IGA stores range from 10,000 to 100,000 square feet and are located in big cities, small towns and everywhere in between. But John Ross, president and CEO of IGA, has observed some attributes shared by retailers that achieve the alliance’s highest honor, IGA USA Retailer of the Year.
They all begin with C:
Curiosity: “When you meet these entrepreneurs, what you see in them over and over again is a ruthless desire to do better, and they’re really interested in what’s working in the marketplace, understanding emerging insights and listening to their vendors to learn what’s going on in terms of changing shopper preferences.”
Courage: “That curiosity then translates into the second attribute, which is courage, and that’s the courage to take risks.
“If you hear that there’s an emerging trend in, say, low-alcohol beer, and you’re looking at your assortment, and you’ve got two flavors … you don’t build your assortment for today; you build it for where you think the marketplace is going because you want leadership in a category; you want to stand out, [not] just follow along.
“Whether it’s beer or deli or bakery or produce department … whatever they choose, they do with excellence in a way that says to every shopper, ‘man, this is a retailer who really knows what they’re doing.’ They’re ahead of the game.”
Culture: Ross recently visited the stores selected as the IGA USA Retailers of the Year, who will be honored at The NGA Show in February.
“When you meet these winners, you’re not just meeting the entrepreneur or the store manager, but you’re meeting the department heads and their teams – the bakers, the butchers, the people working in the store. And the culture inside of these stores makes it clear why they’re winning.
“That entire team understands they’re there to serve the shopper. If they do their job right, they’re feeding hungry families. It’s more than moving boxes and cans; there’s this aspirational thing. That’s what’s always so exciting.
“And that’s why I love this time of year – going into the stores and talking with those associates and seeing how they get it – that it’s more than just a job. It’s all about supporting your community in a way that no other business can. They take a lot of pride from that, and that’s one of the reasons why they win.”
[RELATED: IGA Names 8 Retailer Of The Year Honorees]
IGA is proud of all its retailers, Ross emphasized; the awards program hopefully inspires them all.
“The whole point of the annual Global Retailer of the Year is to identify retailers who have gone above and beyond to create an extraordinary experience for their shoppers, but also to serve as inspiration for other retailers who are looking for ways to upgrade their stores or invest in new programs, to basically learn from their successes,” he said.
“Actually, it’s a very efficient way to encourage entrepreneurial risk-taking, because you can de-risk it by picking up the phone and calling the owner and going, ‘How do you do that cool program that I saw? What mistakes did you make that you wouldn’t make in the second round?’ They’re essentially little bottled-up case studies about success at retail in an environment where it’s tough.”
They have conquered ‘Herculean’ challenges
Supply chain challenges following the COVID-19 pandemic were well documented, but the good news that doesn’t travel quite as quickly is that grocery wholesalers have been working hard to bring their stock levels and fill rates back up, and many have succeeded. 
“We talked about it when it was bad, but now we should be focused on the Herculean efforts that they’ve made because the volume moving through those wholesalers today versus before COVID is significantly greater than it was. And getting back to 97, 98 percent fill rates has been a Herculean task,” said Ross, adding that IGA retailers “don’t exist without the suppliers and their wholesale partner to make it all work.
“The wholesalers, just like the retailers, have to be on a ruthless drive for continuous improvement; there is no other way. Sitting back and trying to operate like it’s 2019, that just doesn’t work anymore.”
He’s also proud that IGA’s licensed distribution centers (LDCs) bust a prevailing myth.
“I just give tremendous credit to our wholesalers. I think there’s a stereotype of an adversarial relationship between wholesalers and suppliers, that they’re just constantly negotiating for trade funds and that we sort of monetize the business down to the lowest levels.
“And yet, if you go to the food shows, if you go to their innovation shows, if you work with them, they’re constantly working with the manufacturer to understand those emerging shopper trends, to adjust the assortments that are available to the retailers to make sure they’re on trend.
“In fact, the biggest thing [wholesalers] would love is that the retailers would adopt faster. I think they deserve a tremendous credit for being in the background, helping these retailers to succeed.”
Addressing ‘the great American injustice’
IGA is making its first foray into helping address food deserts, an issue that is “ever growing and more acute than ever before,” Ross said.
