Building A Culture of Trust and Transparency in Food Retail

By David Fikes, Vice President, Communications and Consumer/Community Affairs, Food Marketing Institute

In a few weeks, I’ll be traveling to Seattle for one of my favorite research projects—the ethnographic interviews that are part of our annual U.S. Grocery Shopper Trends report. These interviews take place in shopper’s homes and we inquire about their grocery shopping and meal preferences. During these interviews, I love to ask participants to fill in the blank to this sentence, “I trust my grocery store to ______.” For a while, I got responses like “sell safe food,” “be clean” and “have a good assortment of food.” But in recent years, I hear more answers along the lines of “give me product information,” “know where my food comes from,” and “be good to their employees.” This shift in consumer values, uncovered in the face-to face interviews is further verified by our expansive Trends survey findings. Our research shows consumer’s reporting the following as important attributes when choosing their primary store:

• Accurate information displayed (65 percent);
• Courteous, friendly employees (51 percent);
• Knowledgeable employees (49 percent);
• Provides information beyond the package (23 percent); and
• Open and honest about business practices (48 percent).

In many ways, shoppers are looking for food retailers to have a culture of trust and transparency across their organization, which presents retailers with the challenge of how do you make transparency a vibrant part of your company identity from the C-suite all the way to the associate on the store aisle?

FMI and The Center for Food Integrity (CFI) have teamed-up to develop a free, online course to help food retail professionals create a culture of transparency in your organization that promotes enhanced shopper trust and loyalty. We’re tackling this online learning experience in three parts, so participants have time to digest each portion, partake in interactive learning experiences and really dig into this complex topic. Here are the three parts:

Recording: Cultivate Trust-Building Transparency

We will cultivate our understanding and knowledge of what the research on trust-building transparency is telling us and how we can begin to apply key learnings within our organizations.

Recording: Nourish Trust-Building Transparency

Participants will operationalize the elements that define trust-building transparency – motivations, disclosure, stakeholder participation, relevance and more.

Recording: Harvest Results from Trust-Building Transparency

Participants will be introduced to The Transparency Index – The Standard for Trust, to form an organizational plan that can increase their harvest.

These sessions will be recorded and archived on FMI’s website, but we do encourage you to commit to participating in all three sessions so you can benefit from the interactive features of this course.