Amazon Hits The Gas On Grocery Concept

 

Laura Heller ,  

 

(Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images)

Amazon has opened up its AmazonFresh Pickup stores to customers, expanding a test concept from employees only to Seattle shoppers. It's an indication that Amazon is getting closer to selling groceries online.

The retailer has two grocery pickup locations in Seattle, but until last week had only allowed company employees to place orders as it was still a beta test, according to the Seattle Times.

But now, Amazon Prime members can order groceries online and select a time to collect them at one of the dedicated sites.

Amazon has several test stores in the market, including Amazon Go, the highly discussed self-serve convenience stores concept that lets shoppers pick up goods and leave without every using a checkout.Everything Amazon does is significant, but the grocery store experiment is among its most important. It's an $800 billion market that cements shopper loyalty and has them coming back frequently. But online grocery has been slow to catch on with less than 10% of consumers using one of the available services.

Amazon needs shoppers to buy groceries from them. It's a lynchpin category for all retailers and a strength for Amazon's largest competitor, Walmart. And while Walmart has been making headlines with splashy e-commerce acquisitions like its recent purchases of ModCloth and Moosejaw, the fact that it has been growing market share in grocery at the expense of competitors is much more significant. 

 

Retailers other than Amazon are developing in-store pick up programs to help mitigate some of the barriers. If a shopper can order groceries and pick them up when it's convenient, there's no need to schedule delivery or have a safe place to leave the order.

This being Amazon, AmazonFresh boasts some new technology. When shoppers pull up, a scanner reads the license plate to register the order and customer. And this being Amazon, there's a nice surcharge -- $14.99 a month on top of the $99 annual Prime membership fee.

Will AmazonFresh Pickup put Amazon closer to being a top grocery seller? Time will tell, but in this race, every maneuver counts.

This 17-Year-Old Sums Up in 1 Paragraph What Great Leadership Looks Like

Take a lesson from this high-school standout athlete: Leadership is not about you.

 

By Marcel Schwantes

 Principal and founder, Leadership From the Core@MarcelSchwantes 

CREDIT: Getty Images

 

 

If you follow my column, by now you're familiar with the ethos of servant leadership, which I often write about and firmly believe to be the best leadership philosophy on the planet.

But don't just take my word for it. The CEOs of some of the best and brightest companies in the world, including The Container Store, TDIndustries, Whole Foods Market, Zappos and countless others would all agree with me that it works. Their reputable companies operate by servant leadership principles with amazing success.

Servant leadership is also an expression of character and values in how we conduct ourselves outside the workplace -- in our schools, homes, and communities.

That expression is vividly clear and profoundly displayed in a recent column I read by David Lee, founder and principal of HumanNature@Work. Lee nails it by depicting a story on his TLNT column about servant leadership as expressed through the heart of a 17-year-old star athlete.

The story Lee paraphrases comes from the book, Stadium Status: Taking Your Business to the Bigtime by John Brubaker, a former Lacrosse head coach and now a nationally-renowned consultant, speaker and author.

I'll let Lee narrate from here, which will lead up to a heartfelt, 1-paragraph summary of the meaning of great leadership. From David Lee's column:

When [coach] Brubaker took over as a college lacrosse head coach he inherited a team that had done poorly for years. Despite this, a high school standout, Stephen, was interested in playing at Coach Bru's college, even though he was aggressively recruited by far better schools.

Coach Bru met with this young superstar and attempted to sign him, but Stephen refused, saying he wanted to wait until the following spring. He was, however, willing to give a verbal, non-binding commitment. Brubaker was desperate to sign this young star, and told him he would hold a scholarship for him until the spring.

All fall and winter, other college recruiters came to Stephen's games to watch this amazing talent and hope he would change his mind. When spring came, Coach Bru and Stephen's coach sat down with him, asking him to commit and why he waited so long.

And now, from the mouth of a 17-year-old...

As Lee tells it, to Coach Bru's astonishment, this is what the 17-year- old said next:

Coach, I don't know if you've noticed, but a lot of colleges come to see me play each week. Most of my teammates weren't getting scholarship offers or even being recruited earlier this year but now they are. By me not committing anywhere, all the college coaches who keep coming to see me play get a chance to discover how good some of my teammates really are. If I signed early with you, all the other coaches would've stopped coming to the games and none of my teammates would've gotten recruited.

