Research

What Millennials Want in Foodservice at Retail

Millennials. Every business is focused on how to tap into their emerging buying power and identify their needs and wants. In many ways, millennials are driving the trend of foodservice at retail, so understanding this shopper segment is ...

A Valentine for Food Retailers

The greeting card companies are also getting savvier in working with retailers. Along with new product offerings, many have developed innovative displays and have an individualized approach to offering in-store marketing capabilities. This ...

Understanding the New Food Marketplace

Terms never spoken just a few years ago are now entering the lexicon of those involved with the food industry: Urban agriculture. Vertical farming. Lab-grown meat. Plant based protein. Food-as-a-service. Statistics and forecasts about the future ...

Holidays and Grocery Industry: Gifts That Keeps On Giving

Ask any food retailer and they will tell you that Thanksgiving through Super Bowl Sunday is their busiest time of the year. It’s true, there are a number of holidays crammed into a short time period between November and early February, but is this ...

The Power of Foodservice At Retail: What Comes After Rotisserie Chickens?

Retail foodservice has experienced robust growth in recent years that many retailers hope to build upon. FMI’s Power of Foodservice at Retail, sponsored by Hussman and The Shelby Report, strives to provide insights as to how to capitalize on this ...

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 ...

Final Jeopardy!: Navigating Disruption in Food Retail

Raise your hand if you’re a fan of the long-running TV show Jeopardy! Isn’t it satisfying when you can answer the question, especially if the contestants are stumped? Considering all the disruption today in the food industry, don’t we wish we had ...

Food Retail as a Social Network

Food retailers are embracing their roles as arbiters and curators of these food experiences, so we recognize the need to challenge FMI’s ways of communicating the priority issues of food retail to better depict our members’ dynamic ...

The Lego Legacy of 2017

2017 has been a year of big accomplishments for FMI, but something of a Lego-experience since these huge achievements are the sum of many, many small steps and tiny pieces coming together. Over the next few weeks, FMI will devote its blog platform ...

To Speak with One Voice

We refer to this new program as the Unified Voice Protocol and it is FMI’s most recent effort to establish a model approach to proactively perpetuate the environment of trust consumers tell us they enjoy with food retailers and to enhance that trust ...

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 ...

Surprise! Shoppers Expect Retailers to Know the Answer to These Questions

I have found I can usually trust my instincts and intuitions when it comes to knowing what most people think, and when I question my judgment in this regard I tend to rely on my Kentucky roots and the connections I still have there to gauge what ...

Challenges and Opportunities: Is the Food Retail Industry Unique?

Just two short months ago I started at FMI as the director of research. Through my first assignment, releasing the 67th edition of The Food Retailing Industry Speaks (Speaks) report, I quickly became immersed in the exciting and evolving food retail ...

The Unsung Heroes of Local Communities

While I often witness how the stores I frequent are involved in making a difference in our neighborhood, through the awards, I get to glimpse how the oft-unmentioned kindness of grocers throughout the U.S. can change their neighbor’s lives, proving ...

From Customer to Partner

Shoppers are on a quest to become more deeply connected to the food experience, and the retailer is a vital part of facilitating that connection – not just by providing the product, but also by providing the surrounding story about the product....