Retail at the Center

Most industry programs treat retailers as the audience. The customer wins when retailers are treated as the convener instead.

Retail occupies a particular position in the fresh produce value chain. Retailers are the closest point of contact with the consumer and feel demand signals first. They carry the operational weight of merchandising, shrink, freshness, and on-shelf execution. They write the specifications that suppliers must meet. They are not, in any meaningful sense, downstream of the work. They are where most of the work either lands or doesn't.

And yet, the conventional shape of supply chain innovation work positions retail at the receiving end. Standards bodies, technology vendors, and industry associations build frameworks, run pilots, develop methodologies, and then present them to retailers in the hope of adoption. The frameworks are sometimes elegant. Adoption is usually slow. The reason is structural: a framework retail did not help shape rarely fits the way retail actually operates.

The Supply Chain of the Future was designed to invert that pattern. TOTEM co-envisioned and is implementing the SCOTF initiative at the direction of IFPA and its stakeholders. From the start, retail has been at the center of the convening, not the periphery of the rollout. What follows is a case study in what that has looked like across the past two industry years, what has surfaced, and what the rhythm of retail-led infrastructure work actually feels like in practice.

October 2025: The Retail Issues Forum

The first inflection point came at the IFPA Global Show in Anaheim in October 2025. The Retail Issues Forum brought retail leaders together not as listeners to a curated agenda but as participants in a working session. Three areas surfaced as candidates for sustained collaborative work: shrink reduction, FIFO disruption, and supplier data sharing. Each became an organizing nucleus for a technical working group, with co-leads, scope, and graduation criteria.

The selection of those three was not a TOTEM call. It was a retail call. Retailers in the room named what was costing them margin and trust, what they were unable to fix alone, and where standardized infrastructure would unlock value across the entire chain. The working groups that came out of the Forum carry that retail authorship into every artifact they produce.

This is the structural difference between retail-at-center and retail-at-end. When the working groups draft a standard, retailers are not reviewing it on draft six. They are at the table on draft one. Specifications get built around how retail actually operates because retail leaders are in the room when the specifications take shape.

The continuing rhythm

The Retail Issues Forum produced the working groups. The working groups produced the cadence. SCOTF technical working groups now meet on a regular bi-weekly rhythm, with steering committee oversight on a quarterly cadence. That rhythm is the part of the work most case studies leave out, and it is the part that matters most.

Standards do not get written in event rooms. They get written in the recurring meetings between events, where draft language gets tested, edge cases get surfaced, and retailers, growers, technology providers, and standards bodies trade interpretations until the specification is precise enough to operate against. The events provide the energy and the alignment. The working groups provide the discipline.

• October 2025 · Anaheim
  Retail Issues Forum

  Retail leaders surface the three working group nuclei: shrink reduction, FIFO disruption, supplier data sharing. Working groups stand up with co-leads and scope.

• November 2025
  Working group cadence begins

  Bi-weekly technical working group meetings begin. Steering committee establishes quarterly oversight rhythm.

• January 2026
  "Insights to Infrastructure" report published

  Roadmap published synthesizing learnings into a forward plan. Pilot scoping begins in parallel.

• February 2026 · Berlin and Amsterdam
  European engagement

  Fruit Logistica in Berlin and follow-on retailer conversations in Amsterdam expand the conversation to European retailers facing PPWR and EPR pressure on the same issues.

• April 2026 · Phoenix
  IFPA Retail Conference

  Two days of substantive sessions. Retailers commit to working group participation. Pilots are confirmed live, standards are being written.

What surfaced in Phoenix

The April 2026 IFPA Retail Conference in Phoenix was the next major checkpoint. Two days of working sessions, demonstrations, and panel conversations confirmed what the working group cadence had been showing in the months between events. Three patterns surfaced clearly enough to name.

Store-level execution is the bottleneck

Live polling during the Retail Issues Forum sessions consistently identified store-level execution, not technology, as the primary challenge. Product makes it through the cold chain in good shape. The break point is what happens at receiving, in the back room, on the shelf, at the moment of merchandising decisions made by individual store associates under operational pressure. This is a profoundly important finding for the industry. It reframes where investment needs to land. Faster algorithms upstream are useful. Better tools and clearer specifications at the store are essential.

The barrier to data sharing is not technical

The infrastructure to share quality, temperature, and lot data across the supply chain exists. The data is being generated. What blocks adoption is not capability but willingness, the ownership questions, the transparency questions, the funding questions about who pays for the infrastructure that benefits everyone. These are governance problems, not engineering problems, and they require the kind of trust infrastructure that voluntary frameworks like SADIE are explicitly designed to provide.

Trade policy is rewriting resilience requirements

The Phoenix conversations took place against a shifting trade policy backdrop, with USMCA renegotiations approaching and tariff regimes becoming more permanent fixtures of the landscape. The takeaway from the trade policy session was clear and operational: harmonized standards and interoperable systems are not just efficiency plays. They are resilience plays. When trade policy shifts overnight, supply chains built on open standards adapt faster than supply chains locked into proprietary silos.

Why retail-led works

Three structural choices underwrite the program's progress. Each is portable to other industry contexts where infrastructure work has historically failed to land at the operational layer.

First, retailers convene rather than receive. The Retail Issues Forum, the working group selection, the pilot scoping, all of it is led by retail. TOTEM and IFPA provide methodology, facilitation, and connective tissue. The agenda comes from the people who will adopt the output.

Second, the working groups operate against graduation criteria, not against deadlines. Each group has a defined scope, a defined output, and a defined success measure that was negotiated with the retailers who will use the output. Standards do not get written by the calendar. They get written when they are precise enough to operate against.

Third, the standards alignment is real, not aspirational. The work is integrated with GS1 and ASTM, two of the standards bodies whose specifications the industry already runs on. SCOTF is not building parallel standards. It is contributing to the existing standards in a way that makes them work for fresh produce specifically, with retail at the table to verify that the resulting specifications are operable in their environments.

What comes next

The trajectory is clear. The pilots that were scoped through the working groups are now live. The standards work is in active drafting. The Phoenix conference produced new working group commitments and steering committee additions. The European engagement that began in Berlin and Amsterdam in February is expanding into a sustained transatlantic conversation, with retailers on both sides of the Atlantic facing convergent pressures from regulation, consumer behavior, and trade policy.

The broader pattern, the one that transfers beyond retail, is this. Industry infrastructure adopted at the operational layer is industry infrastructure built with the operators in the room from the first session. The methodology that produced the Retail Issues Forum, the working group cadence, and the recurring conferences is portable to any context where standards and infrastructure have historically been built for an audience rather than with them. The substantive subject changes. The shape of the convening does not.