The lesson for all leaders.

Lets face it: We've all just been collectively schooled by a (then) 17-year-old. In his response to his coach, not only does it define servant leadership, it illustrates the essence of great leadership, period.

The reason his response is so mind-blowing for someone his age--with star status to boot--is that the world wasn't revolving around his axis, as most self-centered 17-year-olds typically behave.

Instead, he was about helping other people--his less talented teammates. As Lee writes further about Stephen, "He was already thinking about how he can lift up others, how he could help them achieve their goals. He had confidence in his own ability to excel and achieve what he needed to achieve; he wasn't obsessed with how to make that happen because he knew it would. Instead, he focused on how he could serve others."

And therein lies the lesson for every leader in the workplace: Your role is to lift up your employees and help them to joyfully achieve their goals so they can thrive. When they succeed, you succeed, and the whole organization succeeds. It's a thing of beauty.

That reminds me of another great quote by Robert K. Greenleaf, who coined the term "servant leadership" in the modern corporate setting. He wrote these famous words in his legendary essay The Servant as Leader, published in 1970:

The servant-leader is servant first. It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead.

As I wrote in the past, when you serve first, it's for the other person's benefit. Like Stephen, you selflessly focus the attention away from yourself and put the spotlight on others. Greenleaf noticed that these leaders got the best out of their employees; they were more motivated, more creative, and more productive, which led to great business results.

7 ways to put servant leadership into action.

To add some practical elements of servant leadership into your work routine, Lee offers these great tips from his TLNT column:

1. Practice doing everything within your power to remove obstacles that make it hard for employees to do their best work. This means providing the information, technology, resources, and support for people to do great work.

2. Remember the law of reciprocity: what you put out is what comes back to you from others. If you want others to care, make sure you care about them -- and that you show you care.

3. Ask those who report to you: "How can I help you?" "What can I do -- and NOT do -- to help you be successful with this project (or in your job)?"

4. Look for opportunities to compliment -- catch people doing things right -- and show people you "see them."

5. Be on the lookout for articles, seminars, networking connections, and opportunities that would benefit those you serve. The very fact that you were thinking about them says a lot about who you are as a person.

6. Be more generous with your attention and time. Don't only ask, "Would this meeting benefit me?" Be willing to have meetings because they would help the other person.

7. Remind yourself when being a servant leader feels like it takes too much time or effort, that what you put out comes back to you multiplied, for better or for worse.

A New Fresh Food Pharmacy Opens

Location specializes in type 2 diabetes

May 26, 2017, 11:16 am

"Folks, good morning, and welcome to the ribbon cutting and opening of the Fresh Food Pharmacy," announced Sam Balukoff, the MC at Geisinger Health System's launch of a new food pharmacy located on the grounds of a hospital in central Pennsylvania. 

The Geisinger Fresh Food Pharmacy is stocked with healthy pantry staples like oatmeal and peanut butter, as well as fresh produce, and specializes in helping type 2 diabetes patients in a pilot program aimed at getting them to change their diets and lose weight. They receive free groceries of healthy foods every week. Currently, there are 180 patients involved in the program. 

The pharmacy, as reported by NPR, is more like a grocery store, with shelves filled with healthy foods, including whole grain pasta, beans, fresh produce, low-fat dairy, lean meats, and fish. 

Each of the pilot program's participants meet one-on-one with a registered dietitian, who gives them recipes and hands-on instruction on how to prepare healthy meals, and one of the most powerful barriers has been eliminated -- patients go home with five days of free, fresh food to make those recipes. 

"It's life-changing," David Feinberg, the president and CEO of Geisinger Health System says of the results. According to Feinberg, so far all of the patients in the pilot program have made improvements. One example is the significant declines in patients' hemoglobin A1C levels, the blood test used to track how well patients with diabetes are controlling their blood sugar. Feinberg says that as his team tracks hemoglobin AIC levels in the pilot participants, they're also assessing the number of medical visits, sicknesses and the overall cost of caring for these patients.

Here's what they estimate so far: "A decrease in hemoglobin A1C of one point saves us [about] $8,000," Feinberg says. And many of the participants have seen a decline in hemoglobin A1C of about three points. "So that's [about] $24,000 we're saving in health care costs," he notes, adding that "the costs associated with diabetes in the U.S. now exceed $240 billion a year."

