Voice of The Food Industry Blog

Q&A: Why Employees Need Verbal De-escalation Training Now

I recently discussed the importance of de-escalation training with Bill Flynn, former DHS principal deputy assistant secretary and co-founder of The Power of Preparedness (TPOP). Under Bill’s leadership, TPOP provides online training for verbal de-...

Retail Food Safety Professionals Set Food Safety Initiatives for 2022

Retail food safety professionals met in January 2022 to prioritize their work over the next year and set food safety initiatives. FMI’s longstanding Food Protection Committee (FPC) has been in place for decades and works to develop solutions to ...

Seven Years And Counting of Grocery Boardroom Insights

We’re pleased to present the seventh edition of Boardroom. The articles in this year’s volume are focused on the FMI Imperative Issues Framework, contextualizing immediate needs such as supply chain disruption and workforce challenges; and ...

Tools and Tactics for Bolstering Asset Protection

Nowadays, the same old story keeps cropping in the news. It goes something like this: Dozens of people enter a store in unison and take as much product as they can as quickly as they can, and then as fast as their crime began, it’s over – as the ...

A Retrospective on FMI Membership

Most see spring as the season of renewal and rejuvenation. When it comes to the FMI membership program, we take on revitalization at the beginning of every calendar year in the heart of the winter ...

Cell-Cultured Meat Continues to Make Progress Toward Market

Consumers continue to demand a wide variety of products meeting different criteria related to health, sustainable production methods and more. Cell-cultured meat, which is cultured using animal cells obtained from livestock, poultry, or seafood ...

New Year Brings the Same Challenges — But Also New Opportunities

2022 was not supposed to begin this way. When I attended last February’s USDA Agriculture Outlook, the agency predicted that food prices would stabilize and return to a more traditional rate of growth of between one and two percent. Unfortunately, a ...

Emergency Preparedness: Recognition Can Stop a Problem Before It Starts

We’ve all seen the viral videos of irate customers, often in grocery and convenience stores, getting into heated altercations with staff and customers. While these situations can be meme-worthy fodder online, they are often intense and potentially ...

FMItech Pitches: Curated Innovation for the Food Industry

To help food retailers keep up with the latest food technology innovations, FMI and the Center for Advancing Retail & Technology (CART), held an online pitch competition. Through an expert set of judges, we identified the top six food technology ...

Five Key Strategies to Drive Fresh in 2022

Key lessons were highlighted over the past year in FMI's FreshForward Conversations video series, which has covered many angles related to the pandemic's impact. This is a good time to revisit those conversations to identify the best strategies to ...

Digital Skills and the Future of the Food Industry

In the age of social media, smart phones, Wi-Fi, self-checkout lanes and all manner of AI software, it’s no surprise that technology is becoming an ever more critical fixture of food retail operations. Food retailers far and wide are beginning to ...

Continue the New Year’s Celebration on February 22, 2022

Even though there are exactly 50 days until Supermarket Employee Day (2.22.22), there are only 15 days left to place an order for resources from the Supermarket Employee Day online store. Any orders placed after January 18, 2022, are unlikely to ...

The FMI Class of 2021

Reflecting on 2021 most may remember significant events like mass vaccinations for COVID-19, the Capitol Hill insurrection, the beginning of civilian space travel, natural disasters related to climate change, and many others. At FMI, membership ...

VIDEO: Grocery Innovations in Health & Well-being

FMI Chief Food and Product Safety Officer Dr. Hilary Thesmar and FMI Director, Health and Well-being Krystal Register discuss the innovative ways food retailers are supporting customers in meeting their health goals, including meal planning, virtual ...

VIDEO: An Ecommerce Revolution in Food Retail

FMI Chief Collaboration Officer Mark Baum and Vice President, Industry Relations Doug Baker discuss the investments food retailers made to scale up their online shopping operations, such as click-and-collect and home delivery, as well as employee ...