While everyone watched the seven figure deals, grocery chains quietly built the widest athlete endorsement network in the country
The most consequential NIL partnerships of the last four years are not the ones that made headlines. They are sitting in a freezer case in St. Louis, on an endcap in Des Moines, and on a billboard outside a convenience store in Boise.
When name, image and likeness rules changed in 2021, the expectation was national brands signing national stars. Some of that happened. What happened alongside it, with far less attention, was that regional grocers and convenience chains became the most prolific NIL dealmakers in college athletics. They were not chasing reach. They were chasing the same thing they have always chased: the shopper who lives twelve minutes away and buys groceries every week.
The scale is larger than the coverage suggests
Sprouts Farmers Market began in 2022 by signing fifty female athletes across two conferences to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Title IX. Four years later the company reports partnerships with more than 165 female athletes at more than thirty universities, alongside conference level sponsorships. That is a roster larger than most collectives, built one athlete at a time, in categories ranging from softball to gymnastics to track.
H-E-B signed its first NIL athlete in 2024, a volleyball national champion at Texas, and framed the deal around Texas identity rather than volleyball. The launch event was at an elementary school, with a donation to a childhood hunger nonprofit attached.
The Iowa Pork Producers Association signed nineteen Iowa State athletes in a single campaign, put in store displays in two hundred Hy-Vee locations across the Midwest, and donated pork to a food bank chosen by each athlete. The campaign had already won a national award for best NIL deal of 2023.
Jacksons Food Stores, a convenience chain with more than three hundred locations across seven western states, has run repeated NIL partnerships with Boise State athletes, and paired them with a promotion that pays out to customers when the team scores seventy points. Boise State, it is worth noting, plays in a stadium named for a supermarket chain. Food retail has been buying into that athletic department at every level available.
Penn State made a grocery chain its first cornerstone partner for a renovated Beaver Stadium, on a deal running through 2032, with an NIL component that puts athletes at local store openings.
Add it up and grocery is arguably the deepest vertical in college athlete endorsement by number of athletes under contract. It is certainly the least covered.
Athletic directors themselves treat it as a standing category. Ohio State‘s athletic director, discussing what comes after the department secured a jersey patch partner, ran through the sponsorship categories a program either has filled or still needs, and listed grocery store sponsors among the ones already in place alongside financial services and food. Grocery is not an experiment in these buildings. It is a line on the inventory.
Why grocery works when other categories don’t
Three things make this category fit college athletes better than almost anything else.
The geography matches. A national brand pays for a national audience and mostly wastes the local intensity that makes a college athlete valuable in the first place. A regional grocer wants exactly the thing a college athlete has: saturation in one metropolitan area where the school is a civic institution. Schnucks operates in Missouri and Illinois. Jacksons operates in Idaho and its neighbors. H-E-B is Texas. The athlete’s market and the retailer’s market are the same map.
The purchase is repeated. An endorsement works best when the product is bought weekly rather than once every few years. Groceries are the most repeated purchase in American life, which means the athlete’s face gets seen on a schedule no billboard can match.
Distribution is the whole game. The people building athlete branded products are blunt about this. Products sold only online or at the campus bookstore do not move. The ones that work are on shelves at the chain where everyone in the region already shops, which is why athlete branded chips end up in Giant Eagle across Central Ohio and Mizzou frozen pizzas end up in every Schnucks in Missouri.
From endorsement to product
The more interesting evolution is athletes moving from promoting a product to being one.
Schnucks and a Missouri NIL agency launched a thin crust frozen pizza featuring three Tigers defensive players at $7.99, with a plan to rotate in new athletes every two months and expand into ice cream, candy, coffee and cookies. Elsewhere the model has produced athlete branded chip lines, cookies and frozen items, each built around a specific player in a specific market.
Structurally these are group licensing deals: several athletes packaged into one agreement, with revenue split among everyone who takes part. That is the same mechanism behind trading card sets and college video games, applied to the freezer case.
