Mike Stigers is in his second year of serving as president of Wakefern Food Corp., a role he feels he was preparing for throughout his five-decade career in the grocery industry.
Stigers started out as a part-time courtesy clerk at Safeway in California in 1974. Over the years, in subsequent roles in retail and wholesale, he gained a vast amount of experience in operations, merchandising, retail technology, food safety, supply chain and fresh.
Prior to joining Wakefern, he was CEO of Minnesota-based Cub Foods, a subsidiary of UNFI, the largest publicly traded wholesaler and food distributor in North America. Before that, he spent eight years at Supervalu, beginning in 2011 as president of Shaw’s/Star Market in New England.
In 2013, Stigers went on to lead SuperValu’s northern wholesale region. In 2014, he was named president of Cub Foods. In 2016, he was promoted to EVP of Supervalu wholesale and supply chain services and held that role until it was acquired by UNFI in 2018. He also has spent time on the supplier side and is active in industry trade associations, having served as past president of Western Association of Food Chains and past chair of the National Grocers Association.
Former Wakefern President Joe Sheridan, who was with Wakefern for 47 years before retiring in 2023, said Stigers understands Wakefern’s unique culture and structure, which is at the heart of its success.
“I believe Mike Stigers is the right leader who will preserve the best of who we are and at the same time continue to move Wakefern forward,” Sheridan said when announcing his successor last year.
Here, Stigers speaks about Wakefern and his belief that the future will only get brighter for the 78-year-old company.
What makes Wakefern unique?
It’s this large, $20 billion company that is retailer-owned by 45 families – and those family businesses are incredible. When you look at how the company was formed, almost 78 years ago, with a simple promise of allowing the independent, small business to compete in a world dominated by multi-national firms, that promise still stands true today. And that’s what we continue to do – help small business succeed in a big business world.
It’s also a very dynamic group of talented member families, as well as just an excellent group of Wakefern team members. Through our collaboration, which can often involve some very strong debates and discussions, we come up with some really good ideas and strong support for each other.
That’s why the cooperative has continued to attract new members — members like David Maniaci, who joined the cooperative in 2019 and successfully converted his stores to The Fresh Grocer. He has two sons, Rocco and Nick, who are in the business and passionate about it – just like their dad. They are proud to be part of the cooperative.
Then you look at Pat Burns and his family with the different stores they operate in Philadelphia. Pat brought The Fresh Grocer to us more than a decade ago, and now he has some ShopRites as well, and other Wakefern members are opening Fresh Grocer stores in new markets.
We have the Slawsby family up in Boston. When I was president of Shaw’s for Supervalu, I remember working with Harold Slawsby, and now the Slawsbys are part of Wakefern, operating Price Rite Marketplace stores in Boston. Harold is the patriarch, but his sons, Jonathan and Todd, are running the company.
It’s just fun to watch multi-generational families who have been part of Wakefern forever, and those that are just joining the cooperative. We’re all excited to be here.
[RELATED: Wakefern – Powering Success Of Membership For Nearly Eight Decades]
Tell us more about the Next Generation program.
We have the ability to bring some different educational opportunities to our next-gen family members so they not only understand what their grandparents and parents did in the business, but also where the industry is today and how we can help them bring those family values into the future to ensure success.
Our Next-Gen program at Wakefern is designed to make sure the next generation really understands how Wakefern works. It covers the committee structure that we have, as well as the work of the board of directors and corporate governance.
The program is varied and ongoing and offers next-gen operators a chance to network and spend time with each other. It’s a way to keep that family entrepreneurial spirit alive within the cooperative.
We’re also putting together extended educational opportunities for all our employees – teammates, managers, directors and vice presidents. We work with St. Joseph’s, Cornell – excellent universities we’ve worked with for a long time.
We also use programs from FMI and NGA, and we’re bringing in the Food Industry Management program out of USC Marshall Executive Education. We sent five executives to the program in September, and over the next year we will have USC professors here on site, working with our managers, directors and vice presidents.
It’s just really an exciting way that we can provide additional educational opportunities for all of our leaders within the company.
Continuous education and lifelong learning are so important. I didn’t get my bachelor’s degree until I was 50 [bachelor of science degree in applied economics from the University of San Francisco], and then I got my graduate degree when I was 60 [a master of science in food industry leadership from the University of Southern California].
Tell us about how you got into this business.
I’ve been so very fortunate. I just marked my 50th anniversary in the grocery business. I started as a junior in high school, working the carts at Safeway stores in Los Angeles.
