Walgreen to Sell Fresh Foods and Prepared Meals

Walgreen may even have private-label food products made for its own brand by some of the larger prepared food brand names. Walgreen's competitive advantage here is that it is generally easy to get in and out of its stores and it has a store count of 7,000 throughout the U.S. The fare it is thinking about? Salads, cut fruits, pizzas and sandwiches. In addition to adding beer and wine to its shelves, Walgreens will have the distinction of being a drugstore that is morphing into a mini mega-retailer with a store count that dwarfs Walmart.

Will customers warm to the idea of buying food at the same place drugs and foot creams are in abundance? Hard to say, but the sheer amount of locations Walgreens has should make even a pilot of this strategy successful. Even "drive-by-shopping" by those picking up prescriptions and aspirin will give food sales at Walgreens a boost. Bryan Pugh, VP of merchandising at Walgreens, put it this way: "we won't get our customer every day on the way home, but if we could get 50 percent of our customers one day a week on the way home, that would do wonders for our sales." Indeed.