United Natural Foods says the sale of Cub Foods, originally slated for the first part of this year, has been delayed and might not happen until the end of 2020. Meanwhile, UNFI officials said they are working on the sale and lease-back of up to 15 properties in the Cub Food chain, which total 1.1 million square feet of retail space.
The Labor Department's index of producer prices declined in February by 0.6%, with core inflation down 0.3%. The last time the index declined that much was more than five years ago.
The Tri-City News (Coquitlam, British Columbia)/The Canadian Press
(3/12)
State of the Wholesale Supply Chain Industry in 2020 For the third straight year, Blue Ridge asked wholesale supply industry leaders about their challenges, how they're thinking about solving them and how they're dealing with the pace of technological change. One key finding for the 2020 survey is the adoption of new machine learning, such as A.I., which is on the rise as a strategy to combat supply chain disruption. Get the report to read more.
Incomplete data, a tight budget and insufficient bandwidth are barriers to establishing valuable analytics, writes ActVantage co-founder Senthil Gunasekaran. "In the world of changing customer behavior and digital competition, the new process miscategorization or mindset miscategorization is to 'test and learn,' " he writes.
Some 42% of business-to-business marketers say they haven't achieved full personalization, and 39% admit current personalization efforts are just somewhat sophisticated, per Folloze and Propeller Insights. Additionally, 21% don't use customer data to boost sales via personalized content and 60% aren't employing artificial intelligence to enhance personalization despite 77% believing better customer relationships can be achieved via personalized messaging.
MediaNet CEO Julia Amorim explores how marketers can prepare for a cookieless digital landscape, recommending that first-party data is maximized and that marketers learn and adopt Google's cookie alternatives, such as its Privacy Sandbox, Federated Learning and Differential Privacy initiatives. "Marketers might feel as though they were being force-marched into a world without cookies, but they can choose to embrace an era that will be defined by privacy-first, opt-in oriented ways to contextualizing advertising that consumers are demanding," she writes.
Dave Hollis left Disney after 17 years to go into business with his wife, fellow author Rachel Hollis, and says going from a corporate to a startup environment required him to learn new skills, including embracing the possibility of failure. "Every chance that failure could have shown up, I tried to avoid it, and now I see it as something that I have to run toward for the opportunity to grow," he says.
Different perks motivate different people, but about 30% of workers prefer to be recognized -- 23% with personal recognition from a boss or colleague and 8% publicly, according to a recent Achievers survey. Hold off on the pizza party -- only 7% chose in-office perks as the top motivator.
Growing in popularity within our industry, the NAW Certificate in Distribution Professional Management Program is ideal for your high-potential managers who seek to complement their professional development with a strong emphasis on practical application within the distribution field. Two, one-week sessions at Texas A&M University in 2020 focus on Distributor Capability Development (July 27-31) and Optimizing Distributor Profitability (Oct. 19-23). Get all the details and enroll your high achievers today before the seats are gone.
"Customer Stratification: Best Practices for Boosting Profitability" is a first-of-its-kind study that provides groundbreaking research, best practices from 68 real wholesaler-distributors and 20 practical action steps ready to implement. Rather than focus on sales force communication, this cutting-edge research focuses on customer relationships and the value customers provide to distributors. It looks at four customer stratification dimensions: buying power, customer loyalty, profitability and cost-to-serve. Order now.
Benj Cohen writes, "Digital marketplaces were a major theme at the recent NAW Executive Summit, and for good reason; B2B marketplaces are predicted to be a $3.6 trillion boon for distributors in the next few years. This new opportunity is certainly good for distributors, but it does make action even harder. How can AI, e-commerce and marketplaces all be multitrillion-dollar opportunities? Further, which one should distributors pursue first?" Read his blog post.
