What WMU’s Food Marketing Program Teaches About Grocery’s Future | FMI 2026

Hello, everyone.

This is omnitalk Retail.

I'm Chris Walton.

And I'm annmazingo.

And we are coming to you once again from the Simbi booth at FMI Midwinter in San Diego.

We are at Booth.

Yeah.

Right, right.

Russell.

Yeah.

Booth number 118.

Come on by.

Say hello.

Now you can tell he's excited to be joining us.

We have Russell Zwanka.

Russell is the director of food marketing program at Western Michigan University.

Russell, welcome to OmniTalket.

Thanks for being with us today.

Well, thanks for inviting me.

Yeah.

We're excited to have you.

What qualifies one to be in a position as the director of the food marketing program at Western Michigan University?

You have to love this industry, but for the most part, you have to have the academic credentials to be able to teach at a university that's AACSB accredited.

You have to have all the research that goes with it.

But probably the primary aspect of it is you have to have a ton of experience in the industry.

Yeah.

So what, What.

Tell us about your background.

Well, so I started in this industry at 14, bagging groceries for tips.

Okay.

I worked for ahold for 11 years.

Okay.

Was store manager in five different stores for eight of those years in operations.

Wow.

And then I came in when we formed the first category management team.

Okay.

In the country through the partnering group with tpg.

And then I went from there to Fleming as a wholesaler.

Oh, wow.

And so I have this self distributing retail background.

I have Fleming as a.

As a background.

I was the VP of merchandising for all 3,000 of our stores.

Yeah.

And then I went from there, went to Pizzutos for a couple years, went up to Canada where we had operations in 11 time zones.

Wow.

Merchandising, marketing and loyalty and everything for that.

And then price chopper for five years.

And then I started teaching.

I got my PhD along the way.

Okay.

And why.

Why does Western Michigan University have a focus then on a food marketing program?

Well, I wish I could claim it, but it was run quite well before I got there.

Okay.

We've enhanced a ton since then.

Probably the primary ingredient.

Kind of a joke there.

Yeah.

Right.

Nicely done.

Nicely done.

The primary ingredient would be you'd have to have a major retailer that is surrounded by companies that call in that retailer.

Okay.

We are fortunate enough to have two, and I'd say maybe a 2.5, because we have Meijer in Grand Rapids, we have Spartan Nash, and obviously now part of cns.

And then we also have Kroger Michigan which, you know, it's a division of Kroger, but it's a $9 billion division.

Yeah, it's a big division.

So those three also bring everybody else to support them.

Wow.

So why'd you get into academia?

Like, how did that come about?

And how long you been in academia now?

Proper.

So I have been teaching now for 11 years.

Okay.

And I got my PhD because I thought being called Dr. Z would be cool.

It is cool, for sure.

That's true.

I tell people all the time, I.

Did not think I was going to teach.

I had a great job.

I was doing things, but I thought I needed a PhD so I got it.

And then little school in Albany, Siena University.

University now they said you should come out and start trying to teach.

Okay.

And I fell in love with it.

Do they call you Dr. Z on campus?

They do, yes.

Yeah.

Do you like it?

That was the reason why.

Yeah, right?

You love it, don't you?

All right, all right, all right.

So you are, as Dr. Z at Western Michigan University, you're training the next generation of grocery and food marketing executives, really are professionals, and you're keeping track of what's going on in the industry as well.

So what do you think industry executives right now, if you were to sum, are getting right and also, what are they getting wrong?

Well, you know, in regards to relating it to the future or the students who are now the future leaders in the industry, one, there's a common conception there that every student now wants to work remote.

That is one that has been out there for years.

And that is absolutely not true.

Everybody wants flexibility.

And I think that would be every age group wants some flexibility.

But there's always this thing about, oh, you kids, they just want to, you know, work from a beach.

They want the culture, they want the interaction.

They want to be able to learn the company from in person, but you also want to be able to take off on a Friday if you need to, or work from home or something like that.

So that's one of those that we're constantly having to kind of retrain in regards to what they get right.

We're looking for diversity in the workplace.

The Western Michigan food marketing program is over 80% female.

And so it's just a normal part of our data to be putting good, strong females out into the marketplace.

And it's one of those where I think, as companies are looking at the future, they're trying to figure out, okay, now we've got this Gen Z thing.

Gen Z is working their way out.

What about Gen Alpha and I think there is a ton of overlapping between Gen Z and Genesis.

Gen Alpha in regards to being an AI native.

Right.

So Gen Z learned it and Gen Alpha knows it.

They're never going to know a life that doesn't have AI.

Wow.

It's like the early days of the iPhone.

Right?

I mean, it's like now it's just.

Plussed up again and then some grow up.

There's an iPhone there.

Let's continue on that a little bit.

