FMI offers glimpse of food retailing's future

The Food Marketing Institute’s return to Chicago was a combination of theatre and reality.

The association presented a preview of how current research, trend analysis and future-focused leaders predict how food retailing is going to change by 2025, along with a status check on today’s industry.

Looking forward, the FMI Retail Experience of the Future exhibit gave attendees ideas for enhancing the shopping experience and effectively adapting to the changing retail environment. The first part of the exhibit focused on the consumers of the future, which were segmented into four distinct types of customers – Gourmet Gordon, a Generation X or Baby Boomer, living in major urban cities; Metropolitan Marsha, a Generation X or an older Millennial in a large city; Traditional Tim, a Baby Boomer living in the suburbs, mid-size city or small town and Millennial Mel, a younger Millennial generation living in a small town or suburb.

“The goal of the Retail Experience of the Future is to provoke thought, create conversation and inspire optimism among FMI Connect attendees about the possibilities ahead. The exhibit serves as an informed observation of where consumers, food, marketing and technology are headed, and what that may mean for the food retail industry in the future,” said Leslie G. Sarasin, president and CEO of FMI.

The main part of the exhibit featured a series of “what if” vignettes with a structured focus on the following key predictions:

– Stores will become emotional destinations
– The store floor will come a “hyper showroom” to help shoppers become smarter consumers;
– Stores will enable micro-personalization on a macro-scale;
– Retail’s role in its shoppers’ well-being will increase;
– The store environment will become highly responsive;
– Store associates will become shopper advocates; and
– Technology will enable the experience without interrupting it.

Addressing today’s consumer issues, FMI also released its annual analysis of U.S. Grocery Shopper Trends, which revealed significant changes in the retail universe that are impacting the way food companies operate.

U.S. Grocery Shopper Trends 2014 identified and explored five major trends:

– Diversification of the “primary store” as a touchstone of shopper behavior;
– Fragmentation of the “primary shopper” role within households;
– Generational transformation in what “planning” means to food shoppers;
– Re-orientation of consumer attitudes around wellness, with fresh, less-processed taking a center stage; and
– Opening for food retailers to become trusted allies in helping shoppers navigate food and wellness.

“FMI’s U.S. Grocery Shopper Trends 2014 shows supermarkets returning to a 54 percent level of channel share, supercenters down to 22 percent and each of the other categories, such as discount and specialty - registering one percent lower from the positions held the year before. Clearly, the traditional supermarket picked up a few points in all that movement, but what is most interesting is the leap in the number of people who claim they have no primary store,” said Sarasin.

On the exhibit floor, the focus was more on technology and in-store solutions than CPG products, although big grocery companies like Pepsi, Coke, Kellogg’s and Mondelez had sizable booths. On the tech side, Motorola Solutions was showing its latest personal shopping devices, which look like smartphones and are said to lift revenue by up to 14 percent in some cases. Applying technology to food safety was also a big trend, with companies like ReposiTrak offering solutions to help retailers track where products are coming from.

While attendance wasn’t as high as some exhibitors would have liked, the show did have a positive air, with several retailers saying they look forward to the next conference slated from next June.