Kroger is one of the few large retailers that mandates neither a VAN nor an EDI provider, and says a third party EDI service is not required at all. What it does require is grocery-shaped paperwork: UCS 875 and 880 alongside X12, an 824 application advice, and store destination quantities inside the Fred Meyer purchase order. AIMS360 reads the SDQ split straight into store level demand.
Kroger is unusual among large retailers: it does not require a specific VAN or EDI provider, and it does not require you to buy a third party EDI service at all. What it does require is grocery-shaped paperwork that surprises apparel vendors, starting with store distribution quantities inside the purchase order. Fred Meyer is the banner carrying apparel, footwear and home, so it is usually the one a consumer brand sells.
Kroger requires most suppliers to accept purchase orders as an 850 or an 875, to accept 824 application advices, and to send invoices as an 810 or an 880. Kroger returns 997 functional acknowledgments within 24 hours.
Onboarding starts with a New Partner Set-up Form, and Kroger states that accepting a purchase order constitutes consent to establish an EDI relationship. Testing requirements are set by division rather than centrally.
The pairs are the part apparel vendors trip on. The 875 grocery products purchase order and the 880 grocery products invoice are UCS transaction sets, a separate standard from the X12 850 and 810 most fashion retailers use. Which pair applies depends on the division and the commodity, and it is set during onboarding rather than chosen by you. The 824 application advice is the other surprise: Macy's and URBN do not publish one at all, so a brand arriving from department store EDI has usually never had to process one.
Kroger's EDI program spans the supermarket banners and the multi-department ones under a single portal, with division-specific testing on top. Named on Kroger's own EDI site are Kroger, King Soopers, Fry's Food and Drug, Dillon Stores, Fred Meyer, Smith's Food and Drug and Harris Teeter, alongside roughly eighteen further regional divisions.
For a consumer brand the one that matters is usually Fred Meyer. It is the multi-department banner, carrying apparel, footwear, jewelry, home and general merchandise alongside grocery, which makes it the Kroger division that buys the kind of product AIMS360 customers make. The supermarket divisions buy food, and a brand selling into those is normally in wellness, supplements, household or beauty rather than apparel.
Because testing is division-specific, being live with one division does not make you live with another. Plan each as its own onboarding, and expect the common documents, purchase orders, invoices and application advices, to carry across while the division-specific requirements do not.
Taken from the Fred Meyer Group requirements published on Kroger's EDI portal.
| 850 with SDQ | Ability to receive purchase orders containing SDQ, store destination quantity, segments. One purchase order carries the split across many stores. |
| 856 ASN | Sent in Shipment, Order, Pack and Item hierarchy, and sent before you schedule an unloading appointment at the distribution center. |
| Second truck ASN | Where more than one truckload is needed to ship the purchase order complete, an ASN for the additional trucks within 24 hours of the first. |
| 810 Invoice | Summarizes all items shipped on the purchase order. |
| 997 Acknowledgment | Sent within 24 hours of the purchase order being sent. |
| GS1-128 carton labels | Every carton labelled to Kroger requirements. Cartons are scanned at receiving and matched against the ASN. |
| UPC and SKU | Valid UPC and SKU numbers identifying every product in the 856 and the 810. |
Two of those deserve attention because they are timing rules rather than format rules, and timing rules are the ones that get missed by a process rather than by a mapping error.
At most retailers a late ASN is a compliance failure after the fact. At Fred Meyer the ASN comes before you book the unload slot, so a missing one does not produce a chargeback, it produces a truck with nowhere to go. That makes ASN generation part of the shipping process rather than an end of day task.
Receiving scans the GS1-128 barcode and matches cartons shipped against the ASN. The label and the ASN therefore have to come from the same shipment record. If cartons are labelled in one system and the ASN is built in another, the mismatch shows up at the dock rather than in a report.
An SDQ segment carries store destination quantities. Instead of one purchase order per store, Fred Meyer can send a single purchase order that says which stores get how many of what, and expects you to break it out.
If your system treats a purchase order as a single ship-to, an SDQ order has to be split by hand into store-level shipments before anything can be picked, and every one of those hand splits is a chance to send the wrong quantity to the wrong door. On an apparel order with a size curve behind it, the arithmetic multiplies: stores by styles by colors by sizes.
AIMS360 reads the SDQ and creates the store-level demand directly from the purchase order, so picking, carton labelling and the ASN all inherit the split rather than reconstructing it. Prepacks, ratios and size curves come through the same way, which is what makes a multi-store Fred Meyer order behave like one order instead of forty.
Kroger's EDI portal states plainly that Kroger does not require the use of a specific VAN or EDI provider to trade EDI documents. Kroger trades directly through IBM Sterling Commerce, and a supplier on a different VAN needs that provider to establish interconnection.
Kroger also states that a third party EDI provider is not required at all, and that suppliers may develop EDI in house.
That is worth saying out loud because it is not the norm. Plenty of large retailers name the network their vendors must certify over, and when they do, every vendor arrives the same way whatever system they run. URBN names SPS Commerce. Macy's names OpenText as preferred for bulk. Those are the retailer's choices, not limits imposed by anyone's ERP.
Kroger leaves it open, which means the decision is genuinely yours, and the question becomes what you actually want to own. AIMS360 develops and owns its EDI engine and runs it inside the consumer brands ERP, so the maps, the X12 generation and the support all sit with one team and one platform rather than a translator subscription beside your inventory system.
Kroger Ship, Kroger's direct to consumer shipping business, integrated a third party marketplace powered by Mirakl. That is a third route into Kroger alongside bulk wholesale and dropship, and it is a different commercial deal again.