I'd love for you to kind of separate fact from fiction.

Right now.

We hear a lot of talk about AI as one of the technologies that's most impacting our lives in general and especially our lives and the lives of those who work in the retail and grocery industry.

What do you think are the true things that your students should be paying attention to that the industry should be paying attention to right now?

And what is just kind of buzz worthy?

And would you kind of set aside.

Oh, and I totally appreciate the question.

First of all, I assume that there's nothing I get from students that hasn't been run through ChatGPT.

That is perfectly normal and we encourage it as a tool.

Yes.

And as long as people understand it's a tool, then that's perfectly fine.

In regards to replacing people, I think you can just forget about that.

Yes, there will be some automation.

There has always been automation and there has always been this opportunity for something to be reprogrammed, to be done easier from someone else.

But that doesn't mean you lose the human touch.

Right.

The humans are the ones who have to eat.

And you would hope that the people running merchandising are the humans who understand it.

It's not just algorithms and data and regression lines.

It's.

Okay, here's a trend, here's what's going on.

This aspect of.

We're kind of all over this right now.

You have two different other parts about AI.

One, you have the agentic part.

And we're big fans of making sure that we communicate that agentic AI is now in control of a lot of decisions of what people see.

And so you, as a future marketer, you need to understand how to have a bot talking to a bot.

Yeah.

So it gets through the algorithm and to the end user, which would be the human.

And so that was brought up again this morning.

And that is absolutely true.

So bots talking to bots is something that is true there.

And then there's another aspect to it.

It's kind of funny.

It's two different sides of it, the other aspect is that AI is getting a little bit dumber.

Now, you're not gonna hear anybody on.

Stage saying, sir, how so?

But if you think about the times that you have, you've looked up, you've looked up something on chat.

Yeah.

And it gave you kind of just a crazy answer.

Yeah.

And you looked at it and you said, well, you don't even know what, you don't even know what I asked you.

Right.

Like I know you were trying to figure this out.

You gave me this generic kind of a dumb answer.

Right.

So I don't go back and correct it.

And the whole point of AI is to keep taking all of your data points and recirculating them and regenerating them as true.

But we've never told it it's not true.

And, and so there's, there's another party or another side of this.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

So what is going to happen in a couple years when all of these false responses have never been corrected?

And so in essence, the curating or the filtering by a human is probably going to become even more important so that you don't just take an AI answer and shove it out there.

Because AI doesn't know what's right or wrong.

Wow.

So it's curating it all the time.

How does that play into the agentic concept then?

Obviously, the best thing, example of agentic is autonomous vehicle.

Yeah.

It's making decisions.

Right.

Yeah, that's a good, that's a good analogy.

Agentic.

So agentic AI is, is what I was alluding to in bots, talking to bots.

Because if you're, if you're going to give up.

So there's a lot of trust, there's a lot of trust in what AI is giving to us.

So if you're going to give up that freedom and you're going to say this, this bot or this platform has the ability to make decisions for me, then you are going to have to make sure that you have the correct parameters inside.

So if you ever talked about a couple years ago, well, we would love to go after AI, but we have to make sure our data is correct.

We have to make sure that we don't put garbage in, so it gives the garbage out.

This is, this is true.

This is probably even more true now.

So you don't have to tell it, I'm gluten free, I'm celiac, I'm looking to be a vegan in 10 years, those kind of things.

And it's going to go into the platform So I thought.

I thought this morning's sessions, the guy at the end was excellent.

Well, yeah, tell us about it.

Fantastic job.

So what was he speaking on?

He was speaking on future.

Future.

I think that's always what you would get out of an FMI speaker.

And he was talking about the same thing.

And we, we published reports or we published peer review research on bot to bot speaking and algorithm and how you work your way through the algorithm and how it's.

It's different from previous marketing or previous marketing.

You're talking to the consumer and you're.

Right, right, right, right.

You're emoting some kind of feeling.

Now, it's about prompts and it's about facts, it's about nutrition facts, and it's about making sure all that is accurate.

So I just thought his session was excellent.

Yeah.

Wow.

Wow.

All right, well, let's get you out of here on this.

So.

So you're steeped in grocery.

That's what I take from the age of 14.

Steeped in grocery.

What would you say, what would you expect in terms of how the average grocery store will look different five years from now than it does today or the average grocery experience?

I should say.

How much time do you have?

Yeah, a lot.

As much as you want.

I would reframe it a little bit.

Okay.

I would reframe it.

In regards to how are we procuring food for our own consumption?

And I think as long as you can split up the aspect that some food has a very clear replenishment side cycle and you buy it and it's coffee.

It's a regimen item.

You drink three cups a day or two cups a day, and you should be able to predict how long it's going to take for them to run out of that.

