Omnichannel

An Omnichannel “Choose Your Own Adventure” for Food Retailers

From a business perspective, this makes sense—you don’t want to be the turtle or the hare in the race—but that doesn’t mean food retailers should ignore omnichannel. On the contrary, they need to be building the infrastructure and organizational ...

The Future of Retail Metrics

There is an advantage to looking at the larger retail landscape and applying the lessons learned to food retail. I had the pleasure of speaking with Rod Sides, vice chairman, U.S. retail and distribution leader, Deloitte LLP about how changes in ...

How Does FMI Know the State of the Food Retail Industry?

The first ever The Food Retailing Industry Speaks (Speaks) report appeared in 1949. Seventy years later, this report continues to provide the food retail industry with important benchmarks, facts and figures that are used in our advocacy work on ...

It’s Still Early in Food Retail’s Digital Ball Game

According to a group of industry experts at Groceryshop 2018, if the ongoing digitization of food retail were a baseball game, the food retail industry is in the second inning....

Mining Shopper Data to Build Sales

If there is one data point in NPD’s presentation for me illustrates the competitive pressures in food retail today, it’s this one: Eating occasions per capita (i.e., meals consumed per person) are down 3.8 percent over the last ...

Showtime Becomes Real Time in the New Omnichannel World

For more than 20 years, a store’s operations team has worked all day toward that 4 p.m. “showtime” when they present a fully stocked store to their customers. Only now, many of those click-and-collect orders are coming in during morning hours, ...

Five Things Companies Do Right When Preparing for the Digital Shopper

A.T. Kearney’s work with clients has shown this 15 percent threshold is when that company’s digital business really begins to accelerate even more quickly, and it doesn’t always do so in a comfortable linear ...

The Boardroom’s Perspective of The Future of Retail

For the fourth year, FMI and Oliver Wyman have teamed up to provide thought leadership on the most pressing issues facing the food retail industry. The annual edition of Boardroom takes readers directly into the C-Suite of food retail companies and ...

2018’s Most Pressing Question - Are You Operational Ready for $100 Billion Food and Beverage Online?

The age of the digitally engaged food shopper has arrived, with each day seeing more shoppers moving from experimenting with online food shopping to fully embracing it. Total digital maturation in online grocery shopping is a mere five to seven ...

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 ...

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’...

Grocery Store Digital Communications Trends: The Rise of Email and The Fall of SnapChat

As a digital communications professional I like to take a step back from my day-to-day job of actually doing digital communications and look at FMI’s Food Retailing Industry Speaks with a practitioner’s eye. I like to look at the tactics my fellow ...

If You Think Your Customers Don’t Care About Accurate Product Knowledge—Think Again

Here’s some news: When shoppers are at home, they’re often staring at their computer screens to get information about the products they want BEFORE they hit your food retail aisles. Retail Dive tells us 67 percent of shoppers research products ...

Grocers, Get Ready for Artificial Intelligence-based Transformation

Among the six digital imperatives for a successful omnichannel strategy established by FMI and Nielsen is one that involves completeness and consistency across in-store and digital shelves, cutting costs and creating a clear assortment inventory ...

How E-commerce Will Break the Rules on Proximity Impact to Retailer Identity

Studies that measure the impact of proximity aren’t always consistent. Some say proximity’s impact is overstated, while others report it’s a primary factor of shopper choice. One finding is consistent—once the shopper has decided on the retailer (...