[Darin Detwiler] Welcome everyone to another episode of Spoiler Alert!. We're in New York City at the National Retail Federation's biggest show of the year. And I'm here, I'm Dr. Darren Detwiler with my co-host,
[Callin Godson-Green] Callin Godson-Green.
[Darin Detwiler] Excellent. And we're excited to talk with our special guest today, Matt Bunker from Lowes Foods. Welcome.
[Matt Bunker] Thank you. Thank you for having me.
[Darin Detwiler] For those who have no idea who you are, what do you do with Lowes Foods?
[Matt Bunker] I'm the safety and asset protection director for the company. I've been there for 35 years and I direct all of the activities around preventing loss, safety, workplace safety, industrial safety, but also food safety and industrial hygiene.
[Darin Detwiler] Oh, that's a huge umbrella.
[Matt Bunker] A lot of stuff.
[Darin Detwiler] You know, I would throw into, under that umbrella, if you will, reputation, brand image, even the moral character of the retail chain.
[Matt Bunker] Yeah, absolutely. It's a very noble calling to protect the integrity of the products that we sell for our guests. Our guests are very important to us. We're a small regional supermarket chain that's family owned. And so our brand and our reputation is extremely important. And also just the ethical behavior of a food retailer in those markets and protecting all of the products that farmers and ranchers have worked so hard to produce and have put into the food chain. It's kind of our job to be good stewards of those products and those meats and vegetables. to be able to have it to be available for sale for our consumers. Of course, we're always going to have shrink and shrink is always a part of fresh food business and fresh food retail. But we owe it to our consumers to do the best job that we can to manage that shrink so that ethically we're protecting the food supply that's in this country.
[Darin Detwiler] You know, he used the word steward. I love that word. Because you can be a leader. You can be a person who's in a position of leadership and you can check all the boxes and you can do what's required of your job. But to be a steward kind of goes a little further than that.
[Callin Godson-Green] Leading the way.
[Darin Detwiler] Yeah. I mean, what do you think about when you think steward?
[Callin Godson-Green] I think that the whole approach is very holistic, very deep. Fair play. I think that you're expressing such like gratitude to be able to be kind of the protector and leader and guider of this food that it isn't just, grown on a farm and thrown on a truck, like you can appreciate all the steps that are taken. And while you recognize, obviously shrink is an integral part of all food business, but especially for grocery stores, minimizing shrink is more than just to do with like cost savings, asset protection. It's it goes beyond that and your appreciation for the food. I think that's like a new approach, you know?
[Darin Detwiler] I like that. I like that the idea that the approach is almost, it's even when the product goes beyond the store. It's how did it get here and where is it going after? But I want to flip the conversation in terms of the food that doesn't get out of the store or maybe it gets out of the store and it's recalled. But it clearly, it went through so many steps to get to that point of retail, but something happens along the way that now it becomes wasted food. I don't want to say food waste because there's a clear difference between food waste, like orange peels, That's food waste. But wasted food, how do you look at the idea of wasted food?
[Matt Bunker] So there's something very honorable about not wasting food in a way that's reckless. and that we try to take the position that any food waste that comes out of our processing or out of our business is food waste that is done with the utmost care and utmost attention to the detail of how much of that food can we possibly salvage and get to the consumers at the end result. We certainly don't want to continue to fill our landfills with food waste that are producing gases underground. And we certainly want to make sure that what we're producing in store is what our guests want and what our guests are shopping for. So when we do have new items and we do have new things that we're trying, we really do try to make it a proposition that we're not going to over shrink new processes or new products. in an effort to make sure that we're protecting that food chain from the reckless waste that happens. Food waste is always going to be a part. Food shrink is always going to be a part of production. And so there's nothing that we can do to prevent all of the waste and shrink. But really and truly, we're trying to be as good a steward as we can of what it is that we're the job that we're giving. We eat from our stores just like our guests eat from our stores. And so it's important for us to have the freshest, most available products that in our markets.
