An interview with Jeff Snyder, Director of Loyalty & Personalization, The Fresh Market
The Fresh Market, the Greensboro-based premium grocery retailer, has relaunched its loyalty program as TFM Rewards!, introducing a redesigned guest value proposition and the company’s first native mobile app. But according to Jeff Snyder, the company’s Director of Loyalty & Personalization, the most significant changes behind the relaunch are two things that don’t appear on any feature list: a structured, ongoing commitment to listening to guests, and an experiential model that turns in-store member events into a measurable driver of long-term behavior change.
A Program That Had Stalled
The Fresh Market launched its first-ever loyalty program in 2022 under the name The Ultimate Loyalty Experience. It was a meaningful milestone for a company that had operated for over 40 years without one. But by 2024 and into 2025, the program had stagnated. Membership was not growing the way leadership needed it to.
Rather than defend the status quo, the team used that finding as a reset. They codified the company’s guest and business principles, using those as the north star for everything that followed. The result was a redesigned program built around clearer value, a stronger experiential layer, and a guest listening model rigorous enough to guide both.
That kind of honest internal diagnosis is harder than it sounds. Loyalty programs are often treated as sunk costs to defend rather than experiments to evolve. The willingness to call stagnation what it is, and then fix it, is the first thing worth noting about this relaunch.
Listening as Infrastructure, Not Instinct
When asked what one thing the loyalty industry should pay attention to, and what one thing The Fresh Market still isn’t sure they got right, Snyder gave the same answer to both: listening to guests
“Your guests will tell you what they want, what they need, and what is most impactful and relevant to them. It is our job to listen, to hear, and to execute in support of the guest.”
What makes that statement more than a platitude is the operating model behind it. The Fresh Market surveys loyalty members and email subscribers monthly to bi-monthly. Results are shared and discussed with senior leadership on the same cadence. The loyalty team reviews KPIs every two weeks, and those sessions include frontline feedback from store team members alongside digital data. That is a meaningful rhythm of listening built into the structure of the business, not a once-a-year satisfaction survey.
One concrete illustration: store team members flagged that the original program name was cumbersome to say during a checkout-line conversation. Leadership heard it, and simplifying the guest experience became a codified principle going forward. The most useful feedback often comes not from dashboards but from the people having the actual conversations.
The surveys are also not limited to rating what already exists. Guests are asked their opinions on potential future features, giving the team a read on likely adoption before anything is built. “Start, stop, continue” is how Snyder describes the operating spirit. Existing features can and will be deprecated when guests have moved on to something more relevant. Change is acceptable, as long as it is good for the guest and good for the business.
For loyalty practitioners, the question worth sitting with is straightforward: how frequently does your organization review guest feedback, and who is in the room when it happens?
The Experiential Layer: The Strategic Core
In-store member events are not a nice-to-have at The Fresh Market. Snyder is direct about it: experiential loyalty is central to the strategy, and it is going to become more prominent over time, not less.
The current model centers on tasting events offered with exclusive or enhanced perks for loyalty members. On those days, the company is seeing triple-digit sales increases on the items being sampled. That number alone would justify the investment. But the metric Snyder is more interested in is what happens after.
The team tracks whether elevated sales persist beyond the event itself, because a guest who has tried something and liked it is a fundamentally different customer than one who has only seen a promotion for it. That stickiness, the sustained purchase behavior shift that follows a genuine discovery moment, is where the real loyalty value lives.
This is not an accident of assortment. The Fresh Market’s team members are educated on products, health benefits, and allergen information. When a member event brings a guest face-to-face with a knowledgeable team member in an environment built for discovery, that is hospitality functioning as a loyalty benefit. The tasting event is not a sampling program dressed up with a loyalty badge. It is an extension of what The Fresh Market already does better than most, brought to life in a way that only members can fully access.
For any retailer with a distinctive in-store experience, this is a model worth studying. The event is the product. The loyalty membership is the access credential. The stickiness is the business outcome.
Protecting the Brand While Adding Value
The Fresh Market was already winning before this relaunch. USA Today named them the number one grocery store in the United States in 2025, and they swept the major categories. A brand at that level carries a real risk when redesigning a loyalty program: the perception that something premium is becoming transactional.
Snyder addressed this directly. The transactional core of the program, the savings and member pricing, was already in place before the redesign. The deliberate focus of the relaunch was to build on that foundation with experiential benefits that amplify, rather than commoditize, the brand and its brand values. The member events, the personalized content, the hospitality extended through digital channels: all of it is designed to deepen connection, not reduce the brand to a discount mechanism.
That instinct reflects a principle that holds across retail categories. Loyalty programs that amplify what makes a brand worth choosing tend to outperform programs that simply reward the transaction.
The Fresh Market is early in parts of this journey, and they’ll be the first to say so. But the listening infrastructure is in place, the experiential model is producing results, and the operating rhythm to keep improving is built into how the team works. For a company that spent 40 years without a loyalty program, they are moving in the right direction and doing it in a way that other practitioners can learn from.
The question the industry is increasingly grappling with is how loyalty programs can deepen emotional connection without becoming transactional. The Fresh Market’s answer, at least in this chapter, is events that create genuine discovery and a feedback loop rigorous enough to know when you’ve gotten it wrong. It’s a working model, not a finished one, and that may be exactly what makes it worth watching.
It is also the kind of practitioner thinking that NALA™ exists to surface and share. Jeff Snyder is a NALA member, and conversations like this one, honest about what stalled, clear-eyed about what’s working, and candid about what hasn’t been figured out yet, are what the association is built around. For those who want to take that conversation further in person, The BIG Handshake Loyalty™ Chicago on November 10 at the Omni Chicago is where North America’s loyalty community gathers to do exactly that.
Jeff Snyder
Director of Loyalty & Personalization at The Fresh Market.
LinkedIn
This article is based on an interview conducted for NALA
