Total Store Collaboration is a core strategic pillar of FMI and is our wrap-around means of describing our approach to fostering partnerships between retailers, manufacturers, and distributors in the food industry. While retailer/supplier collaboration is an oft-discussed topic and wished for industry aspiration, FMI is in a unique position to facilitate the conversations needed for true cooperative effort to move from dream to reality. In the past year, we’ve built significantly on the initiative (started in early 2014) by expanding our collaborative communities and focusing on high priority industry issues.

A compilation of the monthly agendas for the 2016 resource calls of FMI’s Communications and Consumer Affairs Council (CCA) reads like the chapter headings of Everything You Wanted to Know about Food Retail in 2016, But Were Afraid to Ask.

The whole world is connected. And, if it isn’t yet, it will be. The same goes for the food retailing industry. That is what representatives from the industry’s leading companies discovered when they joined an FMI-organized Jan. 5-8 visit to International CES 2017. The giant consumer electronics show that takes over every inch of all the major venues in Las Vegas year after year is the showcase for products that the world’s consumers soon will be using – but just don’t know it yet.

Consumers were undoubtedly anxious in 2016, but the “sustainability bandwagon” kept rolling for food wholesalers and retailers. The industry’s commitment to creating sustainable supply chains and proactively engaging on a broad spectrum of corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues is ingrained in business operations; it has become part of corporate culture. FMI’s work on sustainability throughout 2016 mirrored this fact.