The Geisinger Fresh Food Pharmacy program costs the hospital about $1,000 for the food it gives to each patient.

Lidl Reveals Locations of 1st 9 U.S. Stores

NC, NC, VA openings to take place June 15

May 30, 2017, 11:32 am

Lidl will debut its first nine U.S. stores in North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia on June 15 at 8 a.m. Each store will hold a four-day grand-opening celebration following a ribbon-cutting ceremony at 7:40 a.m. The locations are Kinston, Greenville, Sanford, Rocky Mount and Winston-Salem, N.C.; Spartanburg and Greenville, S.C.; and Virginia Beach and Hampton, Va.

“We cannot wait to open our first U.S. stores and introduce customers to grocery shopping refreshed, retooled and rethought to make life better,” said Brendan Proctor, president and CEO of Lidl US, whose headquarters is in Arlington County, Va. “Every day in our stores, customers will enjoy the smell of Lidl’s freshly baked breads, a selection of sustainable products like our certified fresh and frozen fish, and top-quality wines from around the world available at market-beating prices. Our mission every day is to deliver our customers less complexity, lower prices, better choices and greater confidence.”

Customers at each store will be able to take advantage of limited-time grand-opening special offers. The first 100 customers to arrive at each location will also get a wooden coin for a chance to win up to $100 in Lidl gift cards. Customers will be able to sample Lidl’s products and get a complimentary Lidl reusable bag while supplies last. The opening-day excitement will extend through the weekend with games, activities, prizes and specials.

According to Lidl, its products will regularly be available for up to 50 percent less than products in other U.S. supermarkets. Shoppers will also encounter newly constructed, easy-to-navigate stores measuring just 20,000 square feet each and featuring six aisles, fresh-baked breads and pastries, prepared throughout the day in a department by the store entrance; healthful, sustainable offerings; organic and gluten-free options; mainly exclusive-brand products manufactured to exacting quality standards; an ever-changing selection of nonfoods items each week, including fitness gear, small kitchen appliances, toys and outdoor furniture; and store hours coinciding during prime shopping times: 8 a.m. to 9 p.m., Monday through Sunday.

The Germany-based company previewed its private-brand offerings at a press event earlier this month in New York. The grocer has also divulged that it plans to open as many as 100 stores along the well-populated East Coast by the close of 2017.

Lidl operates more than 10,000 stores in 27 countries throughout Europe.

Minnesota Caterer and Grocer Ensures Food Safety With RFID

ParTech's SureCheck system enables Lunds & Byerlys to automatically track temperatures within its coolers, in order to meet food-safety standards and confirm product freshness.

By Claire Swedberg

May 29, 2017—

Minnesota family-owned grocer Lunds & Byerlys has rolled out a passiveultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID-enabled solution to ensure the freshness of its products, and to help meet food-safety mandates. The retailer installed the SureCheck Food Safety Solution, from ParTech, at all 26 of its stores in January 2016, and says the system has helped to confirm that each store and every cooler meets federal and local standards requirements for temperatures. The company uses the technology to track the temperatures, as well as to automate the recording of data during safety checks that employees would otherwise need to carry out manually.

In 2011, the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) made requirements for food safety more stringent than they were previously. FSMA aims to assure that the U.S. food supply is safe with regard to contamination, by shifting the focus from response to prevention. Lunds & Byerlys and most of PAR's customers have implemented Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points programs (HACCP) to accommodate the standard.

Typically, food retailers must track temperatures several times, or at least once a day, in order to meet food-safety standards. Companies document the temperatures at which food is stored for their own temperature-management purposes, as well as to provide that information to government authorities when needed. If temperatures fall outside of acceptable thresholds, food may need to be discarded.

"With the rollout and implementation of the FSMA, many resources in the grocery industry have been strained in order to meet compliance deadlines," says Chris Gindorff, Lund Food Holdings' senior manager of quality assurance and manager of food safety.

Lunds & Byerlys owns 26 upscale supermarkets in the Minneapolis-St Paul area, each containing a bakery and a deli. Its core focus is on the quality of its products, the company reports, including the freshness of the food that it stores, to meet the needs of its customers.

The frequency of temperature measurements depends on the specific checkpoints that the firm has put in place. "We typically see measurements taken every two hours," says John Sammon III, ParTech's senior VP and general manager for SureCheck. Without an automated system in place, Sammon explains, the process typically requires pen and paper. Many food retailers simply keep records of temperature checks in binders.

