In the past few years, we’ve witnessed a proliferation of new business and profit models within retail and direct-to-consumer selling. With omnichannel strategies at the core of these models, the industry has passed the physical vs. digital argument and into a channel agnostic world with a focus on enabling consumer choice and fulfilling demand.
There is an advantage to looking at the larger retail landscape and applying the lessons learned to food retail. I had the pleasure of speaking with Rod Sides, vice chairman, U.S. retail and distribution leader, Deloitte LLP about how changes in retail are impacting the way we measure how we do business. Sides will be speaking about this topic at our upcoming Financial Executive and Internal Auditing Conference and pointed out that, “Companies at all stages of maturity, from early stage startups to Fortune 50 companies, are competing for market share, which has led to a diversification of competition, with companies seeking new profit models incremental to ‘core retailing.’”
For years, many companies have used ‘own label’ credit cards as an additional revenue stream, but we are now seeing many permutations of subscriptions, marketplaces, fulfillment as a service, in-house ad/media networks, and more.
