Taking Action to Enhance Fresh Foods Success

FMI’s FreshForward Action Guide provides practical strategies for technology, consumer engagement and fresh food merchandising.

By David Haaf, Vice President, Fresh Foods, FMI  

Fresh food leaders need good ideas to overcome challenges, seize opportunities and strengthen performance.

But ideas alone are not enough. The real value comes from actionable strategies that provide clear pathways to success. That is a central focus of FMI’s annual FreshForward conference, which recently took place in St. Louis. 

The event, a product of our collaboration with Deloitte, showcased panels on three fresh topics: Practical Technology, Connecting with Consumers and Fresh Merchandising. After each panel, attendees gathered in facilitated discussion groups to identify the most actionable steps for each topic. 

The result is the newly published FreshForward Action Guide, which captures these takeaways. This year’s action steps offer winning approaches for engaging with consumers, leveraging technology and enhancing fresh merchandising. 

How to Leverage Practical Technology

The action steps for practical technology emphasize prioritizing fresh-focused tech solutions, building comfort with AI across internal teams, ensuring robust data quality and fostering coordination between the business and tech sides of organizations. 

One action step I especially like is “Trust but Verify.” Here’s how the guide describes it:

AI recommendations will only be adopted when users see reliable results. This reality speaks to the need to carefully validate performance during rollouts, such as through employee oversight and parallel testing.

Strategies for Connecting with Consumers

The action steps for connecting with consumers include leveraging fresh storytelling, optimizing messaging by platform, engaging with younger shoppers and practicing smart measurement. Here are insightful points that conference attendees made about engaging with younger shoppers:

Younger consumers are sometimes more enamored with center store, because they perceive the products to be convenient and offer plenty of on-package content about attributes. Fresh foods leaders can make progress through shopper messaging that relays fresh attributes and easy preparation strategies.

Improving Fresh Merchandising

The fresh industry can take strategic approaches to boost merchandising performance. The action steps identified by attendees emphasize visual appeal, overcoming fresh silos, showcasing differentiation and taking a whole-store approach. Here’s how conference attendees explained the whole-store opportunity:

Place fresh across the store, not just in the fresh department and perimeter. A big opportunity is showcasing fresh at the front of a store, greeting customers with the categories and products that define what sets the experience apart.

Putting Ideas into Action

I am sure you will find the Action Guide useful in your planning for the coming year and beyond. I encourage you to download the guide to explore the strategies in greater detail and review highlights from the conference speaker presentations. The guide includes a checklist for making progress with the action steps. 

I applaud our conference attendees for identifying such valuable actions. We have a unique opportunity to collaborate, learn from one another, challenge our thinking and strengthen relationships.

This is how we move our fresh industry forward!

Download the FreshForward Action Guide