Walmart quietly dropped one of the most revealing pieces of brand research of the year. Customers liked the quality of Great Value products. They liked the price. But they “didn’t particularly feel very proud to display it in their home or with their families.” That admission, from Walmart’s own VP of Creative, David Hartman, explains every decision in the brand’s biggest ever packaging overhaul. First full redesign in over a decade. Nearly 10,000 products. Rolling out over 18–24 months, starting with salty snacks. The contents: unchanged. The brief: make people want to be seen with it.
- Great Value sits in 9 out of 10 US households — it’s the largest food and consumables CPG brand in the country
- The new system: cleaner visual hierarchy, consistent nutrition label placement, “a sense of discovery” across thousands of SKUs
- The timing is deliberate: private label sales hit $330 billion in the US in 2025, growing 3× faster than national brands
- Higher-income shoppers ($100k+ households) are now a meaningful Walmart customer — the packaging needed to keep up
- Gen Z is projected to become the most loyal private label shoppers by 2026, per Numerator — they’re the audience the new look is really for
Shame is a brand problem, not a product problem. Walmart didn’t change what was in the box — it changed how people feel about putting the box on the shelf. At massive scale, good design isn’t a luxury. It’s a commercial argument.
