August 5, 2026
Photo courtesy of Target
As Target Releases its Private Label Cookbook, Should Competitors Consider Their Options?
Target has been aggressively expanding its private label footprint over the course of the past few years, launching Dealworthy in 2024 and significantly boosting its assortment (by ~600 items) of Good & Gather and Favorite Day products just last year.
Now, according to an Aug. 3 press release, Target is further doubling-down on backing its private label push with a cookbook — “Good & Gather: Discover Delicious Every Day” — featuring 100 recipes based entirely around ingredients and items available within the range.
“Families want great taste, trusted ingredients and incredible value, which is why Good & Gather has become a go-to for guests,” said Target’s SVP of merchandising, food, and beverage John Conlin.
“This cookbook is a natural next step for the brand, and it showcases what makes Target different in food and beverage: we’re making food discovery and inspiration feel easy and approachable for busy families, with delicious, affordable recipes for any occasion,” he continued.
Target's Good & Gather brand releases its first cookbook Tuesday with 100 recipes developed by the retailer's test kitchen team. The retailer priced the cookbook at $24.50. https://t.co/7qUARK8ikm
— Minneapolis/St.Paul Business Journal (@MSPBJnews) August 4, 2026
Among the appetizing recipes cooked up by Target’s test kitchen — manned by culinary experts, food scientists, and trend researchers — are steak and potato kabobs with a blue cheese yogurt sauce, chicken and vegetable soup with potstickers, pomegranate dragon fruit shortcut shrub, mango and coconut overnight oats (for the health conscious foodies out there), and potato chip butterscotch cookes (for the late-night snackers, by contrast). Chicken parm meatball melts, spice sesame tuna wraps, and a microwavable Caprese eggs-in-a-mug are also advertised.
“The magic of the Target test kitchen is that we combine food science and culinary expertise with an understanding of how busy families shop and cook,” said director of trend for food and beverage at Target, Diane Douglas.
“Our team has decades of experience developing recipes and products, so every dish in this cookbook was created with approachable ingredients and tested with everyday kitchens in mind — using familiar appliances and tools to make sure the recipes are easy and delicious,” she added.
The cookbook was launched in stores and on Target’s website Aug. 4, priced at $24.50, and appears to be off to a hot start in terms of sales. The hardcover weighs in at 272 pages and boasts several vibrant, full-page depictions of each of the test kitchen’s finished products.
Target Zeroes in On, and Enhances, Past Cookbook Concepts Promoted by Competitors
While the cookbook is a bit of a novel idea in terms of its execution, similar (but not exact) attempts have been made in nearby territory in the past: Walmart famously published its own cookbooks in past years — although the ingredients and products were not entirely based on Great Value offerings — and Costco publishes “Kirkland Signature Recipes” on its website, with some recipes incorporating Costco’s private label products into the mix.
BrainTrust
Pam Marcheski
Brian Numainville
Principal, The Feedback Group
Lisa Goller
B2B Content Strategist
Recent Discussions
Discussion Questions
Do you believe it’s wise of Target to backstop its private label push with a traditional product such as this cookbook? Why or why not?
In your opinion, can other retail competitors avail of what may be seen as “older” or in some cases past-their-prime marketing materials to bolster their own brand offerings? Do any opportunities stand out to you?
Poll
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Given that over 20 million physical cookbooks were purchased in the US last year, I am not sure that the format can accurately be described as being entirely past its prime. That said, this is not a bid by Target to sell cookbooks. It’s to inspire consumers, strengthen Target’s credentials as a food destination, and improve perceptions of the grocery offer. This is part of a broader effort to move food from something consumers happen to buy while visiting Target to more of a primary reason to visit. Obviously, this needs more than a cookbook, which is why there a raft of other actions in play such as range development, bringing in more small brands, and improving store presentation.
Here’s why I like this. Once a customer has a Target cookbook on their shelf, they potentially see the Target name every day they are in the kitchen. It’s subtle, but it’s always there… Target!
Exactly this. A not so subtle reminder about the brand..! This is why beautiful shower products have a high repeat purchase rate, as you’re seeing the brand daily, becoming further attached and identifying yourself as part of the brand.
Ideas like this are exceptionally valuable. In my past, we created furniture or building plans our woodshop clients could offer their customers. The value added by these plans was exceptional as creating the material was a one-time cost with only small costs required for later printing.
I don’t think other retailers should copy this idea, but many traditional forms retain incredible value. One of the saddest results of digital hype is that it dismisses how real people learn and what they value. Other retailers should look at what makes sense for their customers and follow savvy intellectual property ideas which might deliver a benefit far higher than the cost of creating the material.
