It may feel a little strange to be seeing Valentine's Day candy in the January book, but when you think about it, it's really not. Staying ahead is part of the game of retail, and if you want to buy your sweetheart's favorite chocolate before February 14th you'd best act fast because there's only so many on the shelves.

The deli and bakery departments share this page, and I like to give it a special look when I can since many of the products are so fresh! Albertsons has an extensive collection of beautiful plated photographs of food items to go with the packaged product. But finding the perfect match can sometimes require some digging. Finding the image of cubed block cheese (to connect to the Kerrygold) and creamy cheese wedges (to connect to the Laughing Cow) together on one plate was worth the time spent. The caprese salad photo pairs with the Galbani mozzarella.

A grocery page in which the grid layout was adjusted to give the top row more presence and therefore be more attention grabbing for the customer, since the prices are good deals for those items.

A grocery page in which the grid layout was adjusted to give the entire right column to a single brand with quite the variety of products on sale all at once. Opportunities for customers to buy up on a brand like this are not common, so I gave it more space to show off more products.

The folks in charge of seafood like to have a pretty plated photo of the product right by the packaged one whenever possible to entice the customer, showing off what it looks like once it's been thawed and (in some photos) cooked. They're understandably particular about what plated photo is used so that it's accurate to the product, and I do my best to arrange the images in a visually pleasing way.

This page is dedicated to packaged meat, and in this month I adjusted the grid such that the top two rows have more presence than the bottom two rows so as to promote those items (per the meat department's request).

Apologies, but I tended to have the most fun with Page 4 in the Big Book of Savings as it regularly allowed for more creativity, so yes, I put a second one in here. And this illustrates how I made the feature of the page flexible to accommodate whatever plated photos I chose to use, and adjusted the grid on the rest of the page to wrap around it.

A page all about the frozen section of grocery. The items shown shift throughout the year, with summer being more about dessert and winter being more about dinner meals, which means the grid changes every month to suit what the folks in frozen want to highlight.

Whichever page is the last page of Big Book is always reserved for McCormick as part of an agreement Albertsons has with them. McCormick provides the detail as to what seasonings should be in each promotion, then Albertsons determines what products should go into the remaining space based on what's in stock and what deals will be most appealing to the customer. The number of spots (mods) can vary, so the grid often needs to change with each month.