The Messy Relationship Between Food Stamps and Health

Several studies show beneficiaries of the program are more likely to be obese. But the answer is not to cut benefits, some academics say.

Mike Blake / Reuters

OLGA KHAZAN

• MAY 24, 2017

Among other programs President Trump proposed slashing in his budget blueprint Tuesday, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, previously known as the food stamps program, would lose 29 percent of its funding over 10 years.

Conservative groups praised the budget proposal’s combination of boosted defense spending and cuts to “domestic programs that are redundant, improper, or otherwise wasteful,” as Romina Boccia, a fellow in federal budgetary affairs at the Heritage Foundation, said in a statement. Liberal groups, meanwhile, said it would “harm America's most vulnerable people and make matters worse for those who can least afford it,” as Felicia Wong, president of the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank, put it.

The debate about food stamps largely centers on whether the program promotes dependency. In defending the proposal to The New York Times, White House budget director Mick Mulvaney said, “What we have done is not try to remove the social safety net for the folks who need it, but to try to figure out if there are folks who don’t need it and that need to be back in the work force.”

But there’s one thing about SNAP that even its liberal supporters would acknowledge is a weakness: There’s a lot of evidence that the program doesn’t help its recipients achieve or maintain a healthy weight.

To name just one researcher who has uncovered this trend, Cindy Leung, a nutrition researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, found teen and adult food-stamp recipients had larger waists and higher levels of obesity than people who aren’t in the program, even when controlling for income. More than a quarter of children live in households that currently receive SNAP benefits, according to Leung’s work, and while she found that kids in the program are not more likely to be obese, she did find that children in the program consumed more sugar-sweetened drinks, processed meat, and high-fat dairy than kids who didn’t live in SNAP households.

Granted, other papers have found no association between food stamps and gaining weight. But there are other worrisome findings about SNAP’s health impacts. The American Cancer Society’s Binh T. Nguyen found that SNAP participants drank more sugar-sweetened beverages than people who are eligible for SNAP but not enrolled in it. And a USDA report published last year found that 20 cents of every SNAP dollar was spent on sweetened drinks, desserts, salty snacks, candy, and sugar.

Still, Leung says her work should not be interpreted as a call for cutting SNAP benefits.

For one thing, her studies and others can’t quite determine whether the elevated odds of obesity are because of the SNAP program itself or because the people who enroll in SNAP are the kinds of people—stressed-out, poor, less educated—who are more likely to be obese for unrelated reasons. There aren’t many differences between the food purchases of SNAP households and non-SNAP households. Food-stamp recipients might be buying soda, in other words, because Americans like to buy soda.

Furthermore, Leung has found that people who apply for SNAP tend to be at the ends of their ropes. Usually, they’ve exhausted help from their families or churches. Many families in the program run out of food before the end of the month. That means SNAP recipients might be stocking up when they have funds and stretching the rest of their SNAP budgets. As other studies have found, unhealthy food is cheaper than healthy produce.

“If you’re low-income, when you’re going to the supermarket, you might see things on sale, and soft drinks and junk food are promoted [in stores],” Leung said. “The person might think, ‘My family deserves a treat,’ or ‘I’m going to buy this soda because it’s cheap.’ I don’t think it’s because they don’t care about their families.”

Another study by Nguyen found that, indeed, SNAP participation was associated with obesity. But an interesting thing happened when she looked at just those SNAP participants who were “food insecure,” or had serious problems making sure they could afford enough food: They had better diets and were less likely to be overweight—especially the white individuals.

In the paper, Nguyen posited this could be because Hispanic and African American SNAP participants are more likely to live in areas where healthy food is scarce. With their SNAP benefits in hand, food-insecure white people could finally go and buy fruit and vegetables from their neighborhood stores. But people who live in blighted neighborhoods don’t have that option.

Even though the program is imperfect, “SNAP is our first line of defense against hunger,” Leung said. Cuts to the program, she says, “would hurt a lot of families.” In 2016, SNAP helped 44 million Americans.

