The supermarket conglomerate said on Monday that it hired former Walmart US and Air New Zealand CEO Greg Foran to be the new chief executive, filling a corner office that has been vacant for nearly a year. Foran is the executive whose hands-on style and high standards have revitalized Walmart’s massive grocery business over the past decade. Wall Street clearly liked the appointment: Kroger shares rose 8% on the news.

Kroger is ranked No. 27 of 2025 Fortune 500 list of strong $147 billion in revenue. But the company has been a hot mess lately. Almost a year ago, ex-CEO Rodney McMullen resigned suddenly because of an undisclosed ethical violation related to his personal conduct. Several other top Kroger executives have also left the company, creating a leadership vacuum at a difficult time: Kroger is trying to figure out how to appeal to cash-strapped consumers battered by inflation. Compounding Kroger’s problems is the blocking in 2024 of a $24.6 billion merger with Albertsonswhich it relies on to expand its footprint in the notoriously slow-growing grocery industry.

Enter the Foran. The New Zealander led Walmart’s US business, more than half of which came from grocery, and ran it between 2014 and 2019. Known for his outspokenness, Foran once famously told reporters that most Walmart stores were not up to standard, breach of company culture without appreciating such directness. He pointed to basic but important touches like widening aisles in food departments to make them less cluttered, and adding space for fresh food as part of a broader strategy to improve the selection of produce and meat at the big box store.

On the non-food side, Foran aimed to improve Walmart’s once notoriously uneven customer service by raising wages for hundreds of thousands of workers. He added regional managers for more local control and reintroduced Walmart’s 10-foot-rule, which required employees to greet any shopper within that distance of them (a practice first introduced by the late founder Sam Walton). Foran has also been instrumental in equipping Walmart stores with e-commerce, allowing it to expand Amazon in online grocery delivery especially.

At Air New Zealand, where Foran became CEO in February 2020 just as the pandemic brought the airline’s revenue to $0, the executive of folksy management Style is on display again: He learned the ropes by serving as a flight attendant on a few flights. He left the company in October.

Kroger executives said last year that they wanted a CEO who would bring fresh perspectives, and it’s clear they’ll get that from Foran. True, Kroger’s business is more complicated than Walmart’s in some ways, in part because it owns a number of retail chains, including Fred Meyer and Ralphs. And it has been through a turbulent period in which it has cut nearly 1,000 corporate jobs, merged regional divisions, and closed underperforming stores and e-commerce fulfillment facilities. Kroger did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In 2022, Foran distills his approach to a luck interview. “You first have to decide what kind of culture you want the business to operate in, and you have to be able to reflect that through your actions and behavior,” he said.

Kroger clearly needs a steady hand and a CEO who isn’t afraid to shake up a culture and make big moves, and in Foran, Kroger will get that—if he leads like he did in previous jobs.