Omnichannel

Building The Supply Chain of Tomorrow At Groceryshop

Although customer-facing technologies often grab the limelight, some of the most impactful technology shifts are those increasing the speed, efficiency and transparency with which products move through the supply chain. These technologies will build ...

Physical Store Changes Meet Omnichannel Opportunities

According to FMI’s 2019 U.S. Grocery Shopper Trends report, 43% of shoppers now report buying groceries online at least once in the past year. With this in mind, food retailers need to understand how the physical store changes will set them up for ...

Photo Friday: Zabar’s in Manhattan

Recently, with Stanley Zabar and Scott Goldshine as our hosts, 35 FMI guests were welcomed by Zabar’s for a store tour. Everyone loved seeing the famous neighborhood spot where you can buy eggs, a Kitchen Aid, a bagel, an Instapot, coffee and exotic ...

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 ...