[Darin Detwiler] I really appreciate the importance you put into your comment about how you'll never have zero waste. But as a steward, you want to try to minimize that as much as possible. And I would imagine that when we start looking at our technologies, it's one thing to have technology that goes, oh, we can record the food that was wasted. But what if we use technologies to try to proactively prevent as much as we can in the 1st place? I mean, that would be a great way of now being that steward, but using technology in a very proactive and intentful way. Before I ask you this, I want to share that there is a video I saw, like one of those social media platform videos, where it was someone was amazed that there was this whole wall of refrigerated, you know, the glass door opens. And I guess overnight, the refrigeration unit failed. And you could just see the 10s of thousands of dollars of food and how many pounds of food was now completely unusable. They had grocery carts blocking people from opening and caution tape. That's not just wasted food and wasted money. It's also a hit to your reputation, like we screwed up kind of a thing. So there's so many dimensions to how we could use technology to prevent food waste in the 1st place. What comes to mind when you think about how technology is being used to prevent things like us?
[Matt Bunker] Well, first of all, I've been in those situations before in my career, and it is demoralizing. It's demoralizing as a food store associate, a food store worker, to see all of the product that you worked so hard to produce have to be thrown out because there was a refrigeration and mechanical failure that resulted in all of that product being lost. And again, it's just a gut punch when you see that in the visual that you just described. But I think that from a technology standpoint, having a system that monitors those temperatures 24 hours a day, seven days a week, having a system that is intelligent enough to know when your defrost cycles are, when your thaw cycles run, so that you don't get all these false white noise alarms that store operators have to attend to that aren't really excursion events, but they're just the normal behavior of those refrigerated assets. and being able to true that up with an alert system that really does tell the people who need to know and who can respond the quickest, what's going on at real time in their environment so that they can respond to that and correct those. And then those doors that you were talking about, perhaps we need to pull those doors, put that product in another place so that we can safe keep it until the mechanic or the technician comes in to repair that case. And we can all move on with our life knowing that food was protected because we had an early notice system from an AI program that's given us all this information real time at 8,000 different assets.
[Darin Detwiler] Sure. If I remember correctly, a couple years ago in Orlando, you were sharing about how if people had the ability to look at this information or to be part of the communication about some of these things, There were likely red flags that could have been identified earlier and something could have been done.
[Matt Bunker] Correct.
[Darin Detwiler] That's value.
[Matt Bunker] Absolutely. Absolutely. It's one thing to come into an environment where you've been asleep all night and you come in to open your business at 6 in the morning and find all of this product has spoiled overnight because there was an excursion event on temperature. A rack went down, a compressor motor went out. But to have that information real time, hours before that, when the actual event actually occurred and we can actually get people on the ground, move that product out of harm's way, get it into a safer environment, that's a real proactive approach to being able to protect and to serve. And then also to see things that you would never have seen before. I provide this example all of the time. When we first rolled out our temperature monitoring solution, we had locations that were older locations that were a lot of old refrigeration systems that had been in place for years. And we started noticing that some of these cases, some of these assets would tend to jump up and spike during the overnight hours. And we couldn't figure out why these defrost cycles is what it looked like to us were lasting so long, but it was jeopardizing the integrity of that product. Now, overnight, it would spike up and it would come back down before opening. So when managers came to run the business the next day, they would see that all their temperatures were okay. But what happened from midnight to 5 A.m., those temperatures would spike. And what we found was that our light controller to save energy for energy savings to turn the lights off at night was actually connected on the same circuit as banks of refrigeration fans, so the fan motors would stop working in the middle of the night. Now, refrigeration was still pumping through the coils, but the fans weren't blowing that refrigeration and producing that air curtain that we needed to keep that case cool. overnight because the fans had shut off. We would have never known that had we not had the temperature monitoring solution.
[Darin Detwiler] Well, in long term, it could have been a situation where with a fan circulation, you could have condensation build up and now ruin equipment.
