The Fedtrade® podcast recently interviewed Doug Baker, Vice President of Industry Relations at FMI – The Food Industry Association, as part of our SelectUSA Investment Summit Spotlight series. As the food industry association, FMI works with and on behalf of the entire industry to advance a safer, healthier and more efficient consumer food supply chain. Representatives from FMI will be attending the 2025 SelectUSA Investment Summit in National Harbor, Maryland, from May 11-14, 2025.
Learn more about FMI on their website or follow them on LinkedIn. Connect with Doug on LinkedIn.
Key Takeaways:
- FMI provides members with advocacy; food safety training and resources; and collaboration and community.
- Startups face challenges in gaining visibility in a crowded market.
- FMI fosters innovation through initiatives like the Tech Pitch Competition.
[a copy of the written transcript is here]:
Hello, welcome to Fedtrade®. I’m James Hastings of Rothwell Figg. Joining us today is Doug Baker, Vice President of Industry Relations of FMI, The Food Industry Association. Doug will be sharing FMI’s mission and how it helps its national and international members successfully navigate the U.S. marketplace to the benefit of consumers throughout the country.
Doug, welcome to Fedtrade®.
James, thanks for having me. I look forward to the conversation.
Doug, what is FMI, the Food Industry Association?
We’re the Grocery Industry Trade Association. We represent retailers from one store operators up to multi-state, multi-national. We’re vertically integrated and represent some of the most iconic brands that consumers buy in grocery stores. And then we also engage any other organization that supports the grocery industry to ensure that we have a safe and healthy food supply chain for consumers.
Who is a typical FMI member?
Yeah, so we primarily came together as an association. It was focused on food safety on one side and advocacy on the other. And those two, about 50 years ago, came together to create the Food Marketing Institute. And then prior to the pandemic, we changed to just FMI, The Food Industry Association. But our primary member was always retailers and wholesalers, those who sold products. But over the course of these last 50 years, we saw that it was extremely important to have other people at the table as we worked on really big and important issues in the grocery industry and the food supply chain. Again, retailers, wholesalers, product manufacturers, and then anybody that supports those entities.
What types of services does FMI provide to its members?
We really sort of sit in three key buckets. One, we do advocacy. We have long and abiding relationships with the various federal agencies, as well as Congress and the administrations that are in office at the time. We work also along food safety lines. We have food safety resources. We say from farm gate to dinner plate. FMI owns an organization, a food safety program, called Safe Quality Food Institute, which is benchmarked under the Global Food Safety Initiative. And we bought that off of the government of Australia probably 40 years ago and have been building that. In addition to advocacy, we can also work with our members in any company to certify them for safe food handling, for good manufacturing processes, for distribution, and so on. And then the third area is really around the collaboration and education in bringing industry stakeholders together, communities of practice, and create communities where they can spend time with their peers and they can talk about pre competitive issues and share learnings with those pre competitive issues during research and education and just meeting. I come to find that most stakeholders in our industry, they just want to know they’re not on an island by themselves.
Sure. We understand that FMI also attracts and serves international companies seeking to go-to-market in the United States. Can you tell us a little about that?
Yeah, sure. Sources of supply and product innovation are one of the lifebloods of our industry. In order to be able to do that, we need to have a global supply chain. You need to understand who is providing no matter where you are around the world. If you also look at our membership, we have members who are either headquartered or do business in 70 countries but also do business here. So there’s a lot of opportunity for FMI to have visibility into manufacturing outside of the U.S. or brands and emerging brands outside of the U.S. that aspire to come to the U.S. and get into this very enticing market that we have here. We work with them in one way, you know, they need to meet our food safety rules here in the United States. So a lot of times we meet them through Safe Quality Food Institute, our sister company. In other instances, they come to us through our members and they’re looking for support and understanding how they engage in this industry, how they engage with retailers. You know, there’s a lot of processes that are in place to have a new product hit the shelf and each retailer does it a little bit differently and so we can help them understand what those nuances are, and then even help them meet the right people that they need to meet to have those relationships.
