Kroger copies small business - then steals their photos to promote it

Kroger has come under fire for stealing promotional photos from The Peach Truck, a family-owned business that delivers fresh Georgia peaches to people's homes. Stephen Rose, a Georgia native, has been selling peaches for 12 years after being disappointed with the quality of peaches at grocery stores in Nashville.

Then two weeks ago, Kroger announced its own service to sell Georgia peaches from brightly colored trucks. Astonishingly, Rose discovered Kroger - the biggest supermarket operator in America - had used images from his company's Instagram , after he got a a Google Alert.

One blatant example Rose pointed to was an image of one of his employees holding a box of peaches and standing in front of a company truck. The truck, the peach boxes and even the employee's shirt was edited to have Kroger coloring and logos. 'I was shocked at the image they used,' Rose said in a TikTok video that's gotten nearly a million views. 'I recognize the person in the photo. That's our team member Michael...who sold peaches for The Peach Truck.'

'That is the same image, they just edited the photo to change the branding,' Rose added. Rose also claimed Kroger jacked another photo from one of The Peach Truck's pit stops in 2020. 'Kroger, you're a multibillion, yes billion with a "b", dollar corporation. Do you really need to take our marketing and re-edit it on top of taking our business model?'

This controversy comes as Kroger announced Thursday that it beat Wall Street's revenue and profit expectations, while also having an 5.1 percent increase in customer visits to its stores. Rose's video received thousands of supportive comments with people telling him to sue or proclaiming they'd stop shopping at Kroger entirely. 'Kroger boycott confirmed,' one person wrote.

Kroger responded to the backlash by taking down the offending photos and apologizing to The Peach Truck. 'We were embarrassed to learn about this. You could say we have peach on our face! While these images were not approved to be shared as part of our marketing campaign, they should never have been created in the first place,' a Kroger spokesperson said in a statement acquired by KPLC . 'We have removed the images from our system. We apologize to The Peach Truck and wish them nothing but success.'

'How do you learn about something you did?' he said in a subsequent video . 'It was an intentional copy of our brand, our model, the way we do things.'

Kroger won't be doing home delivery like The Peach Truck but will stock stores in Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky and Virginia with 12-pound crates of Georgia peaches priced at $20 each.

Any of Kroger's Instagram posts that have to do with its limited time peach sales have been flooded with comments attacking the company for infringing on The Peach Truck's copyright. 

The Peach Truck, which Rose runs with his wife Jessica, has exploded in popularity in recent years, with people all over the country clamoring to get their hands on his peaches.

Rose's company delivers to 25 states and customers have the option to get their peaches delivered straight to their door or arrange a local pickup directly from one of its bright orange trucks.

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