Each year, FMI’s Food Protection Committee (FPC) establishes initiatives that serve as the focus of the committee’s work for the year. Its initiatives focused on dealing with new regulations, managing recurring food safety problems and tackling basic cleaning and sanitation practices in constantly busy store environments.

While tax reform is probably the most significant legislative item for 2017, the broad range of legislative and regulatory items that FMI and the industry were able to influence – both offensively and defensively – demonstrates the diverse portfolio of issues FMI covers and bears all the unique characteristics of a heavily regulated industry.

2017 has been a year of big accomplishments for FMI, but something of a Lego-experience since these huge achievements are the sum of many, many small steps and tiny pieces coming together. Over the next few weeks, FMI will devote its blog platform to offering a step by step, department by department review of the past 12 months.

We refer to this new program as the Unified Voice Protocol and it is FMI’s most recent effort to establish a model approach to proactively perpetuate the environment of trust consumers tell us they enjoy with food retailers and to enhance that trust in the broader food and consumer goods industries.