Trading Partners

A souped-up, online version of the Campbell Soup Co.’s venerable “Labels for Education” (LFE) program, which bowed in Kroger stores, has earned the manufacturer and MARS Advertising a Gold REGGIE Award for shopper marketing from PMA, the Association for Integrated Marketing.

The food industry, in the form of influential trade group the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA), has placed its considerable weight behind President Barack Obama’s 2010 budget recommendations for improving food safety, which was released last Thursday.

Spartan Stores Inc. has entered a collaborative purchasing agreement with Pharmacy Services, Inc. (PSI) to maximize its purchasing power for Michigan-based independent pharmacies. The deal allows additional volume buying support through a contract with Livonia, Mich.-based pharmaceutical supplier, The Harvard Drug Group, LLC, thus resulting in dollars remaining in the state of Michigan.

Demand management software vendor DemandTec, Inc. will host an interactive webcast to discuss how retailers can improve business performance by managing the demand chain from promotion through inventory.

CPG companies need to broaden the skills of their sales forces to meet retailer expectations, according to a new study released yesterday by the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA), the Network of Executive Women (NEW) and A.T. Kearney.

Fujitsu America yesterday launched its TeamPoS 3600 family of point-of-sale (POS) systems, developed to be a scalable hardware system that can be custom-configured to meet a retailer’s cost and performance needs.

Amid countless reports on how the economy affects everyday purchases, very little has been written about how shopping patterns are tied directly to paychecks -- or more specifically, how paydays at the start and end of each month create spikes in supermarket sales. Specifically, how much of a lift can retailers expect on the first week of each month? Which categories are most likely to spike at the beginning of the month? Has the average first-of-the-month spike increased in recent years?

Whole grain consumption is up a whole 20 percent since 2005. That’s the encouraging message revealed by Boston-based non-profit Oldways and the Whole Grains Council’s (WGC) recent Make (at least!) Half Your Grains Whole conference, which offered the first solid evidence that changes in U.S. Dietary Guidelines and widespread use of the Whole Grain Stamp packaging symbol - both dating from January 2005 - have accomplished major changes in consumer behavior.