So subtracting whether or not they had a baby or they added a wife or something like that, for the most part, they will run out in three weeks.

So those kind of continuous commodities should have a way of being just fed into your house.

And I could picture somewhere, an anteroom in everybody's home where somebody can just deliver coffee, deliver laundry detergent, deliver bath tissue, deliver things that you don't want to think about.

And so as as much as a store can help you and help remind you that you haven't bought toilet paper in a while, it satisfies two things.

One, it reminds you you haven't bought toilet paper in a while, which is good for everybody.

Yeah.

High household penetration item.

The other thing is it helps you identify customers who perhaps have bought toilet paper, they just stopped buying it from you.

Okay.

And so now you can go after that customer and say, okay, this is an item you have to be buying for me.

Right.

So the other answer to this one, you know, because I said we could talk about this forever, is that there is a very clear gap forming between formats of grocery stores.

Right.

So you have an extreme value, you have fresh wellness, those kind of items.

The aspect of including GLP1s and how people are curating or making sure that their own nutrition needs are there, that's going to have to live in a store.

So you're going to have to over communicate.

Whether it's electronically, however you over communicate, this is the item that you're looking for.

So these middle of road stores are.

It's gonna be tough.

Yeah, Keep hearing that.

You don't stand for anything.

Keep hearing that.

What makes you special is one that we teach all the time.

So do you think there's gonna be more consolidation in the industry?

I think you have to consult.

Well, if you're consolidating for aggregation of scale, that's one thing.

If you're consolidating because you are trying to pick up a scope of some kind of a talent that you don't offer, like if you're, you have an Asian market, you're to trying, trying to break it, you're not going to learn that you have to buy this.

That's interesting.

Yeah.

So you know the, the H marts and the 99 ranches, these are, those are absolutely fascinating.

So if you're going to try to compete against them, you're going to want to buy that scope.

So you have to buy that, that.

Because you, you can't just go look, do it.

Yeah.

How a Korean buys groceries.

Right.

And so yeah, I think you, I think you'll see a lot of consolidation.

But that's the story of our industry, always has been.

Dr. Z, I have a question for you to close.

Where would you tell your students right now that are graduating to apply, what jobs would you tell them to look at besides Cindy?

Yeah, that's an option.

But really when you talk about consolidation happening in the industry, you talk about kind of what a future grocery concept might look like.

Yeah.

Where would you tell them to start looking for the longest lasting and most fulfilling career?

I would say that the highest tumult, if you want to call it that, has been on the CPG side.

Okay.

And so in regards to cpg, Kraft, Heinz Splitting, Ferreira, Ferrero, WK, Kellogg, everything that's been happening the last couple of years has shown that there's a clear bifurcation of here's the fast moving items, here's the slide, slow moving.

Right.

And we're going to split the company.

Which 15 years ago everything would have been aggregating, aggregating, aggregating.

Right now they're all splitting, splitting, splitting.

So honestly, I would say maybe you let that settle out a little bit.

Okay.

It's being caused by tariffs, it's being caused by cost of.

Cost of good increases that you can't pass on those kind of things.

And then the retailers, these super regional retailers are awesome.

Yeah.

So if you can go to a Meyer and then you can always add heb, Wegmans, Publix, those guys, the kind of super regionals.

And I would include Kroger in there.

Okay.

Because Kroger operates as a super regional.

That's why they let Harris Teeter keep the banner Harris Teeter, because that is where the recognition comes from.

So if you changed it to Kroger, even though maybe some of the products inside might say Kroger, you might have an issue.

Great.

So are the students taking Dr. Z's advice or are they like inclined to or more interested in taking other types of roles?

I'm curious.

It is sexier to be on the cpg.

Sexier to be on the CPG side.

Okay.

And.

But I came up on the retailer side.

But a lot of the retailer side then gets, they basically say, well, that's in the stores, you know, and if you're, if you're a student at a university, then it's like, well, I don't want to be in the store.

Is that because of the marketing angle?

Oh, it's just the fact that it seems like, you know, that's operations versus, you know, I want to use my, I want to use my brain.

I want to be in marketing in the office.

And it's like, no, you, you're using your brain all along in the process, the entire supply chain uses your brain.

But if you are strong in operations, you're going to be so good inside the office.

Yeah.

It's just hard to convince people that you should go to school for four years and then go take a role in operations.

So it really hasn't changed that much in the 20 years since I was in school too.

Really, for the most part, that was what I would said back then.

Okay, well, Dr. Z, thank you so much for giving us the time.

Thank you for getting your PhD so we can call you Dr. C. Thank you.

Again to Simbi for helping us bring you more interviews just like this one all day live from fmi.

We will be here for a few more hours today and then tomorrow as well, so make sure that you stay tuned.

And until next time, be careful out there.