Based on your experience, what are some common characteristics of startups or established companies who seek to go to market in the United States?
The great thing is that, you know, consumers in the United States, whether they’re traveling abroad or they’re eating at home, they love experience, right? And so what we’ve seen is that the palette of the U.S. consumer has expanded quite broadly. And not only that, we have a large immigration population, you know, people coming from other countries, and they want to be able to access food that reminds them of home. And so, flavors, smells, colors, textures, it’s really what makes the grocery industry so unique and exciting. And also you know, why the average grocery store carries 45,000 SKUs in it is because they want to meet their consumers needs, whether it’s, you know, a special evening or they’re missing home and they want to have some food from home to remind them of what it was like to be a kid again. So it’s really fun.
What are some of the common challenges that you see startups or established companies in the food industry have in seeking to go to market in the United States?
It’s going to seem pretty sort of low-tech, but it’s hard to be noticed you know, it’s a very competitive market. And there’s 45,000 SKUs, but there’s not shelf stretchers, right? Getting to meet the right organizations that are going help you. To create awareness with your product, get it on the shelf, get it set at the right price, help promote it. Those are all things that are just not easy because there’s so many products out there. If the average store has 45,000, there’s hundreds of thousands of products. So how do you decide where to go and who’s the best partner for you and the brand that you’re trying to introduce? And so again, it’s the uniqueness of our industry that we have such a diverse network of grocery stores focusing on various consumer sets, but it’s also a challenge to be able to get time with them to explain to them why they want your product and not somebody else’s product. Those are some challenges. Plus inside the U.S., we have certain things that brands need to keep in mind and think about. Consumers rising ESG expectations, changing marketplace and societal dynamics with consumers. E-commerce and digital shopping is big. And so that in some instances is changing the way products are packaged because they’re being delivered or they’re being automatically selected through automation and warehouses. And so what does that mean for how the product is packaged as it goes through that system? So there’s just several nuances. I wouldn’t say that they can’t be overcome. They just take a little bit of time and lot of education to really understand what your target is in the United States.
Many of the examples you just mentioned require legal and regulatory compliance in the United States. Do you work with a network of professional service providers to help your members?
We have really good relationships with several different organizations, agencies, consultants, firms, trademark lawyers, and attorneys who are individuals that support our industry and they’re associate members of FMI. We’re able to connect them with those organizations that are looking for support through our diverse membership, that’s one of the benefits of being a member of FMI, it opens up sort of a rolodex of solutions and support and thought leaders that can help you with these activities.
You had mentioned education as one of the benefits of being an FMI member. Can you give us a couple of examples of the types of education that you provide?
Yeah, sure. I would say the ones that are probably the easiest to sort of wrap your arm around are our education conferences. So we do about 12 education conferences throughout the year. And some of them are industry focused. Some of them are very topic focused. We have an annual meet conference. We have a financial executive conference. We have an asset protection conference. It’s based on the communities that gather under the FMI umbrella and how they need to serve themselves. And in some instances, we build a conference around that to bring them together. There’s also webinars. We do several webinars every single month and throughout the year. And then our research and insights. We do anywhere from 30 to 35 primary and secondary pieces of research each and every year. We have two signature pieces of research, which is our U.S. Grocery Shopper Trends Report and our FMI Speaks Report. So the first one is really about the consumer. What are they thinking? What’s keeping them awake at night? What do they like? What do they dislike? And then the Speaks Report is having a conversation with the CEOs that run this industry and what keeps them awake at night, what do they need, and what are they seeing are the positives and the challenges of the industry. And those are our foundational pieces of research. Then off of that, we sort of pull the thread on topics. So digitally engaged food shopper, fresh, supply chain, asset protection, to really sort of get down into the various topic areas or functional areas of the industry.
We understand that FMI will be attending the SelectUSA Investment Summit taking place this coming month at National Harbor, Maryland. Can you tell us a little about your participation there?
