CHICAGO — More Americans than ever are shopping for food, and supermarkets are among shoppers’ most trusted allies when it comes to food safety and health and wellness. These two  encouraging trends for food retailers were identified by Food Marketing Institute president and chief executive officer Leslie Sarasin in her presentation of the institute’s “2016 U.S. Grocery Shopper Trends” report at this year’s FMI Connect conference.

Last year’s report identified a seismic shift in the profile of the typical grocery shopper, which FMI attributed to the confluence of demographic, cultural, technological and economic factors.

“Last year we noticed that the ‘primary shopper paradigm’ — where one person, usually Mom, handled all the food selecting, planning, cooking and shopping — was giving way to a new ‘shared shopper paradigm’ in which households delegate or collaborate on food shopping,” Sarasin said, adding that this year’s trends report delves deeper into the shared shopper phenomenon to explore the motivations and methods behind it.

“It’s a brave new world of grocery shoppers because almost everyone is getting in on the act of shopping for food,” Sarasin said. “Currently in the U.S., 85% of all adults report they have at least half the household responsibility for grocery shopping. That means that six out of 10 shoppers walking our store aisles are part of a team of shoppers for the household.”

These shoppers are not coming into the grocery store just to purchase food, Sarasin said. “They come expecting information — information that is easily accessible and entertaining. Shoppers are on a quest for an experience, a personal engagement with food. Perhaps driven by economics, taste, convenience or any number of social responsibility factors, they want a food interaction that addresses their particular needs. All of which highlights the need to know them, so we may communicate with them in personally meaningful ways — from the smell of the store when they first walk in to the font used on product labels, from the exchanges with staff to the graphics on the end-caps, from the intuitiveness of our layout to the intuitiveness of our apps. Everything we do has a communications component.

“The better we understand their expectations, know their challenges and are aware of the specific pain points in their lives, the better equipped we are to communicate in a personal manner that connects with them and provides that satisfying experience they are hoping for — the experience that will keep them coming back.”

In key respects, communications between grocer and shopper are already going well. When asked about their confidence in the safety of food at the grocery store, 86% of Americans say they are “mostly” or “completely confident” that the food they buy at the supermarket is safe, Sarasin said.

“In fact, when asked where they think food safety concerns largely originate, consumers rated grocery stores dead last — well behind manufacturing plants, restaurants and even at home,” she said. “In this instance, let’s work to stay in last place.”

In FMI’s new shopper paradigm, about a quarter of all shoppers are self-shoppers, buying exclusively for themselves in a single household. Nearly as many, 22%, reside in households where there’s a 50-50 split in the grocery shopping. About 45% fall into the primary shopper category, and 9% are secondary shoppers.

“Of those shoppers who consider themselves primary shoppers, only 18% are what we could classify as sole shoppers, meaning they are either in a single-parent household (14%) or are in that tiny 4% sliver of multi-adult households where there is only one grocery shopper,” Sarasin said. “If you add the self-shoppers (those from single households) with the sole shoppers (single shopper in the multi-person household), that equals 42% who are flying solo. That means 58% of shoppers are part of their household’s food shopping team — with varying and shifting degrees of responsibility for grocery shopping.”

Motivations for sharing the food shopping vary, especially along generational lines. Older shoppers cite efficiency and fair play as the main reasons for sharing. Younger Millennials also cited fairness, but were primarily motivated by differences in food tastes. “They want to share in the grocery shopping as something of a defensive means of ensuring that their own preferences aren’t lost, ignored or dropped off the list,” Sarasin said.