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Q&A: How a blueprint for the grocery industry began on an airport cocktail napkin

The 10th anniversary edition of FMI—The Food Industry Association and Oliver Wyman’s Boardroom Journal celebrates a decade of insights and guidance in the food industry and examines what’s in store in the decade to come.

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Consumer InsightsFoodFood Retail

FMI Boardroom Journal

FMI/Oliver Wyman

More than a decade ago, when Mike Matheis was waiting on his flight at Chicago O’Hare International Airport, he was in the midst of a phone conversation with Mark Baum. Matheis, global industry association, Civic and Economic Organization lead for Oliver Wyman and Baum, senior vice president of Industry Relations and chief collaboration officer for FMI – The Food Industry Association, were “brainstorming ways to execute against the FMI strategy and deliver value to (FMI) members,” Matheis said. “One of the key tenets of (FMI’s) strategic plan was increasing peer-to-peer discussion in board meetings and in C-suite forums, and Mark and I (saw) we lacked a platform or a vehicle to share those insights with members who are participating outside of those board meetings or even more broadly across the membership. And that’s how Boardroom was born.”

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Boardroom Journal, the annual journal designed to educate and engage C-suite executives tackling the most compelling issues facing the food industry. Here Matheis and Baum took time at FMI’s 2025 Midwinter Executive Conference to discuss the impact the Boardroom Journal has had in addressing critical topics and in providing valuable insights and guidance for the transformative years ahead. 

Boardroom Journal interview
Mike Matheis (left) and Mark Baum

What was the original intent and purpose of Boardroom? In other words, what is the strategic value of the Boardroom Journal?

Matheis: Mark and I were brainstorming ways to execute against the FMI strategy and deliver value to the members. And one of the key tenets of the strategic plan was increasing peer-to-peer discussion in board meetings and in the C-suite forums, and Mark and I (saw) we lacked a platform or a vehicle to share those insights with members who are participating outside of those board meetings or even more broadly across the membership. And that’s how Boardroom was born. The content inside, by definition, is on the most important issues in the industry. And because Boardroom is an annual journal, those get refreshed every year. We feel like that’s provided a lot of value over the years.

Baum: Just to add a little color and texture to what Mike said, like all great ideas, the genesis of Boardroom began on a cocktail napkin at a bar at O’Hare Airport. We wanted to create something of lasting value. We had a number of board members who had asked for enough copies to share with their boards, with their executive leadership team and the like. And it really became sort of like a guiding light for the issues that matter most. It’s been a great blueprint, not just for us as an organization, to address those issues, but to bring them down and summarize them and give our members a roadmap throughout the course of the year.

How do FMI members use the journal?

Baum: They use it to educate themselves because it takes what we present at a high level, say in a board meeting or a board committee meeting, and it really puts a fine point on it. It dimensionalizes it. It expands on the original concept so it gives them the kind of what I call news they can use. They can use that to help educate their boards, their leadership team. It also empowers leadership teams to imbue these concepts throughout their organization. It becomes not just a really nice document that we’re proud to share with them or they’re proud to share with one another–it becomes a living, breathing thing that they use over the course of the year.

Matheis: Some of the board members have told me over the years that, in addition to reading it themselves, sending it to the leadership teams, they actually hold meetings to compare notes with each other on their learnings from reading Boardroom and the implications (it has) to their strategies and plans. So that’s really key, and that’s gratifying to us to know that it’s really being used tangibly that way. The quality of the print publication when we first launched it was intended to make it so that some people would be comfortable putting it on the credenza, putting it on the coffee table in their office, out in the lobby. Then, there was an intent to broaden the distribution of this when we went to online in 2019. That, then, allowed people to expand it even further. And then the year after that, we actually added audio to the article, so as members are mobile, they can listen to it, whether they’re in a car, in a train, in an airport.

