An Exercise for Fresh Food Executives: What Makes Fresh Food Departments Brilliant?

At FMI’s recent FreshForward event, Leslie Sarasin challenged fresh food executives to consider what makes the fresh food departments brilliant.

By: Leslie G. Sarasin, President & CEO, FMI

The following is an excerpt adapted from a keynote presentation at FreshForward.

There is currently a Tony Award-winning play running on Broadway that is rewriting some of the rules regarding scripting, staging, and overall formats of a successful dramatic performance.

It’s called Every Brilliant Thing, and you may have heard of it because Daniel Radcliffe (of Harry Potter fame), Mariska Hargitay (of Law and Order fame), and Tracee Ellis Ross (of Black-ish and daughter of singing legend Diana Ross) have each had stints starring in this one-of-a-kind solo show.  

The play centers around the musings of a person who, as a youngster, began compiling a list of things “worth living for” as a means of helping his mother deal with her depression. As the protagonist grows up, so does the list. It takes on a life of its own, leading him to solicit others' thoughts and contributions to add to it, and the play is a recitation of (some) of the things that are on the list. Some are significant, but honestly, the vast majority are just small, simple, ordinary things. Things like:

• #1. Ice Cream
• #62. Roller coasters
• #101. Massages
• #102. Late-night text conversations
• #1040. Fuzzy felt
• #1294. The even-numbered Star Trek Films
• #2571. Hugs and laughing until your tummy hurts
• #2572. Seashells
• #3545. Untangling things
• #3263. Telephones with a rotary dial rather than push buttons
• #3346. Getting a mix tape

But what truly makes the play so exhilarating and fun is that a good number of the things that make life worth living are shared by the audience members themselves. They aren’t just observers of a performance but are actual participants in and contributors to the spontaneous dialogue.

The play has been a happy success because people leave these performances excited, appreciative, laughing, and, for the most part, just happy to be alive,  partially because they’ve been reminded of many of the things that bring a smile to our faces.  But I think more importantly, they are happy because they’ve been recognized as experts on what matters in their own lives. They’ve been asked to share in the process of breaking it down, realizing the value of the small gestures in their own existence.

I want to borrow the idea from the play Every Brilliant Thing and urge fresh food executives to compose a list of “every brilliant thing” that makes fresh food departments worth having. What is it about “fresh” that makes it special?

Like in the play, your observations do not have to be grandiose. In fact, you and I both know that success is very seldom ONE big thing, but is usually the cumulative effect of many, many small gestures. Write them down, discuss them as a team, revisit the list and add to it over time. The exercise here is to highlight that the glory of the fresh department rests not in any single magnanimous gesture but is found in the infinite sum of all the small, steady virtues, enjoyments and pleasures it provides daily.

In realizing this, we learn that we will not solve the challenges facing us in one monumental motion. But we can address them by breaking big problems into smaller doable tasks, by striving to be better every day, by relying on those who serve with us to offer perspectives we may not see, and by trusting the innate health, value, and virtue of the products we sell.

If you need help with the exercise, I urge you to download The State of Fresh Foods, which offers a benchmark for fresh food departments and many reminders of why they are brilliant.

The State of Fresh Foods