal into her cart last week.

Kroger Co.'s quarterly profit tumbled 16% and its sales rose a slim 2% as it battled rising costs and tougher grocery competition. The fiscal fourth-quarter results Tuesday still beat Wall Street estimates, but the 2008 forecast from the nation's largest traditional grocery store chain fell short of analysts' expectations. Cincinnati-based Kroger, operator of Ralphs and Food 4 Less, said it earned $322.9 million, or 48 cents a share, for the quarter ended Feb. 2, down from $384.

An executive of the Kroger Co. supermarket chain and three former managers with its Southern California subsidiary Ralphs pleaded not guilty Monday to federal labor fraud charges linked to the 2003-04 supermarket strike and lockout. A 23-count indictment filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles accuses the defendants of conspiring to rehire locked-out workers using fake Social Security numbers and identification during the strike. A trial date of Dec.

Kroger Co. said Tuesday that its fourth-quarter profit rose 36% as the nation's largest traditional grocer continued to record impressive gains. Earnings rose to $384.8 million, or 54 cents a share, for the quarter that ended Dec. 31 from $282.1 million, or 39 cents, a year earlier. Revenue grew 15% to $16.86 billion. Excluding a gain of 3 cents a share from adjusting certain deferred tax balances, the company earned 51 cents a share in the latest period.

Kroger Co., the nation's largest traditional grocery company and operator of the Ralphs chain in Southern California, is marketing a new milk brand for its cholesterol-reducing potential. The product, under Kroger's Active Lifestyle brand, is billed as the first national launch of a cholesterol-cutting milk. It adds to Kroger's expanding lines for consumers of health-conscious and natural or organic foods and the in-house brands that the company sees as an important part of its profit strategy.

One of the nation's largest retail grocery chains has announced plans to switch to milk free of synthetic hormones. The announcement from Kroger Co. is a blow to Monsanto Co., which already had been reducing inventory of its milk production-boosting hormone as Starbucks Coffee Co. and other retailers rejected it. Monsanto, based in suburban St. Louis, markets the hormone rBST, or recombinant bovine somatotropin, under the brand name Posilac.

Weekend grocery shopping list: Milk, on sale at four half-gallons for $5. Cookies, two packages-for-one at $3.99. New $200,000 fixed-rate mortgage, 30 years at 6.2%. Kroger Co., the nation's largest traditional grocery chain, has been quietly but steadily expanding its financial services business since beginning with a Kroger credit card three years ago.

cincinnati -- Kroger Co. said Tuesday that its profit rose 28% in its fiscal second quarter, topping analyst expectations. The nation's largest traditional grocery chain boosted its outlook for the year. Its shares rose 7.7%. The supermarket operator said it earned $267.3 million, or 38 cents a share, for the three months ended Aug. 18, up from $209 million, or 29 cents, a year earlier. Revenue rose 7% to $16.14 billion from $15.14 billion in the year-earlier quarter.

Kroger Co., the biggest U.S. grocery chain, said union employees at its Food 4 Less unit in Southern California ratified a contract. The four-year contract, effective immediately, covers more than 5,700 employees represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers, Cincinnati-based Kroger said. Southern California unions in July ratified contracts at Kroger's Ralphs, Supervalu Inc.'s Albertsons and Safeway Inc.'

Two large-scale warehouse leases valued at a total of almost $300 million have been signed in Southern California as retailers continue to set up distribution centers in enormous buildings, many of them in the Inland Empire. The most recent deals involve new facilities for appliance manufacturer Whirlpool Corp. in Riverside County and grocer Kroger Co., owner of Ralphs and Food 4 Less, in Paramount.