Wakefern outsources ad production, eliminates 79 jobs, adds new roles

Wakefern Food Corp. has started shifting advertising and weekly circular production to an outside agency, a move that will eliminate 79 positions and add 73 new roles, split between 54 internal openings and 19 jobs at Quad.

The Keasbey, New Jersey-based cooperative told employees in an April 28 memo that it was reorganizing its Own Brands, marketing, advertising, sales and e-commerce departments. Wakefern said the changes would take effect May 16 and would refocus customer communications around its eight banners, including ShopRite, while steering internal teams toward “strategic, customer-facing, and sales-building work.” Affected employees were invited to interview for the new roles, and the 54 internal openings were offered only to workers touched by the restructuring.

For Big Lots employees, the clearest signal is not just the headcount shift, but which work is being pushed outward. Ad production and weekly circulars may look like back-office tasks, but in retail they help set the tempo for price changes, feature sets, promotional timing and traffic plans. When that work moves to a specialist like Quad, store teams can end up working with faster turnaround, different approval chains and a more centralized promotional calendar.

Wakefern said Quad is becoming its agency of record, adding 19 jobs tied to the arrangement. The cooperative, which says it is the largest retailer-owned cooperative in the United States, traces its roots to eight grocers who formed the company in 1946. Its banner family now spans ShopRite and other supermarket brands across nine states, which gives the company enough scale to spread support work across internal teams and outside vendors without pulling back from customer-facing marketing entirely.

That balance is the part Big Lots workers should read closely. Wakefern is not abandoning marketing or digital execution; it is sorting the work into what it wants to keep in-house and what it can buy from outside. The internal sales and marketing teams remain in place to support the banners, but the production-heavy functions are being reorganized around agency support and a narrower internal focus.

The move lands in a retail environment where Big Lots has already had to rethink its own structure. Big Lots filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on September 9, 2024, and later said it operated 1,392 stores and an e-commerce platform as of February 3, 2024. The company also launched a rewards-enabled app in November 2024 as part of its digital push. That mix of store operations, e-commerce and promotional planning is exactly where support jobs become vulnerable when executives look for flexibility and lower overhead.

Wakefern’s restructuring is a reminder that even when chains keep stores and customer-facing marketing intact, they can still redraw the map behind the scenes. The jobs most exposed are the ones tied to repetitive media production, circular building and campaign execution. The work most likely to stay in-house is the work that shapes brand strategy, customer communication and sales growth.