There is nothing like printed material to help customers. And its even better when your brand name carries along with that material (as long as you stay focused on giving customers a real value).
I would look at the cookbook as 100 pre-built shopping missions rather than a traditional marketing publication.
That creates an availability challenge. If a recipe requires 12 ingredients, the customer needs all 12 rather than eleven. Even if every ingredient independently achieves 95% availability, the mathematical probability of the complete basket being available is only about 54%. This is an illustration rather than Target data, but it shows why strong item-level availability can still produce poor recipe completion.
Target therefore needs to measure recipe-ready availability. Its app could display recipes that can be completed from the customer’s chosen store. It could offer suitable alternatives for missing ingredients and add the completed basket for pickup or delivery.
Substitution requires more than identifying a technically similar product. It must respect dietary needs and allergens. It should also preserve the intended flavor at a reasonable price.
The cookbook will create demand signals that Target can use upstream. Recipe views and cart additions can help planners anticipate demand. Completed baskets and repeat purchases can show which combinations have lasting appeal. Those insights should influence replenishment, product development and store merchandising.
Competitors can apply the same principle to printed meal planners and recipe cards. Seasonal guides can also become shoppable tools when they connect inspiration with local inventory.
Recipes create demand and basket data reveals behavior. Replenishment protects availability. Emerging preferences should shape the next products and recipes.
Their options? for what…exactly?
If you mean should a company mindlessly copy every move a competitor makes, then I’d answer “no”. Companies should consider cookbooks if it was something they were already planning…and for good reasons, not imitation.
Who doesn’t love a cookbook? Individual home chefs have made a fortune publishing Trader Joe’s cookbooks, so why shouldn’t Target have one of its own? Better yet, it’s coming straight from Target’s test kitchen. That’s smart marketing.
Smart play. Grocery is the most frequently shopped retail category. Private brands deepen loyalty due to exclusivity. Target is wise to celebrate its own grocery brands to inspire shoppers to keep coming back more often.
Private label (home label) products command a record $282.8 billion market share in the U.S., capturing 21.3% of dollar sales and 23.5% of unit sales. Store brands are growing at 3.3%—nearly triple the 1.2% growth rate of national brand (Brand Name) products—driven by a 25% average price savings and high consumer quality perception. Band Name Conpanies should be concerned with this trend. The battle against private labels (store brands) is intensified because retailers control the shelf space, own the transaction data, and copy national brands at a rapid pace.
Suggestions
1. Shift the Focus Off Center-Aisle Shelves
2. Outpace Private Label on Functional Innovation
3. Modernize Your Promotional Blueprint
4. Reformulate Your Retailer Relationships
5. Lean into your Brand. Create exclusive SKUs, packaging, sizes and formula.
6. Create scarcity – Artificial Restriction, Cultural Validation, and Time-Bound Windows. Standard marketing playbook now just stated as FOMO.
6. Collabs – Think McDonald’s Szechuan Sauce.
Target created a cookbook to market to their customers differently. It’s another way to bring credibility to the expansive and growing offering they bring to the table every day across their owned brand grocery portfolio.
The upside of doing this far outweighs any risk so I say why not? If this were the only initiative to improve perception of the grocery category we might have a problem, but we know it isn’t. It’s only one recipe card in Target’s larger cookbook.
It connects perfectly to the efforts to continue to innovate across the entire grocery assortment including owned brand which feels right. Let’s see how it plays out.
This is way more than a cookbook. It’s a platform for engagement and loyalty. Loyalty in the grocery business. That stuff every household in America shops for every week. I think it’s a brilliant idea. And as important as I think the physical book is, I hope they treat the website as an opportunity for continually flowing new ideas. Freshen the engagement. Personalize the content. I’m sure there’s an AI chef who can help figure out a family’s allergies, or their gluten-free needs, or…………….
The cookbook is clever, but it’s also diagnostic. Target has to publish a book to convince shoppers its food is worth a dedicated trip. Kroger and H-E-B don’t need cookbooks because their grocery credibility was earned through decades of fresh perimeter investment. The real strategic value isn’t inspiration. It’s lock-in. Each recipe specifying Good & Gather ingredients creates a micro-switching cost. You don’t buy the pasta sauce; you buy the system. That’s subscription-platform logic applied to grocery: make the ecosystem sticky enough that leaving feels like friction.
Whether Target can sustain the supply chain discipline to keep all 12 recipe ingredients simultaneously in stock across 1,900 stores is the harder question.
