FMI Postpones FutureConnect, Marketechnics

MARK HAMSTRA

ARLINGTON, Va. — Food Marketing Institute here said it has decided to postpone indefinitely its FutureConnect and Marketechnics trade shows, scheduled for next week in Dallas, because of concerns over the swine flu.

“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 Thursday afternoon. "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."

She also said FMI wanted its members to remain in their communities so they could monitor the situation locally. 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.

About 2,000 people had registered for FutureConnect and nearly 1,000 for Marketechnics. She said it was unclear how soon the show could be rescheduled, although she said it was her "hope and belief" that the event could be rescheduled soon. Dallas County this week confirmed a handful of cases of the virus, which is thought to have killed dozens of people in Mexico and sickened thousands.

Nearly 100 cases had been confirmed in the U.S. as of Thursday. One person who was sick with the virus, a child who had been infected in Mexico, died last week in a Houston hospital.

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.