Target reveals new in-house food brand

Company to replace Archer Farms, Simply Balanced brands.

MINNEAPOLIS — Target is making its biggest play in grocery in years with the launch of a new flagship private-label food brand that will completely replace Target’s Archer Farms and Simply Balanced lines and will partially swap out Market Pantry.

The new line, Good & Gather, will be Target’s largest in-house brand across the entire store with more than 2,000 products to be rolled out over the next 18 months. It’s expected to become a multi-billion dollar brand and is the latest example of the Minneapolis retailer leaning into developing and selling its own brands in order to offer more items consumers can’t find anywhere else.

“We did a ton of guest research,” said Stephanie Lundquist, who stepped into a newly-created role of president of food and beverage in January. “One of the things we heard is that they’re time starved, so they want ease and convenience. They don’t want to have to worry if there are ingredients or additives they don’t want. But above all else, they want great taste at an affordable price.”

With those guiding principles in mind, Target stepped up the rigor of its taste testing and hired more food experts and scientists to help develop the products. It also worked out of a new test kitchen at its Nicollet Mall headquarters.

The new line, which has been under development for a couple of years, will be free of artificial flavors and sweeteners, synthetic colors and high-fructose corn syrup. Some of the products will be similar to their Archer Farms and Simply Balanced counterparts with some upgrades. For example, the lime flavor in the Simply Balanced sparkling water was reformulated to taste better in the Good & Gather version.

Others products are completely new and are aimed at better addressing the changing tastes of today’s consumers with items such as avocado toast salad mix (with the mini-toasts serving as croutons) and beet hummus.

“We have some tried and true products within our owned brand portfolio that our guests absolutely love,” said Lundquist. “But we also saw an opportunity to make it a lot easier for them to shop our food and beverage area by having a flagship brand and that makes it a lot simpler to know what they’re getting.”

With Good & Gather, Target expects to increase its overall penetration of private-label sales in grocery, signaling that some national brands might get less shelf space in the process.

In the last couple years, Target has launched more than two dozen new private-label brands across apparel, home decor, electronics, and cleaning supplies to help revive its business. In some cases, the new brands have replaced old ones as was the case with A New Day and Wild Fable replacing Mossimo and Merona in women’s clothing. These in-house brands are generally more profitable for Target.

The new food brand is aimed