The news: Walmart is refreshing its Great Value brand to make it more visually appealing to shoppers, per a company announcement.

• The redesign is the biggest private label update Walmart has undertaken in its history, covering nearly 10,000 food and consumable products.
• The new packaging will roll out over the next two years, starting with snacks and proceeding on a category basis.

Why it matters: While the changes to Great Value are primarily cosmetic, they reveal both Walmart’s ambition and the growing competitive pressure in private label. The colorful packaging is more striking, enabling the brand to stand out on shelves. At the same time, Great Value’s sleeker design could make it more appealing to wealthier shoppers, who are helping drive Walmart’s growth.

The updated design could also help Walmart fend off pressure from Amazon, Aldi, and other retailers with robust private label businesses. While Great Value is the top store brand in the US, with an estimated 87% of households having purchased at least one item from the label in the past year, Amazon has the fastest-growing grocery brand by store volume, according to Numerator data shared with CNBC. Modernizing the packaging could help Walmart stay competitive and keep pace with consumers’ rising standards for private labels.

Implications for retailers: Roughly 1 in 5 grocery dollars go to private labels, per NielsenIQ. While store brand penetration is markedly lower in the US than in markets like Canada and Europe, rising cost-of-living pressures coupled with improving quality perceptions are encouraging greater adoption across categories. Well over 50% of US grocery shoppers trust private label quality as much as name brands, per Ibotta.

However, consumers’ growing affinity for store brands comes with raised expectations for those products. Shoppers are less interested in private labels as cheaper dupes of national brands and have higher expectations for taste, packaging, and overall quality. That will put pressure on Walmart and other retailers to consistently refresh their private label assortments and invest in quality and innovation.