Fresh Foods

Let Us Begin to Unpack the Romaine Crisis

When the government issued a nationwide consumer advisory on all romaine lettuce just days before the biggest food holiday of the year, the operational impact was massive, and the repercussions continue today. Compounding the situation, this was the ...

Fresh Food Management: The Role of Fresh In Retail

Fresh Item Management is not an easy task for any sized retailer. It requires a lot of cooperation from department heads, quality data, constant due diligence, and an end goal for efficiency/profitability. During the recent NRF 2019 Show, I had the ...

A Fresh Look Forward

There’s nothing stale about the fresh category in retail, which is arguably turning the food retail business on its head. It’s the ultimate disruptive category when it comes to competing for share of the business and we dedicated significant ...

Health and Wellness: The Heart and Soul of Food Retail

Health and wellness is at the heart of almost every food retail success story this year. Significantly, according to the 2018 Food Retailing Industry Speaks research, industry executives identified the consumer health and wellness proposition (81 ...

FMI’s 2018 Financial Diversity

Providing the retail food industry with the myriad products and services that FMI offers requires resources—both human and financial capital. To avoid being a one-pronged fork, any well-run business endeavors to diversify its revenue sources and FMI ...

Food Safety in 2018 – A Collision of Public Health and Common Sense

Two words sum up food safety in 2018: Romaine Lettuce. Say those words in front of your peers in the food industry and you will be met with heads in hands, eyes rolling, heads shaking and deep sighs. You might even end the conversation before it has ...

FMI’s Strategic X’s and O’s in 2018

What is true for the industry is reflected in the life of its trade association. 2018 has been a year of the need for FMI to pay attention to where we plot our X’s while carefully watching out for those sneaky O’...

Preventing Unwelcome Guests at Your Holiday Table

Forty-six million turkeys are consumed each Thanksgiving, according to the National Turkey Federation, but the centerpiece for the family meal currently under scrutiny due to an ongoing investigation and multi-state outbreak of a multi-drug ...

Making Disruption Work for Your Business

Food retailers continue to see opportunities for differentiation as consumer expectations continue to shift and evolve. They have also become increasingly savvy, having to compete with an ever-growing set of rivals. We’re seeing a variety of ...

The Blurring Lines of Foodservice

For starters, although we're in the food retail business, we’re all consumers at the end of the day. Like the people who shop our stores (or who we want to shop at our stores), we may divide our meals during a typical week by eating out at ...

The Fresh Food Supply Chain: Combating Food Waste

The strawberry – featured in a video produced by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and shown at a panel discussion on Combating Food Waste during the recent FreshForward event in Chicago – doesn’t stand alone. According to panelist Dr. Frank Mitloehner, ...

Global Food Production and Fresh Foods

“When I was a boy, the world population was three billion. Now, we are at seven billion. Throughout our lifetime, human population on the planet will have tripled,” said Dr. Frank Mitloehner, professor and air quality extension specialist in the ...

The Evolving Consumer: Tastes Change With The Times

The venue for the recent FreshForward event in Chicago, presented by FMI, underscored the inevitability of the evolving consumer. Held in a funky, colorful meeting space inside a former meatpacking building, the room’s décor was designed to spark ...

5 Food Innovation Trends At Expo East

At Natural Products Expo East last week, it was a pleasure to meet inspiring innovators and entrepreneurs that are raising the bar at food retail today....

Photo Friday: National Family Meals Month™ Featured in Times Square

To kick off the fourth annual National Family Meals Month™, this new infographic with the message "More Matters at the Table and On Your Plate" appeared in Times Square on September 4. This represents a unique collaboration to combine the September ...