ARLINGTON, Va. — The steady drumbeat of food crises over the course of the past year is providing a call to battle for Steve Smith, the incoming chairman of Food Marketing Institute here.

“If there's one issue that keeps me up at night, it's consumer confidence in the safety of our food supply,” Smith told SN. “I think the last six to eight months have been some of the toughest in my 30-plus years in this industry. From the spinach E. coli situation to pet food to peanut butter, it seems like there's been one recall after another.”

Smith, who is president and chief executive officer of K-VA-T Food Stores, Abingdon, Va., begins a two-year term as chairman of the association at this week's FMI Show. He succeeds Jeff Noddle, the chairman and CEO of Supervalu, Minneapolis.

Under Noddle's tenure, FMI reorganized its exhibit show and educational forum into an alternating-year format that will rotate to different cities. Next year's event will be an exhibit show in Las Vegas, and in 2009 FMI will stage an educational forum, focusing on personnel development, in Dallas.

That change is among a host of issues Smith and his team will have the opportunity to influence over the next two years. The association is also coping with the legislative challenges created by a reversal of power in Congress, as well as ongoing consolidation in the industry.

Smith said coping with the food safety issue, however, will be his top priority. It is an issue of importance to all of FMI's diverse range of membership, from independents to chains, across traditional and nontraditional formats, as well as suppliers.

“It's going to be on the front burner,” he said. “It's going to be one of those issues that everyone, from the smallest operators to the largest operators, would agree is important to all of us and affects all of us.”

One of the most frustrating things about the spate of recent food recalls, Smith said, has been the slow resolution of the causes of these outbreaks.

“In these recalls, there hasn't always been a clear answer why,” he said. “I think if you have an item mislabeled or an item with a foreign object in it, you can attribute that to human error, and you can fix that. But in some of these cases, there wasn't a good answer right away.”

Smith said he plans to help tackle the challenges of food safety by bringing back FMI's food safety task force, which would be made up of FMI leadership as well as other industry leaders that have a strong understanding of the issue. He said he will look for someone to head that task force.

In addition to retailers and FMI executives, he said the task force will also involve suppliers and others “who have a vested interest in making sure that consumer confidence is where it should be.”

“Let's be proactive, so when the inevitable comes, when we have a dire situation in our food supply for whatever reason, we will at least have the infrastructure in place to deal with that,” he said. “We need to be able to communicate with each other to rebuild consumer confidence as quickly as it can be torn down, because it can be torn down in literally a day.”

(See Pages 54-67 for an in-depth look at food safety issues.)