Baum: I use it selfishly, from an FMI standpoint, as a recruitment tool. When we’re calling on a prospective member, we use it to demonstrate the kind of visionary leadership that we are providing through our partnership with Oliver Wyman, and it’s powerful. It’s very, very compelling. And even when we get to joint business planning with our members, we use this within every segment of our membership. So, you know, we have retailers and wholesalers. They have different needs, and they extract different things from this. We always had manufacturers as part of our associate membership, but back in 2020 we made what actually turned out to be a prescient decision. We changed our bylaws to allow manufacturers to become what we call product supplier members of FMI. That was a sea change. FMI was created over 45 years ago by and for the benefit of retailers and wholesalers. So 2020 we became vertically integrated, and CPG companies could join FMI with all the same right, roles and responsibilities as retailers and wholesalers. So now they’re part of our board, so they’re part of that deliberation, and Boardroom guides a lot of that discussion up and down the supply chain.

Boardroom Journal excerpt
FMI/Oliver Wyman

What are the most significant ways the industry’s challenges have changed over the last decade?  

Matheis: The pandemic clearly had a major impact on the industry. But what it did is, as challenging as that was, it demonstrated the resiliency of the leadership in this industry and the things that this industry did to overcome significant supply chain challenges, to innovate on leveraging omnichannel to deliver value and products to the shoppers and customers. The other thing that permeated that timeframe and really the entire 10 years is technology and over the years we’ve tried to highlight in each of the volumes the value of technology. This year, for example, in the 10th anniversary edition, you’ll see a fair amount of Gen AI as you’d expect. Last year was cyber security. The year before that, the eighth volume, was on the metaverse. So technology has played a key role over the entire 10 years, and I’m sure it’s going to continue to play a major factor in the industry for the next 10.

Baum: You asked, ‘What’s changed?’ I can talk a little bit about what’s changed and what hasn’t changed as well. What hasn’t changed is that we are a product-based, consumer-facing industry, so everything that we do begins and ends with the consumer. Meeting expectations, meeting needs, understanding wants–articulated and unarticulated–investing in innovation, gathering market strategies to excite and delight consumers. You know, the food industry is a really exciting place because it’s not really commoditized. There are commodity products, but food is tactile. Food is sensory. Food is fundamental. What has changed is the way consumers see the industry and their path to purchase and the attributes that they are seeking when they come into our stores. Now they shop online, which they didn’t when we first started doing this 10 years ago, and what they’re looking for in both product quality, how they define quality, transparency, how you communicate with them. Your values as a company are becoming as important as the value of the products and services that you’re providing. Health and well-being was not really as much of the conversation when we started as it is now. The whole definition of product safety has morphed over the years. It used to be, ‘If I eat this, will I get sick?’ Now, it’s, ‘What are the implications of feeding this to my child over the next five years, or rubbing this lotion onto their skin or into their scalp?’ So the issues have changed while there is still some fundamental blocking and tackling. That’s why, even though we’ve used imperative issues as our blueprint, what happens within those issues, how they’re prioritized, all those things have changed dramatically.

And then, of course, we had COVID, and there was no playbook on COVID. I’ve never been so proud and pleased to be part and privileged to be part of this industry as I was then, and remain to this day, but it was in the moment when I saw how our members showed up and stood up and take care of their associates and their customers and their communities in ways we could not have even imagined. That really was probably the sea change, because it really set the tone for what we have to do to future-proof the industry going forward, which is more the focus of our current Boardroom and will probably be even more of a focus going forward.

What are the main ways today’s food industry leaders should adapt their leadership for future growth?

Baum: It’s really kind of interesting, because the 10th anniversary edition waxes nostalgic a little bit. We take a little bit of a look back and take a look at what’s in store for the next 10 years. Nobody’s got a working crystal ball in our industry these days, but I think there are a couple of fundamentals that we know are going to have to be at the top of this next generation of leadership’s mind. You need to be technology savvy, and I don’t mean just understand what it is. I say to some of our board members, ‘It’s time as CEOs, that you need to start thinking a little like CIOs.’ I used to say, ‘If you’re not technology-enabled, you’re competitively disadvantaged.’ We’re way past that now. I mean, the future is now. It’s coming at us fast and furiously, and this is now a technology-intensive business. If you think about the way consumers are using their phones as agents, you have to understand that even if you have a brick-and-mortar shopper that buys 100% of their purchases in store, 90% of them are influenced online or through social or other platforms, through their technology.

Another thing is the next generation of folks that we are recruiting into this business are going to be really different than the folks who historically were here. There is a lot of our workforce starting to age out. Whether they’re working in manufacturing facilities, they’re farmers, in some cases or they’re truck drivers. Young people view those opportunities differently, and in some cases they don’t want to do those jobs, which, by the way, is where technology comes back into play, because you can augment a lot of that labor. But we have to make leaders. You really need to be able to articulate the vision, have everybody understand where it is and where they fit into that.