“The reality is that for the most affluent nation in the world, with the most incredible network of food delivery, we still have millions of Americans who live in food deserts,” Ross said. “That means they don’t have ready access, convenient access, to fresh produce, fresh meat – and reasonable prices.
“If you look at underserved neighborhoods, whether they’re rural or urban, unless there’s an independent there, like an IGA, they’re buying from convenience stores or fast food [outlets], so poor people pay the most for food. It’s the great American injustice.”
According to Ross, local governments often genuinely want to solve the problem, but because they don’t always have retail knowledge or understand how hard it is to run a retail store, they often fail. So when IGA committed to helping, the goal was to set them up for long-term success.
Its first experiment is in Atlanta. A group called Invest Atlanta is giving more than $750,000 to 15 grocery operators to help them increase access to healthy, affordable food in their neighborhoods.
IGA is coming alongside the retailers with “analytics, research, the training library in order to help us make sure that the entrepreneurs that come in and try to fill these food deserts can do so with a good shot at success,” Ross said.
IGA also plans to help facilitate new stores, but he cautioned that retailers need to have realistic expectations of the financial returns.
Local and state governments need to understand that an appropriate level of funding for stores – through grants and/or low-interest loans – also is imperative, “because an underfunded store is a store waiting to close,” he said.
It’s also vital to connect the retailers with “high-quality wholesalers” that will allow them to buy product and sell it at lower-than-convenience-store prices.
“There’s a lot of moving pieces to this, not all of which we do can do on our own,” Ross said. “Over time, we have to develop a network of partners. Some of them do exist, like our wholesale partners, and some of them may be new that we can deploy to ensure that they have all the tools necessary to win.
“That’s our vision for how IGA can work with cities in the future,” he continued. “If funds are available and entrepreneurs are ready to serve, then we believe that over time, we could be a really good asset in helping to assure they have a forecast, and that forecast is realistic, and they know how to staff the store. Then they’ve got a good shot of success. We’ll never solve a food desert problem with good intentions.”
CTV success, making promotions easier
The drive to do better that Ross referred to as vital for grocers and their wholesalers applies to IGA as well. He pointed to two recent offerings for retailers.
The first is Connected TV advertising. These are ads that stream on devices such as smart TVs, computers or mobile phones.
IGA has discovered that when these relatively inexpensive ads are purchased in the neighborhood where the store operates and it features the IGA owner or team member talking about what’s happening in the store, they see “absolute blowout success, because everyone loves their local store, and everyone wants to know more about food,” he said. 
It could be the butcher talking about cutting steaks fresh or a produce manager talking about blueberries that just came out of a field, but whatever it is, “they’re delivering new information about food in a way that shoppers are really hungry for – that’s pun intended –and as a consequence, we’re making little mini celebrities of the store associates.”
The IGA CTV network achieves what may seem impossible: a high percentage of people watch the ads all the way through instead of clicking the “skip” button.
“Our IGA Connected TV network gets the highest metrics on watching the commercial all the way through, and that just says people want to know the people making their food that they feed their family.”
Given the ads’ high ROI, “retailers that are on the program can’t get enough, and I predict that Connected TV will become a part of our arsenal going forward,” Ross said.
He’s also excited about IGA’s recent acquisition of Inmar’s Scanner Applications, which provides support services for scan-based retail promotions. Bottom line, the app should make it easier, less expensive and more efficient for independent retailers to execute promotions in their stores.
“Over the years, for a whole variety of reasons, a lot of those promotions got consumed only by the largest retailers. IGA, like we do with everything we do, we just want to make sure that independent owners have their fair share at the same kind of deals and promotions that bigger retailers get,” Ross said.
“By acquiring this company and formatting it to make sure that whatever CPG budgets are out there … that our owners get their fair access to that. As we grow that network, we hope to make that available to IGA owners as well as all independents. And we’re very excited about that change.”
There is a lot to be excited about at IGA.
In the seven-and-a-half years since Ross was tapped to lead IGA, membership has grown from around 1,000 U.S. retailers to more than 2,200 today. International membership has crossed the 7,000 mark.
“We’re really excited about that, growing domestically and growing internationally. And the comp performance of the stores is ahead of the market as well. It all feels very, very good. And I couldn’t be more bullish on the future of IGA,” Ross said.