Perhaps our brethren on the food-service side of the industry have felt a little slighted in recent years as the Efficient Consumer Response initiative caused activities to swirl mightily around packaged goods issues. If so, they now have good reason to put that feeling aside and look proudly upon the emergence of an ECR-like initiative aimed directly at their business, and possibly at the food-service side of the supermarket business as well.
How so? Well, it develops that ECR has sired its first offspring and it's been dubbed EFR; that's right: Efficient Foodservice Response. A news article that offered considerable detail about the new EFR project, written by Senior Section Editor Stephen Dowdell, was in last week's Supermarket News. Although EFR remains in its infancy, it's not too soon to be ambitious about what it might be able to accomplish as it moves beyond its milk-teeth stage: Proponents hope it will be able to do for food service all that was hoped for ECR, namely that it will blueprint how to increase operational efficiencies, thereby lowering costs. Indeed, those involved in the hard work of rearing EFR intend to model the process to some degree after ECR by searching the many texts ECR has spawned with a view toward pulling out, and using, germane ideas.
Speaking of the welter of intelligence now slumbering in various ECR tomes, IFDA's John Gray told SN that "there is a lot that would apply to both sides of the house."
IFDA, the International Foodservice Distributors Association, is one of the trade associations backing, and funding, EFR. IFDA is aligned with the National-American Wholesale Grocers' Association, the wholesalers' trade group that has been involved with ECR since early days.
Other major EFR sponsors are the International Foodservice Manufacturers Association and the Uniform Code Council. Involvement is also coming from other trade associations, interested companies and, of course, a consulting firm. Backers also hope to engage a research firm that would eventually generate a research paper on the entire matter.
As for the broad concepts expected to underpin the EFR initiative, many will sound familiar to ECR aficionados. They include such salient words and phrases as trust, level playing field, invoice deductions, the complexity of deals, the excessive output of new items, electronic data interchange capability, and so on.
So far, so good: It might be expected that the development of EFR would closely follow the well-blazed ECR path, but in what ways might its development differ?
IFDA's John Gray said that the food-service industry would endeavor to avoid ECR-spawned controversies, such as the one that grew up around the possibility that wholesalers might be weakened should ECR come to define the business. The food-service practitioners also hope to avoid controversies that arose on the matter of trade promotions, one component never effectively addressed by ECR participants.
Also, John said, EFR research results ultimately will seek to cite the actual cost experiences of various elements of the supply chain, a goal that seemed elusive during the ECR report-production phase.
Finally, another difference is that there will be more EFR spade work to do when it comes to bar codes on food-service shipping crates than was the situation with ECR: Shipper bar codes are little used in food service.
But at the end of the day, and regardless of how it all proceeds, supermarket operators might want to know about all this too by asking whether there will be anything in this EFR exploit for them.
Maybe so, John says: "There is the opportunity for partnering among food-service distributors and chains, even to the extent of distributors coming in and helping design and run the stores' food-service programs."
That might be an offer worth eventual contemplation. After all, outsourcing has to be near the top of any list of ways to strip away retailers' operational costs.