The other thing is, you have got to be ferociously competitive. In 10 years, we’ve seen continued industry consolidation and concentration, more marketplace dynamics. I mean, we’re not just traditional grocery operators anymore, traditional and non traditional. Now, we just did our most recent edition of the digitally engaged grocery shopper. The forecasts are somewhat phenomenal, hundreds of billions of dollars. So you’ve got to understand how all of that is going to manifest itself, going toward and you’ve got to be differentiated. I think food industry leaders are going to have to put some stakes in the ground and decide what they’re going to be famous for, and they are going to have to become magnets for those customers. It’s much easier to keep a customer and then gain a new customer, but you need to build brand equity and loyalty and the levers you’re going to have to push going forward that are going to be very different than they were historically.

Matheis: Oliver Wyman, with its think tank conducted a research study with New York Stock Exchange this past year, which is in the new edition of Boardroom. We interviewed over 100 CEOs, and while these were all publicly held companies, a lot of the learnings and the insights that came from the research apply to this industry. The number one priority – 56% of the CEOs said this – is growth. That’s their number one priority. Coming off the pandemic, that’s a big change. It used to be efficiency and cash flow. Now it’s growth.

The challenge is that today’s leaders and CEOs have two different time frames that they’re trying to deliver on, short-term quarterly results and longer-term strategic results. And that’s an evergreen challenge. They have to balance the two. It’s further exacerbated by the fact that in the last 10 years, CEOs tenures have decreased by about 8%. It’s only about four and a half years on average now, so they have even less time to deliver on those two different time frames. So what they’re doing they told us is that they used to all develop, by and large, three-year strategic plans. They’re now bifurcating that into two different plans. There’s a six-month rolling plan that’s tactically focused on generating results, generating cash that can be invested in the business, and then they’re extending the strategic plans from three out to five- and seven-year strategic plans where they’re anticipating market changes, new disruptive operating models, differentiated consumer preferences that produce white spaces where they can grow their businesses.

Within those plans, they told us there are four issues that they’re focused on. The number one is growth, as I just mentioned. The second one, and this depends on the scope of somebody’s business, are geopolitics and global and regional risks. Within that, they’re trying to de-emphasize regions that are risky. They’re trying to diversify and de-risk their supply chains. The third area, which is no surprise, is AI. What’s interesting, though, is that almost all of them perceive it as an opportunity rather than a risk. What they’re focused on is figuring out a way to leverage AI to emphasize their differentiation in the marketplace and create individual use cases that could be applied across the entire scope of their business. The third area that Mark was just talking about is workforce. Talent has always been a focus area for any company, but it’s now on the CEO’s agenda. It used to be that you’d go within your industry to get the talent. Now it’s within and across industries and the competition, as Mark was just saying, is fierce. So CEOs are focused on not only how they can attract and retain talent, but also once they’re in – How do you break down silos? How do you get cross-functional teams to work together to deliver on the growth agenda? The last thing I’ll just mention, and we’ve touched on this imperative issues work that FMI does that’s a real service to the leaders in this industry. Every three years, that’s refreshed and quantified. What are the very top issues and sub issues? What’s the role that the industry and FMI can play in those? The good news is we’re refreshing that this year, and so that’ll be the next iteration that will be available at the end of 2025.

Baum: Oliver Wyman is our indispensable strategic partner in blueprinting our imperative issues and facilitating our strategic planning process with our board and other key stakeholders. Much like these CEOs are looking a little further up and out, we’re going to take the same approach to our strategic planning process this year in 2025. There’s a lot of changes that are going to take place over the next five to seven to 10 years. Part of our responsibility as the leaders within FMI is to ensure that our association is doing the things to service our members, so that they’re successful, and that we as an association are successful in the years to come. We’re going to take a good fresh look at our imperative issues and maybe make it a little bit more operational to help us with those short term objectives, and maybe take a little bit of a longer outlook for our strategic plan. Nobody knows exactly where the world is going, but part of what our members rely on us to do collectively is to take the long view, bring it back in, and then talk about the close-in implications.

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