The economics here look less like sponsorship and more like university licensing. Schools do not get rich licensing logos onto t shirts, and nobody is getting rich on barbecue chips either. That is not the point. The point is presence: the athlete’s name in a place where thousands of people encounter it while doing something unrelated to sports, building a personal brand that outlasts eligibility.
One operator in the space described the test simply. People will buy it once because they recognize the player. They will buy it a second time only if it tastes good.
The community piece is doing real work
A pattern runs through nearly every one of these campaigns, and it is not decoration.
The Iowa Pork campaign donated a thousand dollars of pork to a food bank chosen by each of the nineteen athletes, plus a further sixteen thousand dollars to a statewide food bank association, totaling roughly fifty thousand servings. The H-E-B launch came with a ten thousand dollar donation to a childhood hunger nonprofit. One of the most recognizable athletes in women’s college basketball made community engagement a non negotiable condition of any deal she signs, and used an education company partnership to open a free grocery store inside her old junior high school, feeding fifty families a week.
Food retailers and food insecurity work is an obvious fit, but the deeper logic is that these partnerships are local. A national endorsement has no community to serve. A regional grocer has three hundred stores full of people who will notice.
What this means for everyone below the top of the sport
Here is the part that matters most, and the part almost nobody writes about.
The seven figure NIL market is available to a few dozen athletes. The grocery market is structurally different, because its requirements are modest: a regional retailer, a school that matters locally, and an athlete people recognize. That describes hundreds of programs, including a great many outside the Power conferences, and it is why so many of these deals have gone to athletes in sports that have never had an endorsement market at all. Look at who actually signed. Softball players appear in nearly every campaign above. So do gymnasts, whose sport draws large audiences and almost no traditional endorsement money. So do volleyball players, track athletes, and swimmers and divers, including an Olympian. These are the athletes the national market was built to skip.
That matters more than it may look. One of the open questions in this era is whether the earnings gap between football and everything else is a problem schools are obliged to address. Grocery has not solved it, and a marketing budget is not a policy. But it is one of the few parts of the market where women athletes have been the primary target rather than an afterthought, and the reason is commercial rather than charitable: the people doing the grocery shopping are the audience these retailers most want to reach.
The same logic is showing up one level higher, in the jersey patch market. Boise State’s athletic director has pointed out that outside a handful of national brands like Ohio State and Notre Dame, patch deals are going to local and regional partners rather than national ones. Whether the asset is a chest patch or an endcap, the buyer is usually someone with stores nearby.
It is a reminder that the NIL story is not only about quarterback valuations. In a lot of towns, it is about whether the local chain decides that the athletes down the road are worth putting on an endcap. When they do, the money is smaller and the reach is narrower, and it lands on athletes who were never going to see a national deal.
That local logic is the same one behind fan funded NIL platforms, which let supporters back individual athletes directly rather than waiting for a brand to arrive. RallyFuel lists programs from the Big Ten through the CIAA, which is a wider net than any grocery chain can cast. Between the two, the athletes who benefit are increasingly the ones the national market was never going to reach.
One caveat worth watching
Federal legislation moving through the Senate would require school affiliated sponsors and apparel brands to certify that their NIL agreements are genuinely independent: not directed by the school, and not funded by it. The concern behind it is that outside money gets used to top up what schools pay athletes directly under revenue sharing, which is internal redistribution rather than outside endorsement. Grocery deals are mostly clean on that front, since a regional chain buying shelf space and social posts is doing ordinary marketing rather than disguised payroll, funded from a marketing budget that has nothing to do with the athletic department. But retailers that also hold stadium or department sponsorships now sit on both sides of a line lawmakers are drawing, and the paperwork around these partnerships is likely to get heavier. Anyone building in this category should assume the compliance burden rises.
That is a manageable problem, and a sign the category is being taken seriously. The freezer case turned out to be a better distribution channel for college athletics than anyone predicted. The next question is what else works the same way.