Instead, if policy makers are concerned about the health of beneficiaries, she thinks it could be tweaked in various ways. Leung points to programs like the Healthy Incentives Pilot, a small experiment in Massachusetts that gave SNAP participants 30 cents for every dollar they spent on fruits and vegetables. The incentive helped increase fruit and vegetable consumption by 25 percent. Leung also recommends prohibiting the use of SNAP benefits for soda. That’s a controversial measure—it could feel paternalistic, among other things—but one study she performed found that most SNAP participants would themselves rather be in a program that combined bonuses for buying healthy food and the elimination of soda from the program.

Finally, Leung’s studies highlight a less-talked-about upside to the program: SNAP participants report feeling less stressed about getting food on the table.

And given that stress itself can lead to obesity, that’s a health benefit that shouldn’t be overlooked.

The New Starbucks CEO Seems To Stumble Out Of The Gate

Ronald Holden ,  

 CONTRIBUTOR

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

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Photos courtesy of Starbucks

Howard Schultz, left, turned over the key to the "original" Starbucks store to new CEO Kevin Johnson in March, 2017.

It was a touching moment, the highlight of the Starbucks annual meeting in Seattle earlier this year: Howard Schultz, the charismatic driving force behind the company's rise from quirky local chain to global coffee powerhouse, reached into his pocket and withdrew the key to the historic original Starbucks store on Pike Place. With a flourish, he passed it to his anointed successor as CEO, Kevin Johnson.

But, like so much of Starbucks these days, it was more theater than substance. The Pike Place store, which always has long lines of tourists outside, isn't really the first Starbucks at all; the original location was a block north, in a building that was torn down years ago. And Starbucks today, despite all the outward trappings of success ($20 billion in revenue, 25,000 stores in 75 countries, 250,000 employees), the company faces complex challenges to its business model (from a tsunami of third-wave coffee shops, not to mention die-hard competitors like Dunkin Donuts), its product mix (from beverages to food), and, perhaps most threatening, to its vaunted corporate culture.

Now that Starbucks has lost its magnetic micro-manager in favor of the gregarious Johnson, you'd think the new guy would have a honeymoon period, at least. But no.

Johnson's first major initiative, the North Star project, landed with a thud. One of the issues it addressed is the awkward congestion in the stores, an issue that mobile ordering was supposed to alleviate. Instead, it appears to have made things worse, with loyal customers prepaying their orders from their mobile devices only to wait around in the store for the baristas to make their drinks.

Not enough baristas? Orders too complicated? Fixing the menu is relatively easy, but hiring more workers is expensive, especially since Starbucks pays some of the industry's top wages. The danger, Starbucks has found, are declines in both store traffic and in same-store sales growth.

The Starbucks response, under Johnson, was uncharacteristically authoritarian: wagging the corporate finger at the front-line baristas.

"Each manager was required to read verbatim about a half-hour of dicta blaming the baristas for all these problems," one unidentified employee told Business Insider of the mandatory meetings.

For its part, the company sees the issue as "a fight for the heart and soul" of Starbucks. That would be the "customer experience" as defined by the relationship between the customer and the barista. 

But many employees are skeptical. They feel Starbucks is forcing baristas to take responsibility for customer-service problems caused by other issues (understaffed stores, increasing demand from mobile and drive-thru orders, time-intensive drinks). In the long pep-talk, Starbucks essentially ordered employees to find ways to improve the customer experience, or else quit the company.

The Starbucks culture has always been an (overly self-conscious) emphasis on the emotional connection between the company's partners [employees] and its customers. "We are in the business of human connection," Johnson told Business Insider in an interview earlier this year. 

A lot of the responsibility for the North Star initiative lies on the shoulders of Kris Engskov, a former investment banker who joined Starbucks 15 years ago after a White House stint as an assistant to President Bill Clinton. The "heart & soul" metaphor is Engskov's, who now holds the title of president, US retail.

It's his view that better headquarters support systems and better training can improve morale as well as customer service; it's not clear that all the front-line employees agree, or even feel that their voices are heard. "Company Kool Aid" is how one barista described the new agenda.

Most traffic jams eventually resolve themselves, and most bottlenecks straighten themselves out. This isn't the first time Starbucks has seen difficulties; Schultz had stepped aside before, from 2001 to 2008, only to see sales slump until the board of directors brought him back as CEO.

It's doubtful that sort of debacle will repeat itself under Johnson, however. Schultz, meantime, is often touted as a presidential candidate in 2020. His interpersonal skills are beyond challenge, and his liberal ideology offers a refreshing alternative to the incumbent occupant of the White House. So far, he hasn't ruled out a political career.