Viewpoints

Expo West, held the first week in March, was a terrific and positive kick-off to the 2015 food shows. Record attendance of over 70,000 and enough exhibitors to swell the walls of the over 800,000 square foot of exhibit space to include outdoor fo...

Fear. That’s an emotion that fills the room when retailers — especially smaller ones — discuss online shopping. You can feel it in their questions: Should we enter the online space? Can we get up to speed and make it profitable? How can we ...

Earlier this week, a reporter from a consumer magazine contacted me to chat about added value items at the supermarket. As I started pulling together examples of fresh ideas in produce, meat and deli, it occurred to me that some of the most inte...

At a time when retail pharmacists are conducting diagnostic tests under collaborative practice agreements with physicians, and expanding into more lucrative services like dispensing specialty drugs, companion bills introduced in the House and Sen...

One of the highlights of The NGA Show, which takes place Feb. 8-11 in Las Vegas, will be the Creative Choice Awards. I had the pleasure of being a judge for three marketing categories: frequent shopper or targeted marketing campaign; non-price...

There’s an old phrase coined by the British comedy group Monty Python that happens to perfectly describe what the best independent retailers are all about: “And now for something completely different.” Differentiation is everything to indep...

We’ve all had 15 years to get used to the 21st century, but I’m not sure that’s happened yet. The pace of change has quickened each year, impacting everything from consumer behavior to company strategies and making business decisions more difficu...

We all have ideas on what’s most important to participants in the food retail industry. That said, the Internet era allows us to learn more precisely what people are interested in. At SN, for instance, we know how much reader traffic different co...

Just as health systems are improving patient outcomes by basing in-store clinics in food stores and partnering with retail dietitians and pharmacists, healthcare providers are paying close attention to social determinants of health such as food i...