Texas-Born H-E-B Didn’t Win a Single Grocery Trust Award in 2026, and the Chain That Did Isn’t Texan
H-E-B didn’t win a single grocery trust award in the 2026 rankings from Newsweek and BrandSpark International.
Walmart, meanwhile, picked up twelve trust categories.
These are the trust awards Texas-born H-E-B didn’t win in 2026.
How the Trust Rankings Are Built
H-E-B’s missing trophy case traces back to a study Newsweek and BrandSpark International run every year, called the Most Trusted Awards.
Researchers surveyed 35,215 U.S. shoppers for the 2026 rankings.
They asked shoppers to name the one grocery brand they trust above every other, without handing anyone a list to choose from.
Whichever brand shoppers name more than any other, unprompted, wins that category outright.
It isn’t complicated.
BrandSpark’s leadership frames a trust win as a tiebreaker, the thing that decides which store a shopper picks when two chains otherwise look the same.
Here’s where Walmart came out on top, and where the hometown grocer came up empty.
Walmart’s South Supermarket Crown
Walmart took the crown local grocers used to fight over: The Conventional Supermarket title for the South, the very region H-E-B calls home.
That win was one of twelve Walmart picked up across every region BrandSpark tracks, more than any other grocery chain earned in 2026.
A clean sweep.
Walmart also topped the national vote for customer service, sales and promotions, and quick, easy shopping, taking every one of those titles without a regional split.
Walmart won grocery pickup and delivery too, though that title falls under BrandSpark’s separate services categories rather than the twelve grocery-segment wins counted above.
Even where Walmart came up short of a clean win, it still tied Grocery Outlet for the West’s discount supermarket crown.
The two brands landed within BrandSpark’s margin for declaring a tie instead of naming a single winner.
What Counts as a Trust “Win”
BrandSpark’s survey doesn’t ask shoppers to rate a grocery store on a scale.
Researchers ask an open question instead: Which grocery store does a shopper trust more than any other.
They count only the answers people type in on their own, with no list of stores handed to them first.
A brand needs at least 10% of those unprompted answers just to be in contention.
Winning outright takes a lead of at least three percentage points over the second-place brand.
When a brand falls short of that three-point gap, the way Walmart and Grocery Outlet did out West, BrandSpark declares a tie instead of a winner.
H-E-B’s Separate Store-Brand Trust
H-E-B’s reputation for store brands didn’t come from the 2026 trust awards at all.
Store Brand/Private Label Products is one of 139 categories BrandSpark added to the Most Trusted Brands program for the first time in 2026.
Walmart won it outright in its first year on the ballot.
H-E-B’s case for shopper trust in its store brands rests on a different, earlier study instead.
A separate BrandSpark 2023 study found H-E-B, Walmart, and Kroger were the grocery retailers shoppers trusted most for store-brand and private-label products that year.
That was a grocery-only study, separate from the cross-industry rankings the rest of this article covers.
Two studies, two different years.
Aldi and the Field
Aldi picked up the second-most category wins of any grocery chain in the 2026 trust study, well ahead of any placement H-E-B managed.
Aldi collected eight category wins: Discount supermarket honors in the Midwest, Northeast, and South, and low-price honors in the Midwest and Northeast.
Aldi also picked up small-format grocery store wins in the Midwest, Northeast, and South, rounding out the eight.
Small stores, big trust.
Whole Foods led the national vote for natural and organic foods, and Trader Joe’s took the small-format grocery store title out West.
Kroger, ShopRite, Safeway, and Grocery Outlet picked up the remaining regional titles, covering grocery loyalty programs and a handful of conventional supermarket wins.
H-E-B’s name never turns up on that 2026 winners list, not even once, not even regionally.
Psst! How much do you know about H-E-B and Texas grocery history? Take our quiz and see how many you can get right.
Quiz
Texas Grocery IQ
Answer these questions on H-E-B and Texas grocery history. We bet you can’t get them all right. Prove us wrong?
H-E-B’s founder, Florence Butt, opened her first one-room grocery store in 1905 in which Texas town?
Where H-E-B Still Wins
H-E-B still beats Walmart on a different scorecard, just not this trust study.
Not every scorecard agrees.
The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) gave H-E-B an 83 out of 100 for 2026, based on shopper-satisfaction surveys collected through 2025.
ACSI scores H-E-B in its supermarket segment, alongside Publix, Trader Joe's, and Wegmans.
Walmart's 2026 ACSI score, measured in the hypermarket category ACSI tracks it under, came in at 76.
That's a separate segment from the supermarkets, one ACSI groups with Fred Meyer and Meijer instead.
Publix and Trader Joe's both score higher than H-E-B in that same supermarket segment, so the trust-award shutout isn't the only place H-E-B has ground to make up.
Fred Meyer led the hypermarket segment this year, its score rising nine percent to 82 after a round of store renovations.
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