Last updated on August 3rd, 2015 at 01:32 pm
New Channels News In Brief…
The Specialty Food Association (SFA) has been awarded a Power of A Gold Award from the American Society of Association Executives for its work to help reduce hunger and increase food recovery via the grant-making, education and industry events of its Specialty Food Foundation. The foundation, established in 2014, in its first year gave $250,000 in grants to support 14 organizations in 10 states that are working to address hunger and improve food recovery. They include Portland Fruit Tree Project in Portland, Oregon, which harvests and distributes fruit from urban fruit trees that would otherwise go to waste, and Move for Hunger in Neptune, New Jersey, which mobilizes the relocation industry to reduce food waste by picking up unwanted food during the moving process to deliver to food banks. The foundation also has created “Embrace Hunger Relief Week,” a program that links specialty food professionals to anti-hunger organizations with volunteer events that include re-packs of bulk produce donations and assembling grocery boxes to deploy to a network of local food pantries and high-need schools…
Whole Foods expects to open the first five units of its new small-format stores, dubbed “365,” in the second half of 2016. The stores primarily are on the West Coast, starting in Los Angeles and followed by openings in Santa Monica, California; Portland Oregon; Houston Texas; and Bellevue Washington…
An overwhelming majority (88 percent) of U.S. adults want their store checkout experience to be faster, according to an online study conducted by Harris Poll. In particular, a combined 50 percent of those surveyed cited slow checkout speeds and long lines as their top grievances with this aspect of the retail experience. Adding to a shoppers’ disappointment upon checkout is a lack of quality human interaction and perceived gratitude. Many consumers (61 percent) agree that clerks focus most on scanning items and less on finding out if they’re satisfied. And nearly a third of consumers (30 percent) say they feel like they’re burdening the clerk and other customers when they have a full basket. The survey also suggests that self-checkout (which nearly three-quarters of respondents have avoided) could be more appealing if technical problems were reduced. Of those who avoid self-checkout, 43 percent cited technical or barcode scanning difficulties as the reasons why.
