Highlights of the Grocery Manufacturers Association Greenbrier Executive Conference - Phil Friedman, Executive Vice-president Sales and Marketing

This year’s GMA Executive Conference was held from June 10th through the 13th at the Greenbrier Hotel, West Virginia. This event, with over 450 attendees, brought together the CEO’s and their top reports from Fortune 200 CPG companies. Also participating where top consumer retail executives including Lee Stucky, SVP and Chief Administrator Officer of Wal*Mart, Danny Wegman of Wegman’s Supermarkets and the leadership from Ahold, Safeway, Kroger and 20 other retailers as well as members of key distribution companies including Acosta. Consulting and system integrator attendees including Booze, Allen, KSA, Accenture, Bearing Point, Deloitte, IBM Global Services and several other firms.

Also attending and meeting was the Associate Member Council, with whom I am a council member. This group of leading suppliers to the GMA member companies provides technology and application guidance and shares cross industry best practices. One of the events sponsored by the council is the industry innovation award. This year The Campbell Soup Company was chosen for their creative program to rebuild its canned soup brand. The company’s total and integrated approach to segmentation, product refocus, marketing and consumer focus made them a winner out of the significant number of submissions.

This annual event provides a forum for sharing best practices, brainstorming new ideas and setting the tone for true trading partner collaboration.

Hot discussion topics included:

• What Wal*Mart has learned from expanding into the China marketplace. The three presentation points included:
• 1. Globalization of brands sounds great but Wal*Mart’s success has been due to the specific localization of products and price points – and considering China’s size and demographic breakdown, , accomplishing this took more effort than they had anticipated;
  2. Consumer service and focus is what resulted in their significant short term growth;
  3. Technology (RFID, Kiosks, etc) was critical to manage the supply chain, reduce out of stocks and reduce operating costs.
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• Status of RFID – Recognition of technology limitations and the deployment issues being faced. However, it was understood that the retail community was committed and that implementation initiatives need to move forward.
• Status of collaboration efforts between manufacturers and retailers including the need to significantly improve data quality and timeliness. The workshop brought some real time examples of the reduction in out of stock that can be achieved by initially building an internal single version of product data, then driving quality between trading partners.

In addition there were 25 plus workshops on all phases of the industry from managing returnable, aligning point of sakes information with supply chain optimization, ROI’s for deep down segmentation and managing in a global economy.

As a member and attendee for over 20 years, I have seen this conference move from a networking event to an event that allows the best minds in the industry, public sector, and academic world to share best practices, explore and identify new and exciting ways to drive global consumer focused initiatives and establish a vision that drives shareholder, consumer and partner values.