[Matt Bunker] Yeah, you could absolutely have had condensation in the bottom. That condensation could have gotten too close to the coils, could have iced up. could have created clogged drains, ice on the coils is never good. You tend to run into refrigeration failures when you have a lot of ice. So lots of things were going on at that, in that scenario. And we would have never known that had it not been for the, we call it an EKG of the temperature graph when we watched that health of those assets. And that healthy asset was going unhealthy from like midnight to 5:00 in the morning because we just had those We had to get an electrician out to re-circuit those fan motors so they didn't turn off at night when we turned the lights off.
[Callin Godson-Green] And like what a crazy defrost cycle this is. Five hours to the dot.
[Matt Bunker] Here's the other piece of that too. What we didn't know was that how less fresh were our products to our consumers, to our guests when they would get them home because we had temperature abused them overnight the night before. So if you stopped to buy leafy greens, lettuces, if those were off refrigeration for a period of time and they lost an hour off of refrigeration is a day of shelf life, then perhaps that guest wasn't getting as good a shelf life when they brought that product home because we had temperature of used it overnight, unfortunately.
[Callin Godson-Green] That's such a good insight because I suppose, you know, it becomes those little things that you hear being like, oh, I never get my greens at Lowes. They always go off right away. Like, that's why I grabbed them somewhere else. And how are you guys to know that like all of this is connected to the same thing? Because as you said, when people come in, they even if they got an They start saying the excursion had occurred. Their time on the product, they're like, this is fine. It's 38, like nothing for me to do here. Like keep it going. So.
[Matt Bunker] Yeah, but it was in the 40s overnight. Yeah. Nobody knew that it had jumped up into the 40s.
[Darin Detwiler] Yeah, sure. The other thing I hear very similar to that is when people are like, I always want to get a rotisserie chicken, but I'll never get it from that store because it's always so dry. Come to find out that there are stores that, yeah, they have the permanent display, you know, in the meat area, but someone says, oh, well, look, impulse buy, let's put the portable heater unit display thing for some rotisserie chicken, but it's closer to the exit, closer to the doors, and it's high traffic. So they crank up the temperature. And what's that do? It starts drying it out.
[Callin Godson-Green] Exactly.
[Darin Detwiler] And so no one wants to buy it because it looks like it's overcooked and it's dried out and things start shrinking even, right? So again.
[Callin Godson-Green] I'm not talking about shrinks though.
[Darin Detwiler] Exactly. It's a Democrat shrink, but it is in a way it's a food waste because now it's not because it was under cooled. It was because it was overcooked. And if someone was tracking that information and be able to go, oh, this is why we need to do this differently because of that, when you have those seasonal or those change in the geography, or again, the time of day when the fans are going off, I don't think most people think about those things.
[Matt Bunker] Yeah, I think it's things that are revealed to you as you become more sophisticated in how all of these systems work. But you really do need a more sophisticated system to tell you what is happening, when it's happening. And again, we just can't do that with the labor force that we have. Those manual checks, we just can't possibly get out to 8,000 assets every 15 minutes or 30 minutes like our system does, our automated system does. So what we're doing is we're just taking the manual refrigeration checks that we mentioned earlier, and we're multiplying those out to say, we want to see every single refrigerated asset every 20 to 25 minutes of day day and night and report on that and tell us when there's an excursion. If you extrapolated the labor that it would cost to do that manually, it's in the millions and millions of dollars. And so to us, that's the trade-off is that we do have this system that gives us all of this real-time information, helps us to be proactive, helps us to partner with our maintenance teams and give them information on the ground as it's happening. It also gives our operations folks a lot a better read on where the temperature excursions are happening and that they can respond to that, pull those cases, get that product in an environment that's going to keep it safe while we maintain and while we do the maintenance and work on those cases. So a lot of really cool benefit and protecting our food from waste from an automated program.
