I emphasized another reason for being at FreshForward, which was held in late August in Minneapolis. The entire industry needs to come together to boost the success of fresh foods strategies. Senior leaders need to engage with each other to help navigate disruption and create the next generation of fresh foods opportunities. Retailers, wholesalers, suppliers, and service providers are integral to these efforts.

FMI's Foundation’s National Family Meals Month™Spokesmitt, Mitty the Mitt, joins the Voice of Food Retail as a guest author to share favorite family meal memories and speak to the impact the food retail industry has made helping consumers have one more family meal each week.

Since the advent of online grocery shopping, it has just been intuitively assumed that this new channel would take a major bite out of brick-and-mortar grocery traffic and sales. It just felt like a logical assumption that as people more frequently shopped and purchased food online, they would visit the physical store less often and spend less when they were there. Intuitively, that felt accurate. However, data from FMI’s 2019 U.S. Grocery Shopper Trends provides a picture of the online shopper that invites us to revisit our intuitive read on this situation.

There are 89 freshman House members in the 116thCongress and nine new Senators. Most, if not all these individuals, have not voted on a trade agreement in any context and many come from professions where the impacts and benefits of trade would not have played any role.