At our 2020 Midwinter Executive Conference, we honored Skogen’s Festival Foods with the FMI Food Safety Innovation Award. Festival Foods has demonstrated a responsibility to strengthening its food safety culture using a multi-pronged approach.

FMI and Oliver Wyman’s annual journal publication Boardroom provides a starting point. In fact, volume 5 of the journal is a strategic playbook for the emerging issues a food retailer or supplier should be discussing in their boardrooms—that’s how we arrived at the name. Just look at the breath of topics covered in this year’s journal.

Shoppers are pushing back on plastic waste, but many consumers do recognize packaging can be important when it comes to product shelf life, food safety, in-store conditions, product information, portability and more. This is particularly true for produce shoppers as we found in our 2020 Power of Produce research.

I have a bottle of alcohol-based hand sanitizer with at least 60% alcohol sitting on my desk at work. It’s half-full, and I’ve used it more in the last two weeks than the last two years. I am also washing my hands with soap and water for 20 seconds. The reports of coronavirus have heightened our awareness regarding personal health and prevention habits, and compounding these challenges, our members also must think about the well-being of their associates, their customers and the overall supply chain as they prepare for a potential public health crisis.