As a strategic move, it’s smart and low-risk. A cookbook is inexpensive to produce relative to the brand-building payoff: it turns a private label into a lifestyle brand, drives repeat grocery trips (every ingredient sold in-store), and works as content marketing that doubles as merchandising — closing the loop between inspiration and purchase in one book.
I think this is a smart evolution of private label. Customers don’t often wake up wanting to buy ingredients they simply want inspiration, convenience and confidence about what to cook.
The opportunity for retailers is to think beyond the transaction. The strongest private labels create an ecosystem around the product, whether that’s recipes, how-to content or meal inspiration.
Private-label foodstuff is different in quality today than it was back in my day. To build and promote the Target PL with a cookbook strikes me as brilliant. There is a silent message about quality.
And, while the cookbook may never get used, it is one of those things one should have in their kitchen. Not to mention Shep’s insight… “Once a customer has a Target cookbook on their shelf, they potentially see the Target name every day they are in the kitchen.”
This is a no-risk, high-reward endeavor for Target.
Great idea! Private label quality and prices resonate with shoppers so why not build around that!
I have questions about the willingness of consumers to pay $25.00 for a cookbook with “uses Target branded ingredients” as the differentiator.
I think most consumers who buy cookbooks look for themes that explore new cooking styles or flavor profiles, or for cookbooks written by famous chefs or by a favorite restaurant. This feels more like a “like what Mom used to open cookbook” than something the typical cookbook buyer would purchase. This isn’t unprecedented; Target had success with similar cookbook “like” materials when they were first expanding food to every store in the chain. The big difference, they were free.
I think it would be more valuable for Target to go back to the marketing channel with this and use these recipes to drive traffic- as a free perk of Target Circle or a loyalty program benefit rather than to charge for this.
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Given that over 20 million physical cookbooks were purchased in the US last year, I am not sure that the format can accurately be described as being entirely past its prime. That said, this is not a bid by Target to sell cookbooks. It’s to inspire consumers, strengthen Target’s credentials as a food destination, and improve perceptions of the grocery offer. This is part of a broader effort to move food from something consumers happen to buy while visiting Target to more of a primary reason to visit. Obviously, this needs more than a cookbook, which is why there a raft of other actions in play such as range development, bringing in more small brands, and improving store presentation.
Here’s why I like this. Once a customer has a Target cookbook on their shelf, they potentially see the Target name every day they are in the kitchen. It’s subtle, but it’s always there… Target!
Exactly this. A not so subtle reminder about the brand..! This is why beautiful shower products have a high repeat purchase rate, as you’re seeing the brand daily, becoming further attached and identifying yourself as part of the brand.
Ideas like this are exceptionally valuable. In my past, we created furniture or building plans our woodshop clients could offer their customers. The value added by these plans was exceptional as creating the material was a one-time cost with only small costs required for later printing.
I don’t think other retailers should copy this idea, but many traditional forms retain incredible value. One of the saddest results of digital hype is that it dismisses how real people learn and what they value. Other retailers should look at what makes sense for their customers and follow savvy intellectual property ideas which might deliver a benefit far higher than the cost of creating the material.
There is nothing like printed material to help customers. And its even better when your brand name carries along with that material (as long as you stay focused on giving customers a real value).
I would look at the cookbook as 100 pre-built shopping missions rather than a traditional marketing publication.
That creates an availability challenge. If a recipe requires 12 ingredients, the customer needs all 12 rather than eleven. Even if every ingredient independently achieves 95% availability, the mathematical probability of the complete basket being available is only about 54%. This is an illustration rather than Target data, but it shows why strong item-level availability can still produce poor recipe completion.
Target therefore needs to measure recipe-ready availability. Its app could display recipes that can be completed from the customer’s chosen store. It could offer suitable alternatives for missing ingredients and add the completed basket for pickup or delivery.
Substitution requires more than identifying a technically similar product. It must respect dietary needs and allergens. It should also preserve the intended flavor at a reasonable price.
The cookbook will create demand signals that Target can use upstream. Recipe views and cart additions can help planners anticipate demand. Completed baskets and repeat purchases can show which combinations have lasting appeal. Those insights should influence replenishment, product development and store merchandising.
Competitors can apply the same principle to printed meal planners and recipe cards. Seasonal guides can also become shoppable tools when they connect inspiration with local inventory.
Recipes create demand and basket data reveals behavior. Replenishment protects availability. Emerging preferences should shape the next products and recipes.
Their options? for what…exactly?
If you mean should a company mindlessly copy every move a competitor makes, then I’d answer “no”. Companies should consider cookbooks if it was something they were already planning…and for good reasons, not imitation.
