Voice of The Food Industry Blog

The Power of Making The World A Better Place

According to The Food Retailing Industry Speaks 2023, 82% of food retailers emphasize community support or community ties. What’s more 62% of food retailers surveyed report these community uplift programs are successful at connecting with customers. ...

Northgate Market in Cooking Up Change in the Community

Sometimes we don’t really grasp how one program, grounded by a local grocery store, and supported by an entire community, can impact the lives of so many until we get a chance to see that impact firsthand. What an honor when Northgate Gonzalez ...

Lessons Learned from Trailblazing Grocery Consumer Affairs Professionals

Often, you must look back in order to move forward. I recently had the opportunity to reflect on FMI’s consumer affairs accomplishments over the past several decades with a group of trailblazing grocery consumer affairs professionals that met in ...

Photo Friday: Consumer Affairs Reunion

More than 20 food retail consumer affairs professionals recently met in Washington, D.C. to share insights from their storied careers. Six of these professionals were recipients of the Esther Peterson Award for customer service and in 2021, FMI ...

The Next Hot Topic: Social Justice and Food

The whole world is anticipating, yearning, and preparing for the day when the COVID-19 pandemic does not dominate the horizon of our life considerations. From a food industry perspective, part of that involves speculating which pandemic-tinged ...

Food Retailer or Food Storyteller?

It has been well substantiated that shoppers today ask more questions about their food than ever before. They want to know its story and are in search of intersections – those places where the details of their food’s story resonate with some aspect ...

Building A Culture of Trust and Transparency in Food Retail

I love to ask participants to fill in the blank to this sentence, “I trust my grocery store to ______.” For a while, I got responses like “sell safe food,” “be clean” and “have a good assortment of food.” But in recent years, I hear more answers ...

Why Millennials Are Tired of Being Categorized and Classified

Without a doubt, we are knee deep in the age of radical personalization, with consumers anticipating food retailers’ ability to know and serve each customer’s shopping preferences regarding cost, convenience, taste, experience, health and wellness, ...

Adjusting our Optics on the Consumer

FMI’s 2017 work in clarifying shopper expectations of transparency, addressing consumer concerns and highlighting community service helped better frame the food retail picture and sharpened industry focus on the customer’s craving of personalized ...

Grocery Stores Explore More Social Media and Digital Advertising

A couple of years ago, I wrote about how grocery stores used social media with findings from our 2015 Food Retailing Industry Speaks report to make the case that the food retail industry was just beginning to dip their toe in the digital marketing ...

Stopping by Product Date Labels on a Snowy Evening

Bringing the industry together to agree on a common date-label language was a crucial first step, but it was only that; a first step. Much work remains to be done to bring this acclaimed initiative to fruition. There will be cross- industry task ...

Reducing the Noise, Sharpening the Message

This TPA affirmed recommendation calls for voluntary industry-wide adoption of two sets of product code date labeling language: one for shelf stable items, when the date is for communicating quality issues, and another for certain items when the ...

Amplifying the Voice of a Noble Cause

A compilation of the monthly agendas for the 2016 resource calls of FMI’s Communications and Consumer Affairs Council (CCA) reads like the chapter headings of Everything You Wanted to Know about Food Retail in 2016, But Were Afraid to ...

140 In-Person Membership Visits in 2016

Building a strong membership program can be equated to the quote, “Without a solid foundation, you’ll have trouble creating anything with value.” In 2016, the FMI Membership department continued to build a robust and valuable membership program by ...

2016, One for the Books

Just as a prism takes a single ray of light and splinters it into its constituent spectral colors, to help make as much sense as we can of 2016, FMI is approaching its end of year reporting by breaking the year into 13 different spectrums of ...