NGA Show Draws Independent Grocers to San Diego

By Lorrie Baumann

More than 3,500 independent grocery retailers and wholesalers gathered in San Diego Feb. 23–26 to explore issues affecting the grocery industry, to discuss ideas for how they’re going to remain relevant and competitive in an omnichannel environment and to hear success stories from their colleagues who have winning strategies in place in their stores. This was National Grocers Association President and Chief Executive Officer Peter Larkin’s final time to preside at the gathering before he retires at the end of this year. Larkin has served the association for nine years.

Richard Volpe, a professor in Cal Poly’s Agribusiness Department and a member of the Food Industry University Coalition, brought a group of students to the NGA Show to compete in the NGA’s annual Student Case Study Competition and to participate in the mentoring opportunities offered to them by the association. To prepare for the competition, his agricultural economics and food marketing students had spent four months researching the economics of getting food from the field to the fork and had prepared to present that research to the association as part of their capstone projects for their degrees, he said.

This year’s Student Case Study Competition was around the topic of how independent grocers can encourage Millennials, especially those from diverse backgrounds, to join their ranks. The multi-day judging event evaluated presentations by 13 university student groups and concluded with Saint Joseph’s University and Western Michigan University facing off in a final round in which Saint Joseph’s took top honors.

For Warren Brown, Vice President of Operations at Commerce Quality Foods, a retail grocer with eight stores — six in Georgia and two in South Carolina — the event was an educational opportunity that he hopes will help him attract new customers. “A lot of our customer base is older. We’ve got to embrace that younger generation to have a new customer base,” he said. “We need to embrace technology in the grocery business, especially in the independent world, or we’re going to be left behind.”
He noted that many of the 400 vendors in the 57,000 square-foot exhibit hall were offering new technology that can help him do that, and his next step may be finding new meat-wrapping equipment that can help him add more deli offerings into his stores. Brown foresees that prepared foods will be playing a greater role in his stores in the future, and while he’s already dipped a toe into that water with a smoker and a hot and cold bar, he’s anticipating that his stores will need to go further. “That’s kind of the first wave before we go into full deli,” he said.

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Fresh-cut meat is a real point of pride for Joe Jester, from Hamilton, Ohio, who believes that the custom cuts that he offers in his Brookville IGA store offer his shoppers both better texture and better flavor that they can get in the pre-packaged meat they’d buy in a chain store where the meat was cut and wrapped in a central processing facility. “We don’t have to do anything artificial to it. We cut it and present it,” he said. “Custom-cut meat is a real opportunity for independents to showcase their meat departments.”

He recently bought two new stores, and the first thing he did was double the size of their deli departments so the markets can offer their customers more prepared offerings like sandwiches, deviled eggs, pasta bowls and hot pizza. “It looks like it’s working very successfully,” he said. “People’s most valuable commodity right now is time, so anything you can do to save them time is appreciated.”

While he feels that he’s got that point pretty well figured out, he came to the NGA Show hoping for some guidance on what he should do next with social media. He’s got Facebook accounts, and he’ll probably do Twitter next, but he’s been letting other grocers iron out the wrinkles on click-and-collect and other strategies for competing with online marketers before he adopts them, and he thinks now might be the time to start figuring out more of that. “If you’re not keeping up with technology, you’re going to be behind,” he said.

David Masterson, Director of Information Technology for Bristol Farms, came to the event to explore how Bristol Farms might strengthen its level of competition in the grocery industry with artificial intelligence, click-and-collect services and various omnichannel methods. “Consumers are migrating towards digital,” he said. “Walmart and Ralph’s are strengthening that part of their business, and we need to strengthen that as well to make sure we’re able to compete in the future.”

Chris Smith, the Vice President of Information Technology for Homeland Acquisition Corporation, which is headquartered in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and operates stores under the Homeland, United Supermarkets and Cash Savers banners in four states, was also searching the exhibit hall for vendors who could help his company compete in the technology arena. “The technology side of the NGA Show seems to grow every year,” he noted. For him, this show offered a particular advantage because it presented him with an opportunity to catch all of his vendors and prospective vendors in one place and to catch up with his colleagues in independent grocery retailing. “Some of which we see only once a year,” he said. “They’re resources where we can bounce things off each other.”