Who doesn’t love a cookbook? Individual home chefs have made a fortune publishing Trader Joe’s cookbooks, so why shouldn’t Target have one of its own? Better yet, it’s coming straight from Target’s test kitchen. That’s smart marketing.
Smart play. Grocery is the most frequently shopped retail category. Private brands deepen loyalty due to exclusivity. Target is wise to celebrate its own grocery brands to inspire shoppers to keep coming back more often.
Private label (home label) products command a record $282.8 billion market share in the U.S., capturing 21.3% of dollar sales and 23.5% of unit sales. Store brands are growing at 3.3%—nearly triple the 1.2% growth rate of national brand (Brand Name) products—driven by a 25% average price savings and high consumer quality perception. Band Name Conpanies should be concerned with this trend. The battle against private labels (store brands) is intensified because retailers control the shelf space, own the transaction data, and copy national brands at a rapid pace.
Suggestions
1. Shift the Focus Off Center-Aisle Shelves
2. Outpace Private Label on Functional Innovation
3. Modernize Your Promotional Blueprint
4. Reformulate Your Retailer Relationships
5. Lean into your Brand. Create exclusive SKUs, packaging, sizes and formula.
6. Create scarcity – Artificial Restriction, Cultural Validation, and Time-Bound Windows. Standard marketing playbook now just stated as FOMO.
6. Collabs – Think McDonald’s Szechuan Sauce.
Target created a cookbook to market to their customers differently. It’s another way to bring credibility to the expansive and growing offering they bring to the table every day across their owned brand grocery portfolio.
The upside of doing this far outweighs any risk so I say why not? If this were the only initiative to improve perception of the grocery category we might have a problem, but we know it isn’t. It’s only one recipe card in Target’s larger cookbook.
It connects perfectly to the efforts to continue to innovate across the entire grocery assortment including owned brand which feels right. Let’s see how it plays out.
This is way more than a cookbook. It’s a platform for engagement and loyalty. Loyalty in the grocery business. That stuff every household in America shops for every week. I think it’s a brilliant idea. And as important as I think the physical book is, I hope they treat the website as an opportunity for continually flowing new ideas. Freshen the engagement. Personalize the content. I’m sure there’s an AI chef who can help figure out a family’s allergies, or their gluten-free needs, or…………….
The cookbook is clever, but it’s also diagnostic. Target has to publish a book to convince shoppers its food is worth a dedicated trip. Kroger and H-E-B don’t need cookbooks because their grocery credibility was earned through decades of fresh perimeter investment. The real strategic value isn’t inspiration. It’s lock-in. Each recipe specifying Good & Gather ingredients creates a micro-switching cost. You don’t buy the pasta sauce; you buy the system. That’s subscription-platform logic applied to grocery: make the ecosystem sticky enough that leaving feels like friction.
Whether Target can sustain the supply chain discipline to keep all 12 recipe ingredients simultaneously in stock across 1,900 stores is the harder question.
As a strategic move, it’s smart and low-risk. A cookbook is inexpensive to produce relative to the brand-building payoff: it turns a private label into a lifestyle brand, drives repeat grocery trips (every ingredient sold in-store), and works as content marketing that doubles as merchandising — closing the loop between inspiration and purchase in one book.
I think this is a smart evolution of private label. Customers don’t often wake up wanting to buy ingredients they simply want inspiration, convenience and confidence about what to cook.
The opportunity for retailers is to think beyond the transaction. The strongest private labels create an ecosystem around the product, whether that’s recipes, how-to content or meal inspiration.
Private-label foodstuff is different in quality today than it was back in my day. To build and promote the Target PL with a cookbook strikes me as brilliant. There is a silent message about quality.
And, while the cookbook may never get used, it is one of those things one should have in their kitchen. Not to mention Shep’s insight… “Once a customer has a Target cookbook on their shelf, they potentially see the Target name every day they are in the kitchen.”
This is a no-risk, high-reward endeavor for Target.
Great idea! Private label quality and prices resonate with shoppers so why not build around that!
I have questions about the willingness of consumers to pay $25.00 for a cookbook with “uses Target branded ingredients” as the differentiator.
I think most consumers who buy cookbooks look for themes that explore new cooking styles or flavor profiles, or for cookbooks written by famous chefs or by a favorite restaurant. This feels more like a “like what Mom used to open cookbook” than something the typical cookbook buyer would purchase. This isn’t unprecedented; Target had success with similar cookbook “like” materials when they were first expanding food to every store in the chain. The big difference, they were free.
I think it would be more valuable for Target to go back to the marketing channel with this and use these recipes to drive traffic- as a free perk of Target Circle or a loyalty program benefit rather than to charge for this.