by Terrie Ellerbee/associate editor

Mild-mannered grocery operators are superheroes when it comes to government relations, according to Jennifer Hatcher, who spoke at the Food Marketing Institute (FMI) Midwinter Conference in Orlando.

Hatcher, who is SVP, government relations, for the FMI, asked how many people in attendance at the conference had attended a city council or county commission meeting. The show of hands was impressive.

“You may not realize this, but this is not normal behavior,” Hatcher said. “The former speaker of the house, Tip O’Neill, who was well known for his mastery of politics, titled his book, ‘All Politics is Local’ for a reason. City council politics is real politics. And anyone who can master that arena is ready to tackle Washington.”

Six lobbyists work for the FMI, and they follow roughly four-dozen federal and two dozen state issues at any one time, Hatcher said.

“We participate in coalitions, we weave coalitions, we design research studies to support positions that we hold on behalf of the industry,” she said. “The government relations committee then meets quarterly and holds bi-weekly calls to learn about new issue developments and make changes and additions to priorities.”

Those positions and priorities are developed through an annual survey process. FMI’s lobbyists had to narrow their focus when the work got to be too much several years ago, and came up with the idea that the issues must fit on the side of a paper grocery bag.

“We then delivered those grocery bags with products up to members of Congress on Capitol Hill,” Hatcher said. “The combination of gift ban rules and security changes ended that practice, but it continues to be an important exercise to fit our list of priorities on the side of a grocery bag.”

Most recently, these issues have included health care reform, debit card or “swipe” fees, and “plenty of tax and labor issues in between, and, of course, food safety,” she said.

She shared her personal “elevator speech,” a 45-second spiel explaining priorities to, say, a senator: “In a 1 percent profit margin business, everything that impacts our customers’ costs or choices is an issue to us. But the issues that I’m working on today are swipe fee reform and menu labeling.”

Grocers and others in the food marketing business should develop their own and be ready to share it.

The FMI lobbyists build trust and relationships with lawmakers, and educate them on issues.

“And this is where you come in,” Hatcher said. “We do this by providing them with solid, factual information on a subject that they can use to support their position and ours. We work to get to know them and develop their trust—and start this when they first get elected to Congress. With more than 100 new members of congress in 2011, this was a busy year for us.”

FMI also supports campaigns with FMI’s Political Action Committee (FoodPAC) funds, which come from contributions made by FMI members and their associates as well as the FMI staff.

But then the advantage, when it comes to influencing lawmakers, goes to grocers.

“You knew them when,” Hatcher said. “You knew them when they were on the debate team or played the tuba or took your best friend’s sister to the prom. More than any other person except maybe a barber or a preacher, you know what’s happening in people’s lives. To restate one of the themes for FMI 2012, you know your customers. Politicians try desperately to learn this. You live it.”

In addition, many times grocers are among the biggest, if not the biggest, taxpayers in the community.

“The taxes you pay build schools, pay teachers, pave roads, provide clean water, all the things people say they want from their government, very little of which is coming from Washington,” she said.

To drive the point home about the influence FMI members have, Hatcher talked about swipe fee reform, the Durbin Amendment success of last year. Two years ago, an analyst in New York City asked Hatcher why she thought the retail food industry had a chance when neither the banking committee chairmen nor the leadership wanted debit fee reform.

Hatcher said she asked the analyst if he’d ever been bitten by a hornet.

“I explained to him that a bee could sting once and then dies. But if you make a hornet mad, he’ll never give up, and he could sting you dozens of times and actually enough to kill you,” Hatcher said. “I told him that we had a large group of grocers that were madder than hornets and were ready to be unleashed.”

She asked attendees to continue the hornet-like behavior by sending letters to Congress, by sharing operational facts and expertise with FMI, by inviting elected representatives to stores and distribution centers and letting them bag groceries or view new technology at work, and contributing to FMI’s FoodPAC.

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