Why Retail Belongs at the Center of Supply Chain Innovation

katiegrimble
Nov 16, 2025
7 min read

Insights from the Supply Chain of the Future Retail Issues Forum

On Wednesday, October 16, 2025, during the International Fresh Produce Association Global Produce & Floral Show in Anaheim, California, dozens of retail leaders gathered for a conversation that most of them admitted was long overdue.

The Supply Chain of the Future initiative convened its first Retail Issues Forum, bringing together produce buyers, category managers, and operations leaders from independent specialty chains, regional grocers, and enterprise retailers across North America. The two-hour session took place under Chatham House Rules to encourage candor and create space for honest dialogue about the barriers preventing supply chain innovation from working in retail operations. The central question driving the forum:

How do we stop designing supply chain solutions for retail and start designing them with retail?

The Pattern That Keeps Repeating

For years, supply chain innovation in fresh produce has followed a predictable cycle. Technology companies develop sophisticated tools. Grower-shippers implement them. Everyone then looks to retail to adopt—only to discover, too late, that the solution doesn't fit the operational reality of stores, distribution centers, or retail systems infrastructure. One forum participant captured the frustration plainly:

"We've had vendors come in with beautiful shelf life prediction models that don't integrate with our POS system. They want us to manually enter data... That's a non-starter."

The candor in the room revealed something that supply chain innovators need to hear: retailers aren't resistant to innovation. They're resistant to solutions designed without understanding their constraints. When retail leaders have space to speak freely, they don't just identify problems—they design solutions. The Retail Issues Forum proved exactly that.

What Happened at the Forum

The session opened with a panel discussion featuring four retail leaders who set the tone with unflinching clarity about the challenges they face: on-time delivery failures, product quality inconsistencies, shrink that erodes margins, and staffing shortages that make any new operational process feel impossible.

The conversation quickly moved beyond complaints. Panelists acknowledged their own organizations' internal barriers—misaligned incentive structures that reward volume over margins, IT systems decades old, and lack of cross-functional collaboration between buying, operations, and store teams. The honesty extended to recognizing that some barriers to innovation sit inside retail organizations themselves, not just in the supply chain beyond the loading dock.

Then came the workshop. Retail leaders self-organized into three working groups, each tackling one of the highest-priority challenges identified through opening polls:

Shrink Reduction & Freshness Optimization
FIFO Disruption Management (when product rotation conflicts with product quality)
Supplier Data Sharing & Integration

What emerged was a blueprint for pragmatic, sequenced innovation—grounded in what actually works in retail operations.

What Retail Leaders Told Us

The full findings are captured in the, Retail Issues Forum Report, but several themes cut across all three working groups and deserve attention from anyone working on supply chain innovation:

Start with high-shrink commodities, not system-wide rollouts.

Don't try to transform the entire produce department at once. Focus pilots on berries, leafy greens, and asparagus—the categories where shrink hits hardest and ROI is clearest. Prove value there, then expand. Retail leaders repeatedly emphasized that attempting full-category implementation before demonstrating results in targeted areas sets up failure.

Data standardization must happen at the executive level.

Technical integration turns out to be the easier part. The hard part is getting competing organizations to agree on data formats, sharing cadences, and reciprocal visibility. Several retail leaders made clear that this requires CEO-to-CEO conversations, not just IT department coordination. One participant noted: "We can build the pipes all day long. But if leadership hasn't bought into why we're sharing this data and what we get in return, the pipes sit empty."

Quality-based decision-making can coexist with FIFO.

Retailers aren't trying to abandon product rotation—they're trying to make it smarter. Shelf life prediction and dynamic routing tools should enhance FIFO, not replace it. The goal is to route higher-quality product to longer-shelf-life destinations while still ensuring proper rotation. The group working on this challenge explicitly reframed the problem: they're not fighting FIFO, they're asking for tools that let them execute it intelligently.

Store-level execution determines success or failure.

Even the most sophisticated upstream supply chain optimization falls apart if stores don't have the training, equipment, or staffing to execute. Several participants shared stories of corporate initiatives that looked brilliant on paper but collapsed at store level because nobody accounted for 17-year-old part-time employees working the produce section on Saturday afternoons. Any pilot must include clear, simple store-level implementation guides and realistic timelines for adoption. Incentive structures matter as much as technology. Multiple retailers acknowledged that internal compensation systems—where sales managers are rewarded for volume rather than margin protection—undermine even the best supply chain tools. Before launching pilots, retail organizations need to audit their own incentive alignment. As one participant put it:

"We keep blaming the supply chain for waste, but our own sales team gets bonuses for moving volume regardless of what it does to margins. That's on us."

