#Big farm mobile harvest excek how to#

And with new ways to sell food ascendant, legacy grocers like Rich Niemann are failing to bring back the customers they once took for granted. (The term summons the image of a sea stained with the gore of countless skirmishes.) Now, the industry ’ s stodgy old playbook - “ buy one, get one ” sales, coupons in the weekly circular - is hurtling toward obsolescence. Even in plush times, grocery is a classic “ red ocean ” industry, highly undifferentiated and intensely competitive. The traditional American supermarket is dying. It’s not just Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods, an acquisition that trade publication Supermarket News says marked “a new era” for the grocery business - or the fact that Amazon hopes to launch a second new grocery chain in 2019, according to a recent report from The Wall Street Journal, with a potential plan to scale quickly by buying up floundering supermarkets. Yet Niemann was no longer sure the future had a place for stores like his.

#Big farm mobile harvest excek how to#

It’s probably fair to say no one alive knows how to run a grocery store better than Rich Niemann. In 2014, he was elected chair of the National Grocery Association. He’s spent his whole life in the business, transforming the grocery chain his grandfather founded in 1917 into a regional powerhouse with more than 100 supermarkets and convenience stores across four states. Part square-jawed cattle rancher, part folksy CEO, Niemann is the last person you’d expect to ask for a fresh start. “I need a last great hope strategy,” he told Kevin Kelley, the firm’s cofounder and principal. He was ready to put aside a century of family knowledge, throw away all his assumptions, completely rethink his brand and strategy - whatever it would take to carry Niemann Foods deep into the 21st century. He dialed the Los Angeles office of Shook Kelley, an architectural design firm, and admitted he saw no future in the traditional grocery business. In 2014, Rich Niemann, president and CEO of the Midwestern grocery company Niemann Foods, made the most important phone call of his career. This story is published in partnership with The Counter, with r eporting supported by the 11th Hour Food and Farming Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley. Joe Fassler | The Counter & Longreads | April 2019 | 8,802 words (33 minutes)