ARLINGTON, Va. – Food retailers on Monday are celebrating their employees for the “work they do feeding families and enriching lives.”

February 22 is Supermarket Employee Day, a new holiday conceived back in November by FMI—The Food Industry Association.

“When FMI proclaimed this new holiday to recognize the six million employees that comprise our nation’s food industry, nobody ever could have imagined how much this celebration would be embraced,” FMI president and CEO Leslie Sarasin said. “In this short window of time, supermarkets and food manufacturers are coordinating a broad spectrum of activities to honor our industry’s front-line heroes on this first-ever Supermarket Employee Day.”

FMI created a full suite of turnkey tools and resources to help jumpstart industry members’ plans to celebrate the new holiday in varying ways to accommodate their individual brands and budgets. These tools include messaging, logos, proclamations, ideas for celebration tactics, infographics, templates for stickers, buttons, posters, press releases, and even methods to unlock talent and potential among teams.

“Many thousands of industry members have been visiting FMI’s website and accessing our planning tools,” Sarasin continued. “We know the food industry has a full spectrum of events planned which include state and local proclamations for Supermarket Employees Day, programs that invite customers to nominate supermarket heroes, reward sweepstakes, video tributes, headquarter celebrations, appreciation campaigns throughout the supply chain, social media campaigns and lots of in-store activities.”

With more than 40,000 individual stores that sell food and grocery items in the U.S. alone, supermarkets are the backbones of our communities. Millions of supermarket employees come to work daily to keep shelves stocked and to provide communities with essential services that help them survive and thrive.

In spite of supply chain disruptions or challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic, supermarket employees have demonstrated heroic efforts to keep communities going. Supermarket employees have personified compassion and courage when communities have most needed to be encouraged.

“Supermarket employees have earned our gratitude, which is why we are creating an annual holiday to celebrate them,” Sarasin concluded. “The fact is that they always have been frontline heroes during periods of crisis. In the face of natural disasters and now especially during a global pandemic, these folks keep communities going.”