Food retailers continue to see opportunities for differentiation as consumer expectations continue to shift and evolve. They have also become increasingly savvy, having to compete with an ever-growing set of rivals. We’re seeing a variety of strategies and initiatives.

For starters, although we're in the food retail business, we’re all consumers at the end of the day. Like the people who shop our stores (or who we want to shop at our stores), we may divide our meals during a typical week by eating out at restaurants, taking food home from restaurants, buying prepared foods from our stores, making meals from scratch, using shortcut ingredients in home meals or substituting snacks for meals.

The strawberry – featured in a video produced by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and shown at a panel discussion on Combating Food Waste during the recent FreshForward event in Chicago – doesn’t stand alone. According to panelist Dr. Frank Mitloehner, professor and air quality extension specialist in the Department of Animal Science at the University of California, Davis, 40 percent of all food grown in the U.S. is estimated to be wasted, a figure that holds true internationally and in developing countries, where food often is left on the field or other places before it even gets to market.

This year, in analyzing the data from the questions that historically shaped the Worry Index, we found that there were as many factors that contributed positively to sales and profits as there were factors negatively impacting the bottom line. Consequently, in a decided to move to the more positive – we renamed the Worry Index the Food Retail Pulse. We hope you detect the more encouraging note of this move as it is a recurring theme in this year’s Speaks findings.