Boardroom: Charting the Changing Food Retail Environment

By: Heather Garlich, Senior Director of Media and Public Relations, Food Marketing Institute

Part I of a two-part post. See part-two.

Recently FMI, in partnership with global consulting firm Oliver Wyman, jointly released a compilation journal of strategic insights to help senior executives successfully guide their companies in this ever-changing food retail environment.

Boardroom is comprised of original perspectives from leading experts in food retail on a selection of the most critical issues executives must confront in boardrooms across the country and around the world. We are excited to share a series of Q&As with various authors from papers included in the journal that will give an expanded perspective on the key topics.

In this two-part interview, I had a chance to speak with the two architects of Boardroom, Mark Baum, senior vice president & chief collaboration officer at FMI, and Mike Matheis, global industry association lead, Oliver Wyman, on how Boardroom was created and its importance to the food retail community.

How did the Boardroom come to fruition?

Mike Matheis, Oliver Wyman: About one and a half years ago, Mark and I were discussing ways we could continue to improve the FMI member value generated from our Board and Senior Merchandising Executive (SME) Forum content we had delivered. We agreed that the insights from our meetings and forums were excellent and that while white papers had been produced for each and presentations had been made available on our SME Forum web-site, people are busy and can benefit from significant insight being neatly packaged and provided to them in an efficient and senior manner.  The concept of Boardroom was born!

Mark Baum, FMI: Exactly! FMI and OW have been collaborating as strategic partners for the last several years and part of what we do is to provide content to our board of directors, and we've created a community of senior merchandising executives (SMEs). Wed created a great deal of intellectual capital - webinars, white papers and frameworks for business building opportunities – and were looking for a way of bundling that up and presenting it to key professionals and other stakeholders. So we created an annual journal, which includes a lot of this information with an extendable shelf life and will provide great information for members throughout the year.

Can you both address the issues covered in Boardroom and their importance to food retail executives?

Matheis: Sure. While Boardroom covers many important industry issues pertaining to growth strategies, food waste and food safety, cyber and crisis management, and omnichannel challenges and opportunities, it is important to note that one of the key principles that we have operated under for all our Board and SME Forum content is that all is member-driven. We interview CEOs and SMEs throughout the year to make sure that any topics discussed are the most important issues for them and what they want to have peer-to-peer discussions about, leveraging the insight to improve their business performance.

Baum: The content here consists of the most important stay-awake-at-night issues for senior leaders today. And while we prioritize the issues they may and frequently do, shift. But if you think about the topics in this journal, the number one challenge for all companies is growth – as we like to say, “you'll never save your way to prosperity”. And the other topics, are timely and directly impacting   our business today; for example, cyber security and crisis management are permeating our business in every facet. In the social and digital world of instant communication, crisis management is increasingly becoming just “management”. We want also provide “news you can use”. You're going to take this journal back to your company and apply it that same day, while provoking a lot of thinking from your management team.

Matheis: It’s also important for FMI members to know that when these papers were written following various events they contained additional resources available to the members at FMI. Some of that was removed in the journal, but when members read Boardroom, they should know that for those issues that are of are high interest, they can go to the SME forum website to access how FMI can further help them.

See part-two | See the full series on Boardroom.