I became a store manager at 21 and then went on to become a district manager and had the opportunity to move on to my next venture at another company. But I was at Safeway for 14 years, and that’s definitely my foundation, that’s what gave me the foundational skills to understand the grocery industry and entrepreneurial spirit. It’s where the love of this business began.
What do you enjoy about Wakefern?
Wakefern is a combination of everything I’ve ever done in the business. It brings all my work experience together. I have been very blessed to be able to operate grocery companies on the West Coast, in the Midwest and, now, the East Coast, and to have also run wholesale divisions supplying independents throughout the country.
When I ran wholesale for SuperValu, we operated in all 50 states and in international operations. So, I really love the wholesale side as well as retail, and Wakefern is just that unique combination of both.
It’s like wholesale is my second language, retail is my first language.
It’s kind of fun when I can flip back and forth with the Wakefern team, whether I’m discussing a wholesale situation versus a conversation about what we’re going to do at retail.
And I love the people at Wakefern. I’ve had such great respect over the years for the company and its leaders. I had the opportunity to work with Joe Sheridan, who I respected for decades in the industry. I spent almost six months, he and I in the same building, having a great time as I got to know Wakefern. And Joe is still just a phone call away, and that’s what’s really cool, how all this collaboration just continues.
What opportunities are there for Wakefern to grow?
I’ve got to tell you, we are so excited about the opportunities that we have here at Wakefern. We are focused on our future and our growth potential.
We see some excellent opportunities for new retail growth and expansion in our wholesale operations.
The cooperative also offers incredible services to our members today that have a lot of value. Anything that the chains do in the back end of a grocery store, we have those support services for our members – financial services, construction services, training, education, development, IT – anything that a grocery store needs to have done on the back end to make it a functional grocery store, we provide those services. And we are definitely open to providing those services to other folks in the industry and retailers because we believe we have a lot to offer.
One of the most exciting things we’ve done recently is the expansion into the CPG world. In April, Wakefern member Brown’s Super Stores and the Brown family announced plans to assume operations of the iconic Di Bruno Bros. retail stores in Philadelphia, so Di Bruno is now one of our Wakefern brands. And we’re very proud to have this specialty grocery brand at the retail level.
Wakefern, meanwhile, purchased the CPG side of Di Bruno Bros., so now we have a specialty products brand that is structured for national distribution, which is very different for us.
We’re very excited about that expansion into what we call a complementary part of our industry, and we are excited to bring the Di Bruno Bros. brand to customers and do some great things with this incredible brand.
Think of what you need for charcuterie and appetizers and a good Italian meal; that’s what Di Bruno brings. The stores that the Browns run under that brand have got incredible delis, ready-to-eat meals and just full-quality Italian deli offerings. It’s the meats, the cheeses, the crackers, the stuffed peppers, the olives.
There are probably 20 different types of cheeses, parmesan, all the hard Italian cheeses and some soft cheeses including incredible cheese spreads. And a lot of meats, salami, pepperoni, La Sabrosa Italian meats. And, of course, delicious crostini, the crackers and all the things that Emilio Mignucci, our VP for the Di Bruno Bros. brand, knows about.
Emilio is a cheese expert and the grandson of one of the Di Bruno Bros. founders. He’s a third-generation operator, and we want to encourage that family, entrepreneurial spirit and expertise for this gourmet food company.
We also have a new leader that we just brought on to help guide us and run the CPG side. Rick Brindle [formerly of Mondelēz International] … he’s advising the Di Bruno growth and development of the brand. And we couldn’t be more proud to have him.
We have a sales team that is out selling Di Bruno. We sell right now to other retailers in our trade area, to other wholesalers, and we sell to distributors.
It’s a quality brand, and we bought it just for that reason. We did not want to buy it and then transition it to another one of our own brands; we wanted to really vertically integrate what we call a strategic business unit, so that way we could also expand the growth and capabilities of Wakefern.
What inspires you most about the industry?
You know, the industry is about people. I absolutely love it. I always tell people, we are in the people business, selling groceries. And I practice every day to be a better servant leader than I was yesterday. I believe we have two ears and one mouth, and we should use them in that order.
This is not an easy industry. For people to be in this business for a long time, it’s hard work. Let’s be honest, you’re selling groceries, it’s nights, it’s weekends, it’s holidays.
But it’s also rewarding, and I love it because you get the people and families that are in it and also love it. We’re here to serve, we’re here to help, we’re here to develop, we’re here to train. You know, my job is to make sure everybody has the tools to do their job.
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