[Darin Detwiler] What would you say if a counterpart to you at another store said, yeah, I really love what you're saying, but there's no way I could convince the decision makers to invest into this technology?
[Matt Bunker] That was a tough sell for us too. It's a technology that you have to invest in. It's your right, it's an investment. So to be able to convince executive leadership, you have to present all of these different scenarios and all of these different ROI factors. We talked about maybe before we went on camera about, when you do have that food waste and you do have that case loss, it's not just the food that's in the dumpster. It's the wrap, it's the supply, it's the labor. It's all of the things that got that food there, that got it into the prep area, that got it processed, that got it wrapped and sealed and priced, and then it goes onto the shelf and then you have to throw it in the dumpster. So then when you start to calculate all those soft costs into a loss like you're talking about when the buggies are in front of the cases, you also have to calculate what does it cost for us to get more of that product in the store as quickly as we can? Do we have to pay overtime to restock the shelves? Do we have to bring in an army of folks from other locations in that market to reprocess all of that food that we lost? So how much beef are we going to have to cut to get that case set back up? How much salads are we going to have to make in our deli department to be able to get that case back up to where it was before and how much is that going to cost in labor and wrap and supply and all of the things that we lost. So from a cost perspective, you really do need to go into the weeds on what these refrigeration loss events really cost in real dollars in revenue and then come back to the leadership of the organization and say, it's not only that, but it's that guest experience when they walk in and they see that they can't buy what they want and they walk out and they may never come back. And when you start to relay those kinds of confidences that are lost in our guest traffic, then it's almost a no-brainer that it's worth its weight in gold to have a temperature solution, a monitoring solution that can tell you real time what is going on with your parish-made products.
[Darin Detwiler] Well, and it's so difficult, you know, oh, we prevented this failure, oh, we prevented this. to have a dollar amount in terms of what did we save, right? Well, if we didn't prevent this, it probably would have cost this much. If we caught in time, yes, but we would have had to get a refrigerated truck in here to store everything. And, you know, again, like you said, the restocking, all these different things. It's almost as if you have to calculate the It's a food safety theme though, isn't it?
[Callin Godson-Green] Like the same with like food war and outbreaks, anything along those lines you're saying, the cost of not doing action is this, hypothetical, but you never want to find out the true and trying to, you know, create those numbers.
[Darin Detwiler] Well, I think inherent to so many problems with food, you have the problem, but the cause might not be determined until down the road, right? Is it fraud? Is it sabotage? Is it electrical or, you know, systems failure? You know, what was the cause of this? When you're the shopper, you're not going to like, well, I'll wait here until you give me the root cause analysis or whatever. You're like, I want to buy this now. I want to go home, feed my family now. I want to come back to my favorite store.
[Matt Bunker] Yes. There's an article I read in the supermarket news that said, and it quoted, they did a freshness perception study. And in that freshness perception study, 88% of the customers that they interviewed said that word of mouth and open source information, social media opinions mattered to them when it came to whether or not a location was deemed as being fresh and their precious perception was based on what they hear from other people and what they see on social media and what they see in open source platform. And so to us, it's like we cannot be out of stock. We cannot be out of business on items that people want. And people are showing up to our stores and expecting our shelves to be full and our displays to be well stocked and our product to be at the right temperatures is just baseline for running that business. And if we can't hit that baseline, if we can't hit that foundational aspect of our business, then we're probably never going to be successful. So being in stock, being on time, making sure that the products that our guests want to buy are there is a huge part of that freshness perception that our guests are looking for.
[Darin Detwiler] Yeah, and it really doesn't matter what is the brand or who's the maker, you know, whether you're looking at it's, you know, I want to pay this much or I want to pay this much, or I like that color or that color. A foundational element is the safety and the freshness and the availability. If it's not there, you don't have that sale. And that family doesn't have that meal ingredient.
