*By Amanda Weston*
Grocery chain Kroger launched a new delivery service Wednesday to compete with industry giants Amazon and Walmart.
[Kroger Ship](https://ship.kroger.com/) offers more than 50,000 products to online shoppers in Cincinnati, Houston, Louisville, and Nashville. The chain aims to lure new customers with curated options, free shipping for orders over $35, and discounts.
Online shopping accounts for about 2 percent of the American food-and-beverage market, but it's rapidly expanding.
"When you look at all these new channels in the industry, they are growing extremely, extremely fast," Yael Cosset, Kroger's chief digital officer, said Thursday in an interview with Cheddar.
This isn't Kroger's first attempt at online delivery. The grocery chain has offered delivery service from almost half its 2,800 stories through Instacart.
The new service represents the chain's ambition to make shopping easier for its customers ー and help keep its brick and mortar businesses stable.
"The direct interaction with some of the fresh assortment ー produce, meat, seafood, cheese ー experiential engagement is still very important to them," he said. "They do, however, still want the convenience and simplicity that a digital engagement can offer."
Kroger is going up against Amazon, a formidable competitor, [which sold](https://www.wsj.com/articles/kroger-to-launch-grocery-delivery-service-1533117720) about $650 million worth of food items in the second quarter, up 40 percent from 2017.
As for Kroger Ship's future, Cosset said digital partnerships will also play a major role in growth.
For more on this story, [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/kroger-introduces-kroger-ship-delivery-service).
Surprise! Today is officially a federal holiday after President Biden signed the Juneteenth proclamation into law. Plus, Obamacare beats another court challenge, Victoria's Secret ditches the angels and the GOAT of potato chips.
Scientists have found a dead Asian giant hornet north of Seattle, the first so-called murder hornet discovered in the country this year.
A huge diamond weighing more than 1,000 carats, which could be the third-largest mined in history, has been discovered in the southern African country of Botswana.
The Supreme Court has ruled that the city of Philadelphia violated the Constitution by limiting its relationship with a Catholic foster care agency over that group's refusal to certify same-sex couples as foster parents.
President Joe Biden has signed legislation Thursday establishing a new federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery, saying he believes it will go down as one of the greatest honors he has as president.
The headlines out of the Biden-Putin summit, the first new federal holiday in 40 years, the Fed's economic outlook, podcasts coming to Facebook and more.
How much do you think cops make? A few hundred thousand per year? It sounds extreme, but this is the case in many cities across the country thanks to a slew of financial perks in ironclad union contracts.
A Portuguese teenager has found a message in a bottle that traveled at least 2,400 miles from a Vermont teenager.
Just 40 years ago, New York City's Times Square was a very different place: crime-ridden and adult theaters as the main source of entertainment. Cheddar explains how it went from this to one of the top tourist attractions in the world.
Jill and Carlo preview the big sit-down in Geneva today, the momentous reopenings in California and New York, what we're spending our money on post-COVID and more.
