Supply Chain

For Food Retailers Infrastructure Isn’t Just About Reliable Roads

This week kicked-off the seventh-annual Infrastructure Week, with hundreds of organizations and companies coming together to stress the importance of a reliable, well-managed national infrastructure. This year’s iteration comes at a particularly ...

Backhaul Pilot Project Aims to Reduce Empty Trucks on the Road

The backhaul challenge in transportation is characterized by an imbalance in transport flows between locations. A backhaul, as it relates to trucking capacity and logistics, is the return trip of a commercial truck that is transporting freight back ...

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 ...

Technology Just Might Solve the Dwell Time Conundrum

Nobody profits when drivers wait in the loading dock of a distribution center for teams to load or unload their trucks. It costs everybody in food retail. The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration estimates “detention time,” or dwell time, ...

Supply Chain Resilience – Lessons from Florida

I recently met with leading supply chain and disaster response experts, decision makers and other stakeholders in Florida to share our experiences in preparing, responding and recovering from Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria in 2017. Hosted by ...

SQF Code Recognized as a Procurement Standard for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games

The five Olympic rings aren’t the only thing food retailers will notice at 2020 Olympic games in Tokyo, Japan. The SQF Food Safety Code for Primary Production has been recognized as a procurement standard for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic ...

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 ...

A Proactive Approach to On-shelf Availability

We know the On-Shelf Availability (OSA) rate, the measure of products that are not available to buy right now, has been stuck at a stubborn eight percent for some time. If that doesn’t sound like much to you, translate it into dollars. If your ...

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 ...

The Transportation Capacity Challenge of 2018: Structural or Cyclical?

There is one disruptor, however, that might not seem so obvious. A severe capacity shortage in the trucking industry is affecting the flow of food to retail businesses and having a negative impact on the consumer experience. There simply aren’t ...

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’...

Accomplish Transparency In Food Safety

To protect consumers, retailers are now expecting more from their supplier’s food safety and quality processes. We believe one way to accomplish this is to be transparent about your food safety and quality programs by implementing a rigorous food ...

Retailers Stay Within the Circle of Trust with Food Safety

Year after year, FMI’s U.S. Grocery Shopper Trends Report shows consumers consistently trust their grocery store when it comes to food safety. This year, 93 percent of shoppers trust their grocery store to ensure the food they purchase is safe. No ...

Hurricane Preparedness and Response Resources

Hurricane and storm season is upon us and the first potential major storm of the years, Florence, is threatening the Eastern coast of the United States. To help our members prepare their stores, associates, supply chains and communities we’ve put ...