According to the latest installment of McKinsey & Co.'s Foodservice 2005 study ("What's for Dinner?"), retailers today need innovative approaches and partnerships to create the competitive, cost-effective business systems that will make them true competitors in the fresh-meals segment.
ns, traditional grocery wholesalers -- experts in the heavy work of moving volume -- cannot yet adapt to this new way of doing business.
Perhaps the most significant development in the sourcing dilemma has been the new links forged between retailers and food-service distributors, who've made it their business to move the quick-turning, highly perishable inventory that makes up the fresh meals segment (SN examined this aspect in its June 1 issue). Likewise, there are new direct connections between supermarkets and manufacturers, brokers and other allies, such as commissaries.
In part two of our examination of the fresh-meals distribution pipeline, SN examines these burgeoning relationships further. The retail and food-service industries -- once separate entities operating in their own worlds -- have quickly discovered that they share several common goals: opening new markets, capturing efficiencies inherent in the business and preventing this huge profit potential from going down the drain.