Why This Matters for the Industry

The Retail Issues Forum validated what the Supply Chain of the Future initiative has maintained from the beginning: voluntary collaboration among competitive organizations creates value that no single player can capture alone, but only when all stakeholders shape the design—not just execute the implementation.

Retail is where supply chain theory meets consumer reality. Retail leaders manage the operational complexity, customer expectations, and financial risk that make or break any innovation. Their insights aren't optional add-ons to well-designed systems. They're essential inputs that should shape systems from the beginning.

The forum confirmed that retail leaders want to participate in building better systems. They're hungry for solutions that actually work. Several participants mentioned feeling isolated in their organizations as the only voices pushing for supply chain modernization. Finding peers facing identical challenges—and working through solutions together—proved valuable beyond any specific recommendation that came out of the working groups.

The Supply Chain of the Future initiative exists to create exactly this kind of space: where competitive organizations can work pre-competitively on shared infrastructure that raises performance across the industry.

What Comes Next: Retail Participation in Phase 2

The findings from the Retail Issues Forum are now shaping Phase 2 strategy for the Supply Chain of the Future initiative. Specifically:

Pilot sequencing will prioritize high-shrink, high-perishability commodities first (berries, leafy greens, asparagus) rather than attempting full-category rollouts. This sequence builds momentum and demonstrates ROI where it matters most.

Data standardization conversations are beginning now with key retail and supplier partners—before pilots launch—to establish formats, frequency, and integration approaches that work for existing retail systems. The goal is executive alignment on the "why" of data sharing before engineering teams build the "how."

Store-level implementation guides are being developed in partnership with retail operators to ensure that any new process can be executed by real store teams with real constraints. No more corporate mandates that ignore operational reality.

Executive alignment workshops will bring together leadership from retail, grower-shipper, and technology organizations to secure the cross-organizational buy-in required for data sharing and reciprocal visibility. Technology can't fix trust deficits or misaligned incentives—leadership commitment can.

Most importantly, retail participation is now permanent. The forum will not be a one-time listening session. Retail leaders are joining working groups, contributing to pilot design, and ensuring that the solutions we build together are solutions retail can actually adopt.

Why Retailers Should Get Involved Now

Here's what's at stake: the infrastructure being built right now, will shape how fresh produce moves from farm to consumer - for the next decade and beyond. The standards being developed today will influence business practices for years. The tools being created now will evolve but remain foundational.

Several industry leaders captured this well during the Supply Chain of the Future sessions at the International Fresh Produce Association Global Produce & Floral Show. One supply chain executive noted that when the industry discusses challenges, opportunities, common language standards, and appropriate data use across stakeholders, companies benefit from having a seat at that table early—getting an early look at developments that will influence their operations and competitive positioning. A retail supply chain leader from a major berry producer put it more directly:

Many produce companies take a wait-and-see approach, allowing others to lead. By doing that, they're allowing others to shape their future. The companies participating actively in building these systems are defining how they'll work. The companies waiting will inherit what others create.

The good news: participation doesn't require massive resource commitments. The Supply Chain of the Future initiative has designed pathways for different levels of engagement.

Active participation in working groups (no cost) allows organizations to contribute subject matter expertise and help develop standards, tools, and frameworks alongside 100+ industry professionals already engaged.

Partnership sponsorship provides deeper engagement, including steering committee participation, pilot program involvement, and recognition as an industry leader investing in long-term infrastructure.

Both paths offer value. Both paths influence outcomes. The key is showing up while solutions are being designed, not after they're built.

An Invitation to Retail Leaders

If you're a retail leader in fresh produce—whether you manage operations, buying, category strategy, or supply chain—the Supply Chain of the Future initiative needs your voice. We're not asking you to adopt pre-built solutions.

We're asking you to help design them.

The Retail Issues Forum showed what's possible when retail leaders have space to be honest about constraints, share ideas with peers, and collaborate on solutions that account for operational reality. That conversation continues through working groups, pilot programs, and ongoing engagement.

The industry has spent decades building supply chain innovations that stop at the retail loading dock. It's time to build innovations that work all the way through to the shelf—and that only happens when retail leaders are at the center of the conversation.

Interested in getting involved?

Sign up here - or contact us at info@scotf.org to learn more about working group participation, pilot opportunities, and upcoming retail engagement events.

Download the full Retail Issues Forum Report to see detailed findings, working group recommendations, and Phase 2 implementation guidance.

The Supply Chain of the Future initiative is a multi-stakeholder collaboration advancing supply chain digitization, data interoperability, and open-source solutions across the fresh produce industry. Co-led by the International Fresh Produce Association (IFPA), the initiative brings together grower-shippers, retailers, technology providers, and industry organizations to build infrastructure for shared value creation.