On a marketplace you keep ownership of the goods, set your own retail price and pay a commission on the sale, rather than the retailer buying at wholesale cost. Sellers apply and are approved rather than being bought by a buyer, and on most marketplace programs the seller handles returns. See Mirakl marketplace integration for how the model compares to wholesale and dropship.
The operational catch is the same everywhere: bulk purchase orders, dropship and a marketplace listing all draw units from one pool of stock on three different cadences, and none of them reserves inventory on the others' behalf. Publish a number you cannot honor on a marketplace and the correction is a cancellation against your seller scorecard.
AIMS360 is a consumer brands ERP with EDI built into it rather than bolted beside it. The purchase order lands in order management, inventory allocates, the warehouse picks and labels, and the ASN and invoice are generated from the same records that did the work.
The store split inside the purchase order becomes real allocations rather than a spreadsheet exercise, with prepacks, ratios and size curves carried through to picking.
GS1-128 carton labels and the 856 come off the same shipment, which is what makes the dock scan match. The ASN transmits at shipment close, ahead of booking the unload appointment.
AIMS360 writes and owns the maps and generates the X12 in house, and connects through whichever route Kroger approves for your account. No AS2 dependency, because Kroger does not support it.
Bulk, dropship, marketplace and your own ecommerce all read the same available to sell figure, with allocation rules deciding between them on purpose rather than by whoever picks first.
Kroger requires most suppliers to accept purchase orders as an 850 or an 875, to accept 824 application advices, and to send invoices as an 810 or an 880. Kroger sends 997 functional acknowledgments within 24 hours. Which pair applies to you, the X12 850 and 810 or the UCS grocery 875 and 880, depends on the division and the commodity and is set during onboarding. Individual divisions add their own requirements on top: Fred Meyer, for example, also requires an 856 ASN and GS1-128 carton labels.
No. Kroger's EDI portal states that Kroger does not require the use of a specific VAN or EDI provider, and that a third party EDI provider is not required at all, with suppliers free to develop EDI in house. That is different from retailers such as URBN, which names SPS Commerce as the network its vendors certify over. Kroger trades directly through IBM Sterling Commerce, and a supplier on a different VAN needs that provider to establish interconnection.
No. Kroger states that it does not currently support EDI-INT, AS1 or AS2, and that VANs remain its preferred method of exchanging documents. If your current setup assumes an AS2 connection because another retailer uses one, that assumption does not carry across to Kroger. Plan the connection route during onboarding rather than after.
SDQ stands for store destination quantity. It lets a single purchase order carry the split across many stores, saying which store gets how many of which item, rather than sending one purchase order per store. Fred Meyer requires the ability to receive purchase orders containing SDQ segments. If your system treats a purchase order as a single ship-to, that split has to be done by hand before anything can be picked, which on an apparel order with a size curve behind it is a lot of arithmetic and a lot of opportunities to send the wrong quantity to the wrong door.
Before you schedule an unloading appointment at the distribution center. That is a meaningful difference from retailers where a late ASN is a compliance failure recorded after the fact: at Fred Meyer a missing ASN means you cannot book the slot. Where more than one truckload is needed to ship a purchase order complete, an ASN for the additional trucks is required within 24 hours of the first. The ASN itself is sent in Shipment, Order, Pack and Item hierarchy.
Fred Meyer. It is the multi-department banner, carrying apparel, footwear, jewelry, home and general merchandise alongside grocery, which makes it the Kroger division most consumer brands sell into. The supermarket divisions such as King Soopers, Fry's, Dillons, Smith's and Harris Teeter buy food, so a brand selling into those is typically in wellness, supplements, household or beauty rather than apparel.
Roughly 24, including Kroger, King Soopers, Fry's Food and Drug, Dillon Stores, Fred Meyer, Smith's Food and Drug and Harris Teeter, plus further regional divisions. One setup does not automatically cover them all: testing requirements are specific to each division, though the common documents, purchase orders, invoices and application advices, have no division-specific testing. Plan each division as its own onboarding.
New suppliers submit a New Partner Set-up Form and review the EDI compliance requirements on Kroger's EDI portal. Kroger contacts vendors when it is ready to begin the connection, based on business requirements, and states that acceptance of a purchase order constitutes consent to establish an EDI relationship. In practice a buyer relationship comes first and the EDI setup follows it.
An 824 reports back that a document you sent was received but had a data problem, which is a step beyond a 997 confirming it arrived and parsed. Kroger requires most suppliers to be able to accept them. It catches brands out because several large fashion retailers, Macy's and URBN among them, publish no 824 at all, so a team arriving from department store EDI has often never had to process one. Build a place for it to land rather than discovering it in a mailbox nobody reads.
Yes. Kroger Ship, Kroger's direct to consumer shipping business, integrated a third party marketplace powered by Mirakl. It is a different commercial relationship from wholesale: you keep ownership of the goods, set your own retail price and pay a commission on the sale, and on most marketplace programs the seller handles returns. Being a wholesale vendor does not put you on it and being on it does not make you a wholesale vendor.
Yes, and the reason to want that is inventory rather than convenience. A Fred Meyer purchase order, a Macy's bulk order, a dropship program and a marketplace listing all draw units from the same physical stock. In AIMS360 they read one available to sell figure, with allocation rules deciding between them deliberately. The document sets differ by retailer, which is what the maps are for, but the stock record behind them does not have to.
No, and treating it as one is the most common mistake. Kroger is a grocery company and its EDI reflects that: UCS transaction sets alongside X12, store distribution quantities inside the purchase order, an 824 application advice, no AS2, and testing set by division rather than centrally. The GS1-128 carton label and the ASN discipline will feel familiar. The order structure and the standard will not.
Store distribution quantities, GS1-128 labels, ASNs ahead of the appointment and invoices that reconcile, generated from the same records that ran the shipment. On an EDI engine AIMS360 builds and supports.
