Food retail industry leaders are preparing for business meetings and conversations at the upcoming FMI Midwinter Executive Conference, which brings leaders together from across the supply chain to tackle what’s next in food.

FMI Midwinter provides an opportunity to reflect on how our industry has changed radically in the past two decades. Through it all, grocery stores have made meeting shoppers’ needs the driving force in all they do; suppliers have expanded their product offerings in line with new trends; and service providers have learned new ways to help both achieve their goals.

We are navigating new and unpredictable changes — some obvious, some hidden — yet we remain nimble and continue to transform how our industry keeps communities fed. It’s incredibly exciting to be on the front lines of these dynamic changes. Every day, the innovative products and services we offer become more important in the lives of our customers. We must take seriously the trust our customers place in us. It is our responsibility to embrace change in a way that safeguards that trust while providing new and creative approaches to better serve them. As an industry that always strives for continuous improvement, we are dedicated to maintaining a mindset that welcomes beneficial change to strengthen our companies, our collective voice at FMI, and our entire society.

Internally, one of Compare Foods’ core values is a commitment to always learn and improve. To achieve that value, we focus on training our leadership and frontline associates. It’s impossible to train for the unknown, but continuing to learn and being open to new ideas and possibilities helps us work through challenges when they present themselves. This is one of the biggest benefits that independent operators like my own company gain from participating in FMI Midwinter — the opportunity to learn about innovations in our industry and how to apply them in our stores.

Any time that our collective industry comes together to discuss the common challenges and opportunities we face in an open, noncompetitive manner, we all benefit. By participating in diverse educational sessions and interacting with other supermarket owners from different parts of the country, we can share best practices, identify solutions to the challenges we face, and return home with fresh ideas and better processes to implement in our own businesses.

The agenda at Midwinter intentionally covers many different operational areas where this can apply: skillfully leveraging artificial intelligence and the rapid growth in technology to improve our operations and the customer experience, maintaining food safety best practices to ensure we are properly mitigating the spread of foodborne illness, or establishing robust disaster preparedness and violence prevention procedures to minimize threats to our businesses, our associates and our customers.

Above all, the FMI Midwinter Executive Conference offers a platform to remind ourselves that the customer must be at the forefront of everything we do. FMI research shows that across all income and demographic levels, shoppers prioritize good value. That value embodies an array of factors, not always steeped in lowest cost. I myself am a big fan of Jim Collins’ Hedgehog Principle. Find what you do really well — better than everyone else in the market — and focus almost obsessively on those differentiators. Even as we come together at FMI Midwinter noncompetitively, we each have an opportunity to think about how the topics discussed and conversations we have with our peers will drive us to provide even greater value to our communities.

I look forward to joining all my colleagues in the food retail industry in Florida this January in our continued quest toward collaboration, innovation and meeting customer needs at the FMI Midwinter Executive Conference.

Omar Jorge Peña is chief executive officer of Compare Foods and is serving as the 2024 FMI Midwinter Executive Conference chairman.