Associated Wholesale Grocers Bags Record Revenues

Associated Wholesale Grocers, the Kansas City region’s second-largest private company, is closing the gap on the largest: At its annual shareholders meeting today, the grocery cooperative announced that it had posted record revenues for 2016, at $9.18 billon. That’s still $4.2 billion shy of taking over bragging rights as the biggest company in the region, but narrows the gap with Dairy Farmers of America by nearly $700 million in just one year.

The cooperative, celebrating its 90th year in business in 2017, announced its earnings with a news release that also took a look back at the past half-century’s performance. During that span, AWG had annual sales growth of 8.7 percent.  AWG is a retailer-owned cooperative of 3,800 member stores, providing groceries, frozen foods, dairy and refrigerated products, meat, produce and other products that, combined, generated more than $20 billion in sales for those retail outlets.