Shoppers universally say they love loyalty programs, so every grocer is right to provide it.
But as the competition for market share intensifies across America, grocers face a challenge. Consumers have been handed a growing list of choices — more banners and more channels than ever before — and they’ve responded by cross-shopping. Upside data shows that more than 90 percent of grocery shoppers spread their grocery trips across banners, joining multiple loyalty programs in the process.
Jeff Snyder is the director of loyalty and personalization for The Fresh Market (TFM), the No. 1 Best Grocery Store in America according to USA Today’s 10Best Reader’s Choice Awards. He recently led efforts to reimagine the grocer’s loyalty program, TFM Rewards!, with greater focus on personalized value.
In this Q&A, Jeff explains why TFM decided to revisit its digital experience and how it’s helping them win more trips.
Q: The Fresh Market rebuilt its digital experience from the ground up. Tell us more about what’s new.
Well, to start, our guests can engage with us online in a brand-new way. Along with our new loyalty program, TFM Rewards!, we also launched our first TFM mobile app. That’s all about ease. It’s now easier to find offers you’re interested in and easier to show your TFM Rewards! membership at checkout. We want to reduce friction for our guests as much as we can.
As for TFM Rewards! itself, personalization has been a big focus of the relaunch. Members now get curated offers for their tastes, so they can enjoy savings on the flavors they love most.
We’re also starting to host in-store tasting events that are open to all guests, but supported with exclusive perks to members. Those events help us to bridge our award-winning in-store experience and impeccable hospitality with this new digital experience that we’re really proud of. And when you put the two of them together, we like to think we’re providing our guests with the very best, no matter how they shop with us.
Q. Inflation may be nowhere near its 2022 highs. But it’s trending upward again, and consumers are exhibiting intense “value-seeking” behaviors. How is this market shift showing up at TFM?
We are operating in an environment of highly fragmented shopping habits. Consumers are visiting multiple retailers and making smaller, more frequent trips. Some are aggressively trading down to private-label alternatives.
Brand loyalty is incredibly soft right now. As a natural and speciality-focused grocer, that macro trend presented us with a vital crossroad. We knew we couldn’t just engage in a price war. Instead, we had to redefine what ‘value’ means. And for the average TFM guest, value is the balance of clean-label quality, impeccable hospitality, programmatic convenience, and affordability.
Q: That definition of value must have shaped your thinking around these digital upgrades.
I’d definitely say so. Economic pressure and consumer responses to that pressure are exactly what accelerated our investments in loyalty and the digital experience.
TFM has a really special in-store experience, and my team prides itself on our continuous quest to extend that over to our digital experiences. Amid all this splintering in shopping behavior, TFM Rewards! is meant to make it easier than ever to shop at The Fresh Market. With deeper emphasis on personalized value, we’re trying to deliver a more complete, satisfying experience that guests want to return to again and again.
Q: What kind of impact have you seen since the official launch of TFM Rewards! and the new app in the spring?
We have two KPIs related to loyalty that we are laser-focused on for 2026, and in just eight weeks, we’ve made some great progress on those.
First is loyalty transaction penetration. Our goal is to increase our penetration rate by 5 percentage points, and since launch, we’ve improved this KPI by 1.5 percentage points. We feel great about this strong start.
The second thing we’re focused on is actively-shopping loyalty members. Our goal is to increase our annual active loyalty shopper base by 200,000 guests. As of May, we have already gained 150,000 active loyalty shoppers.
We’re lucky to have some other tools at our disposal that help increase the effectiveness of our loyalty program. One of them is Upside. TFM Rewards! is fantastic for deepening relationships with our existing core shoppers. Upside is helping us solve a completely different puzzle: incremental customer acquisition. Upside uses personalized cash-back offers to motivate guests who aren’t currently shopping with us — or maybe someone who has TFM in their rotation of stores — to try us out.
From there, all the other things we do to positively impact the guest experience, like our high-quality selection, our beautiful stores, our knowledgeable and service-oriented team members, and TFM Rewards!, increase our chances of attracting new guests and winning them over.
What’s most impactful for us is that Upside operates entirely on proven, incremental sales. We aren’t cannibalizing our standard margins or subsidizing shoppers who were going to visit anyway. It’s a margin-positive addition to our toolkit.
Q: What advice would you give to grocery teams thinking about how to get more impact from their loyalty program?
Loyalty programming is a really powerful tool. But I think it’s important to keep in mind that all of our competitors have their own programs, as well. There’s a ton of noise in this industry, and just because consumers are signing up for your program doesn’t mean that they’re not signing up for a couple others.
My advice to grocers would be to think about what you can offer that your competitors can’t. In a space like this, that edge is everything. Find something that differentiates you, that makes your program and your store an irreplaceable part of the guest’s routine, and anchor around that.
I think the most effective way to find that edge is by listening to your guests and the team members that interact with them regularly. When you do, you’ll uncover insights you may not have otherwise obtained from a central office.
Particularly in a crowded market, those conversations allow you to meet the guest where they are, building deep, long-lasting loyalty.
