ARLINGTON, Va. — Citing an “abundance of caution” because of the influenza outbreak, Food Marketing Institute here last week said it would postpone indefinitely its FutureConnect and Marketechnics conferences in Dallas that were to take place this week.
“We were concerned about the urgency of the alerts that were coming out of public health officials,” Leslie G. Sarasin, president and chief executive officer of FMI, told SN on Thursday of last week. “We spoke with several public health officials at the national, state and local level, and the counsel seemed to be fairly consistent that bringing large groups of people together in a confined space could be a problem in this type of a situation.”
About 2,000 people had registered for FutureConnect and nearly 1,000 for Marketechnics.
SN had already printed several pages of this edition that refer to the conferences before FMI made the announcement about postponing the events.
The decision to postpone the conferences was made by FMI's officer group, which includes the chairman, the four vice chairs and the immediate past chair.
Sarasin said it was unclear how soon the shows could be rescheduled, although she said it was her “hope and belief” that they could be rescheduled relatively soon.
“This was not an easy decision,” she said. “We are disappointed because a lot of time and effort has gone into what we perceive as a tremendous program, and we have been receiving a tremendous amount of support from the industry for [FutureConnect].”
This was to be the first staging of the FutureConnect conference, a leadership development forum that was being held in lieu of the traditional FMI Show. The Marketechnics conference was to follow FutureConnect at a different venue in Dallas.
Dallas County last week confirmed a handful of cases of the virus, which is thought to have killed dozens of people in Mexico and sickened thousands. One person who was sick with the virus, a child who had been infected in Mexico, died last week in a Houston hospital.
“We feel it is important for our industry leaders to be engaged in their communities back home so that they can be on the front lines of dealing with their customers who may have concerns about their own health and safety in their communities,” Sarasin said.
