Get Set for National Family Meals Month

September is National Family Meals Month (NFMM), a nationwide event designed to underscore the benefits of family meals and the challenge for us all to pledge to share one more meal at home per week with our families using items purchased from the grocery store. This educational program is supported by the FMI Foundation.

To help you prepare for this September, the FMI Foundation has created new resource-packed NFMM toolkits for both retailers and suppliers. In addition, registered dietitian Sue Borra, chief health and wellness officer at the Food Marketing Institute (FMI) and executive director of the FMI Foundation, blogs about three ways to get set for successful NFMM events:

• Tap into the toolkits. Get tools and tips to make your NFMM celebration a success. With customizable logos, images, social media posts, messaging and more, the new turnkey toolkits can help you prepared for September. Toolkits are available at www.fmi.org/toolkit.
• Weave it in. Weave NFMM into your existing September plans. Be creative and incorporate NFMM into your current communications and marketing programs by utilizing FMI’s resources or taking a new spin on an old program. Think about how you can help customers celebrate coming to the table as a family during September.
• Share your participation. Use the hashtag #FamilyMealsMonth to share images of your employees and customers celebrating NFMM. A common photo of this movement is raising your oven mitt to commit to one more family meal per week. Everyone’s interpretation of the family is slightly different, so it is exciting to see what ideas come forward.

The FMI Foundation will once again collect stories of what retailers and suppliers are doing for National Family Meals Month this September. E-mail them at [email protected] with your plans for in-store and online promotion of family meals during September.