When A&M’s Jeremy Levine told me that Americans consume 12 billion fewer grams of protein than they should every single day, my jaw dropped. That’s more than a massive (as my teenage boys would say) rounding error. That’s an opportunity sitting right inside the meat and seafood departments of your local grocery store. And it’s exactly the kind of insight that made my recent 5 Insightful Minutes conversation with Jeremey one I didn’t want to end.
Jeremy is a Senior Director at Alvarez and Marsal’s Consumer and Retail Group, and he recently co-authored a white paper called Mastering Fresh Operations: Tactics for Grocers to Win in the Next Decade. What he shared in just a few minutes is the kind of thinking that should be shaping boardroom conversations at every regional grocer in the country right now.
Fresh Is Having a Moment And It’s Not a Coincidence
The tailwinds behind fresh departments right now are real and structural. Consumer behavior is shifting toward healthier lifestyles, e.g. fewer processed foods, less alcohol, more protein. More than fads, these are durable trends that push shoppers deeper into the perimeter of the store.
And that perimeter?
Well, that’s where traditional regional grocers have always been strongest.
What does a regional grocer do better than almost anyone else?
Quality, personal service, the butcher who knows your name, the deli counter person who already knows your order, and hyper-localized assortments tuned to the community they serve. As Jeremy put it, fresh is a genuine defensive moat for regional grocers, if they execute it correctly.
That last part matters. A lot.
Why Fresh Is So Easy to Get Wrong
I spent years running Super Targets, and I can tell you firsthand that fresh is unforgiving. Jeremy described it well when he said the margin of error in fresh isn’t days, it’s hours. The hours mean the difference between a fresh strawberry and a fuzzy one. Or an appealing steak and a brown one. Customers are more discerning in fresh departments than almost anywhere else in the store, and they notice everything.
The other thing that trips operators up is treating every fresh department the same. Produce, bakery, deli, meat, etc. all have completely different operating rhythms and customer expectations. You can’t manage donuts the same way you manage seafood. The bakery needs to be stocked early for the morning rush; the produce section requires constant culling throughout the day; the deli has to be staffed for the lunch spike. These are distinct operating disciplines, and the teams that treat them as one generic “fresh” problem tend to underperform.
Four Pillars of Fresh Excellence
Jeremy laid out four things that separate great fresh operators from the rest:
1. Talent, top to bottom. It starts with whether your store managers are actually incentivized on fresh performance and whether your store associates have real fresh training. You can’t execute complexity without capable people who understand what good looks like.
2. Process excellence. The more complex the department, the more standardization you need. One counterintuitive truth Jeremy shared is that culling, i.e. the process of pulling product off the floor, actually drives more sales, not fewer. But it takes real discipline to do consistently. Backroom organization is equally critical. If your back room is a mess, it will show up on the sales floor in quality, availability, and ultimately in the customer’s basket.
3. Scheduling. This one deserves its own section (and Jeremy doubled down on it when I put him on the spot). The right labor in the right department at the right hour can make or break an entire day’s performance. A well-placed production hour in the deli sets the whole department up. A poorly staffed weekend morning costs you sales and customer loyalty.
4. The HQ-to-store bridge. Too often, there’s a communication gap between headquarters and the stores. Store teams can tell you when things aren’t working. HQ just needs to listen. The merchandising teams and the store teams need to be genuinely aligned, not just nominally connected.
The Monday Morning Move for Grocery CEOs
When I asked Jeremy what a grocery CEO should do first thing Monday morning, he didn’t hesitate. “Fix the scheduling,” he said.
It’s the highest-impact, fastest-to-implement lever in fresh operations. And in Jeremy’s experience, almost every retailer has pockets where it’s broken by way of understaffed weekends, misaligned production hours, or inconsistent enforcement of scheduling rules. You don’t necessarily need a brand new system.
Sometimes you just need discipline around the playbook you already have.
If you want to dig deeper into Alvarez and Marsal’s full framework, go find and read Jeremy’s white paper Mastering Fresh Operations: Tactics for Grocers to Win in the Next Decade. And of course, listen to or watch my full conversation with Jeremy wherever you enjoy your podcasts.
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Be careful out there,
– Chris, Anne, and the Omni Talk team
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Omni Talk® is the retail blog for retailers, written by retailers. Chris Walton founded Omni Talk® in 2017 and have quickly turned it into one of the fastest growing blogs in retail.