[Matt Bunker] That's right. Out of stocks costs our industry millions and lost revenues and lost sales. So we have to be in stock. And we just have to make sure that if we have perishable items that are protected by our refrigeration systems, those systems have to have integrity. And the piece behind that integrity is this monitoring system that we're able to effectively monitor 8,000 pieces of refrigerated equipment to keep that product safe.
[Darin Detwiler] When you have new employees, you know, there's the old kind of idealism of, the 17-year-old who has the summer job kind of idea works at a grocery store. That's not really what we have today. But when you have new employees, are they often surprised about how much technology and data is collected? It's not just the item on the shelf and a price tag. There's a lot more behind the scenes.
[Matt Bunker] Oh, yeah, I think so. I think that goes to a lot of the innovations in our grocery retail space. I think a lot of people are shocked to learn. Sometimes when I explain what I do for the grocery store company, people are like, I didn't even know that existed, right? I didn't even know that people had to have that kind of, I think, if you think about how your food gets to your table and how all this food traceability and food chain stuff works, then there does have to be this sort of like integrity oversight of all of the things that you put on your table to feed your family. And so, that's where I come in. We're working really, really hard to keep the food safe and wholesome for our families to eat and our guest families to eat. And so, yeah, sometimes it is surprising that people hear that, you know, I'm watching my alarms on Thanksgiving night because there's an excursion and I know that nobody's there. I know that we closed the store. And so folks are like, wow, that's pretty impressive that you can look at every refrigerated asset in your company and see what the temperature is. So yeah, I think it is surprising that technology is there.
[Callin Godson-Green] It's not life or death, Matt. You work for a grocery store. You're there on your front. You're like, actually, funny enough, it is. So this is important that I action this. You know, it's not, it's so much more to the surface. But then again, I guess part of your job and success of your job is that people don't need to know that because people start knowing those things on their end of the food industry because they're looking into the problems because there's been an issue. So you're sort of the man in the background pulling all the strings that they don't know is there until something unravels, that sort of thing. So I think it's a testament to you that people say, You didn't even know that all that work went into it. You're like, yeah, flawless, isn't it?
[Matt Bunker] And we're totally fine with that. And we're 100% totally fine with that. We just want folks to know us for our brand, to know us for fresh, to know us for the availability that we're always in stock and that we're always on time and that we have the best perishable products in the markets that we serve. And they don't have to worry about how it gets there or how it stays there. That's the way we want to keep it.
[Darin Detwiler] Yeah, and talk about an incredible concept. customers don't have to worry because they know that people behind the scenes are worried and asking the right questions and following up with actions.
[Matt Bunker] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's, we all have things that go through our minds about, the food supply. I know that in the job that I have, I worry, I worry just earlier about the lunch that I was eating, whether or not it was at the right temperature. So we, kind of are hypersensitive to that, but we want our guests to be hypersensitive to the lives they're living and the food that they're feeding their families should never come into question whether or not it's wholesome, whether or not it's safe. We just want to make that a given. That's just a given. Let's let our guests and our markets live their lives. And we want to be a small part of that. You know, when we invite guests into our business, we would love for them to have an experience. We would love for them to see a show. We would love for them to experience friendly and safe. All of those things are our cultural priorities. But at the end of the day, we want them to live their lives without necessarily thinking about all the bad things that could happen by eating improperly stored foods or foods that have been temperature abuse. And that's where We come in and we're happy to be the gatekeepers of that huge responsibility.
[Darin Detwiler] Excellent. Excellent. Matt Bunker, Lowest Food. Thank you for talking. This was a great conversation and I really appreciate the very steward approach that you're taking to all this.
[Matt Bunker] Always a pleasure, Dr. Detwiler, talking to you and always a pleasure to sit down and talk food safety with such a professional. Excellent.
[Darin Detwiler] Thank you very much.
[Matt Bunker] Always a pleasure to talk with you as well.
[Callin Godson-Green] Thanks, man. You too.
[Darin Detwiler] All right, for Spoiler Alert!, thank you very much.
