Fall temperatures may drop, but it’s still a healthy time to promote fresh salad items in weekly ad flyers. Football season is an ideal time to promote tailgate salads to accompany main cookouts before the big game. Be creative in your produce ad section with a “Football Tailgate Salad” and impress your customers as well as boost your sales.

Lettuce, tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers are the four main items that make up a basic salad. Adding other items can make it more exciting such as bacon bits, dried cranberries and pine nuts.

Lettuce: The demand on Iceberg, leaf, Romaine and Boston in

Instacart and health care provider Kaiser Permanente have announced a collaboration to study the impact of convenient access to nutritious food on health outcomes. The study will target Kaiser Permanente Northern California and Southern California Medi-Cal members who have diet-related diseases.

Lack of proper nutrition is the number one driver of poor health outcomes in the U.S., contributing to higher rates of diet-related diseases. Barriers to food and nutrition access are not experienced equally, with low-income and rural communities, and historically marginalized racial and ethnic groups

Top execs driving retail innovation — the winners of International Fresh Produce Association’s Retail Merchant Innovation Award — will be recognized at the Retail Awards Reception Oct. 20 at the Global Produce & Floral Show in Anaheim, CA.  

“These winners demonstrate passion and purpose in developing innovative strategies to drive produce consumption,” said Joe Watson, IFPA vice president. “With this award, IFPA recognizes and celebrates the ‘best of the best’ retailers. We will hear from them at the global show and take the opportunity to congratulate them.”  

IFPA awarded winners in five

The Produce Distributors Association — originally founded in 1989 as NAPAR (National Association of Perishable Agricultural Receivers) and headquartered in Washington, DC — solely advocates for fresh produce distributors. Initially an East Coast-based organization made up of terminal market members, a key goal of the reborn organization is to build national membership with broad representation by the next generation in the evolution of produce distribution.

“We want to remake NAPAR and have started with a simplified name change,” said Matthew D’Arrigo, PDA board chair and owner of D’Arrigo

The new Schnucks Fresh store located in Oak Grove Village, MO, will open Oct. 25. The 23,000-square-foot store will include a heavy focus on fresh departments such as produce, meat, seafood, deli and bakery. This will mark the company’s second store to operate under the “Schnucks Fresh” banner.

“We look forward to continuing our mission to nourish people’s lives and to show area customers what we can offer them when building a store from the ground up,” said Schnucks Chairman and CEO Todd Schnuck. “Schnucks Fresh will be a store where customers will find an extensive selection of the same

Fusion, a business-to-business integrated marketing and research agency, took a deeper dive into the produce category to uncover shopper preferences between choosing their own fruit or purchasing pre-packaged options when shopping. The results of the survey offer insights into growing trends in produce retailing.

“Our research provides awareness into shopper preferences and purchasing behavior taking a closer look at how consumers choose their fruit,” said Matt Schraut, Fusion’s vice president of analytics and client services. “We also analyzed shopper demographics and found additional