Yeah, looking forward to it. They’ve invited FMI to moderate a panel and it’s an industry spotlight panel on food and beverage. So we’ve got a pretty diverse panel. I hope that the attendees will look forward to hearing from them. We have a tech startup and a food tech startup as well as an import lawyer, as well as a company who owns manufacturing and actually made the journey from Asia to the United States and now realizes some good success here in this country. At the same time, they’re investing in the U.S. So hopefully they’ll glean some insights and maybe some takeaways to be able to do it themselves.
As we know, the U.S. supermarket space and slotting costs play a great factor in whether or not certain brands will be introduced and be allowed to sell within U.S. supermarket chains. How important in your experience are the value of brands for a company seeking to enter that chain?
There’s things that just sort of keep the machine running that are sort of like, you know, standard operating procedure and there’s costs associated with putting in a new product and taking out a product and all the administration that goes to actually putting it in. I was a retailer on two different occasions for the first half of my career and the amount of work that it takes to put that new product in, there’s definitely a cost associated with it. But the one thing I would also say is that retailers are looking to be competitive, right? And they want to have points of differentiation. One, they don’t want to be out competed by their competitor, but they’re also looking for those opportunities to have points of differentiation. And so the way I would encourage brands to come into market is have that storyline, explain to that retailer that they’re looking to get their product on the shelf as to why they want them, why they are going to create a competitive advantage for that retailer. And there are partnerships that are created. I wouldn’t say it’s a one size fits all. Retailers look at each and every brand and compare it to their strategy and how that product is going to meet that strategy in the store. So it’s important. It’s real. There’s costs associated to doing this, but if you just make it transactional, then it’s going to be a transactional relationship. If you look at the strategy behind it, then there’s definitely potentially some negotiation and partnerships that can be created.
Can you share one or two success stories of working with FMI members, either through SelectUSA or through your efforts with the organization?
Yeah, sure. Many of our conferences we do what we call trading partner meetings. Some people call them speed dating. If they’re less than 45 minutes, we have a variation of that. And we do that not only with new products, but also with new technologies. And so, you know, one instance is not a product related, it’s technology related. We created the FMI Tech Pitch Competition. And so each year at our midwinter executive conference in January, for the six months leading up to it, we have a virtual pitch competition with emerging technology companies. And then the top three get to come to midwinter and pitch in front of the entire live audience, which includes the FMI Board of Directors. These are decision makers in their organizations and that’s been really successful. And we also do that in different variations with brands. We have an annual business conference and we’ve had a situation where we invite emerging brands, founder brands, to come into the annual business conferences and give them a different type of experience but also allow the retailers to see them without the same kind of investment that the CPG large iconic brands have. So we’re always looking for ways to introduce those folks. We started a small company inside of FMI called Emerge. And it was an opportunity to nurture these emerging brands. And some of these brands came to us, these founders came to us, and they had a recipe on a three by five card. So how can you help them find their way to the shelf? In the long run, it wasn’t a business that FMI could sustain, but the woman that we hired to run it, we spun it off and she’s taken it and she owns it now and it’s thriving and it’s growing under the business model that she created. And we continue to support her and she continues to funnel companies to us when they’re ready to be introduced to the industry.
For those who are seeking more information on becoming a member of FMI, how do they go about doing so?
Yes, the best place is probably to go to fmi.org. And there’s a little button there that says get involved up in the right-hand corner. But spend a little bit of time on the website and peruse around. We have industry topics, so if you have a specific topic area that you’re interested in, you can learn more about it. And then there’s information on what it means to become a member or an associate member at FMI. And then all of our contact is on the website. So you can find me out there. You can find my colleague, Peter Collins, who leads our associate membership if you’re interested in learning more about that. But reach out. Let’s have a conversation. We can give you a much more intimate formal introduction to FMI and together we can decide if it’s the right time and the right association for you to join.
Doug Baker, Vice President of Industry Relations of FMI, The Food Industry Association. Thanks for joining us.
Thanks for having me, James.
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