 Let's get started. We are very glad that all of you joined us here today. We have an exciting topic. We call this a Collaboratory because it means that we'll be working together. Everybody here on this Zoom should participate. And there are several ways to do that, which I'll tell you about in a second, but today's topic is all about the effect of the coronavirus COVID-19 on the global supply chain for food. And we've got some great speakers here and great attendees. And one thing we've learned from doing this, this is our fifth one we've done on this COVID-19 issue and how it affects supply chains, is we've learned that it takes a lot of participation to make this work. And our first four calls, we had that tremendously. A lot of people participating, offering opinions, ideas, asking questions, and it just made for a very robust discussion. So I encourage everybody who joins to please speak up and be involved. You know, my name is George Bailey. I run the Digital Supply Chain Institute research group. Very excited about the discussion today. We're going to have a great conversation. And the way it works is, those of you on the phone, on the Zoom right now, you have a couple ways to participate. The easiest way is to enter the Q&A button, click on it, and then write your question or comment. And that way everyone will see it. We'll be able to respond to it right away and get back to you. We've had a couple of calls where we've had to come back to those things later on and answer them in an after the meeting format. So we will answer all the questions we will get back to you with whatever discussion topics are of interest. The other way is to, we'll recognize some of you and you'll be able to speak out. You can ask that through chat and we'll be able to get your conversations going immediately. So please everybody, let's make sure we participate and be involved. So the Digital Supply Chain Institute is a not-for-profit that focuses on the future of supply chains across industries, but this food industry is probably one of the most interesting ones right now. And so we have three objectives for this collaboratory. The first one is we want to make sure that we can outline the overall impact of the coronavirus on global supply chains in the food industry. And what we can expect to see next. Second objective is really describe what actions are being taken right now, very practical things that are being done to make life better for companies and for customers. And some very, very specific examples. And what you'll find out is that a lot of the things that are being done in this industry are applicable to other industries. So even if you're not in the food industry, what you're going to hear about and what we're going to talk about should be useful to you. And the third objective is to develop some recommendations that will help, you know, your supply chain with your customers and your shareholders so that you can go back and add even more value with your company as you return to work after this call. So three things, outline, describe and develop. Next slide please. And here's our agenda to do that. I'm going through very quick introduction right now. I'm going to just take a few minutes and I'm going to turn it over to Mark, who is the SVP at the FMI, the Food Industry Association. He's got great perspectives on what's happening and good ideas about some of the trends and what he and his organization is working on and also what companies are dealing with. And then we have from, we have Chris Lewis from the Holdel Hayes and that's a really powerful company with some great examples of really decisive actions that are being taken to meet customer needs and improve the business. So we'll go through all that. And our goal is to get all of that done by 935 in the morning. When we do that, we'll have plenty of time for discussion. Q&A. I'll come back at the end and wrap it up with some observations and a summary and we'll respect your time. Make sure that we're done by 10 a.m. Eastern time today. Next slide please. So quick background, obviously companies are very much focused on the present just getting through this COVID-19 coronavirus thing is not easy, but they're also preparing for the future. It's been amazing to see the remarkable growth in many food related companies, not all of them, but you've really seen a consumer spending shift from restaurants to grocery stores. So that's a really major shift there. We've had big growth in GoDirect models. Pee Pod, very successful Whole Foods Direct Model. So much more GoDirect than we've seen before in the past in terms of the food industry. However, there is still a lot of uncertainty about what the long-term impact will be. Will consumers still have historically high grocery spend numbers? Is that a shift that's happening now? We're going to see that continue. Will we experience more shortages? We've had a bunch of them. The first one, of course, was toilet paper. Then it was flour. Now people are talking about protein and meat. So you'll hear about that today. But will we experience shortages and how those be handled through the supply chain? And of course, longer term, will consumers still buy from home as they are doing more and more right now? And the final thing I would say is never waste a good crisis. Companies are really taking action now to prepare supply chains for the future. And the food industry has a great set of companies that are really winning and making great progress. You're going to hear from one of those today. And also companies that have had some adjustments to do because, for example, Cisco with less restaurant business. So a lot of things happening that are very, very fundamental to the business. Next slide, please. We've done a lot of survey work on this. You can get more of this as we go through. This is a survey of almost 5,000 people. We asked them questions like, do you prefer local produce? More than ever? A third said, basically a third said yes and I'll even pay more. A third said no. I'd like to take those local products, but I wouldn't pay more for them. And then another third said no preference. So it's interesting how the market is developing and how you bet on this is very, very important as you adjust your supply chain. So getting things done quickly through transformational change in the supply chain and be able to meet needs like this are critical. Next slide, please. So what's happened for local food products? Over half say it's increased. And that's really the big news that more and more people are focusing more on direct food products that are locally based. Next slide, please. So that's my quick set of comments to get us kicked off. We're looking forward to a great discussion. And now I'm going to turn it over to Mark, who's the SVP from fmi so Mark, would you take it over please? Absolutely. Thank you, George, so much for the introduction. I might say before you even get started, parenthetically, some of the trends that you outlined in your survey work were actually occurring pre COVID-19, and have accelerated exponentially in the context of what's happening now and I'm sure we'll address quite a bit along those lines as we get into the Q&A, particularly in the shifts between food service and retail and the winners and the partnerships that are occurring as a result of all this. But let me just, if I can, if you go to the next slide, please spend a minute on who we are. So we are fmi, the food industry association. We have three sort of core competencies within our mission. One is to be advocates for public policy. At the federal level, we interface with lawmakers and regulators and the executive branch at the state level, particularly in the context of this pandemic with the governor's role in managing through this crisis and states departments of health as well as local municipalities. The central core pillar of fmi, I like to say job one is food and product safety because it's after all where life and death matters are at stake. So we interface with a number of the government agencies, FDA, USDA, CDC, among them. We also own a food safety certification business called Safe Quality Food Institute. We actually certify manufacturing facilities to ensure that they aren't just in compliance with FDA rates, but they meet our standards, which we think are higher as well. The third pillar is really around trading partner collaboration. And that's between retailers and product suppliers. So we're a member based organization. Our members are retailers and wholesalers and consumer goods and other related product suppliers. Within that context, we focus on three things really to enhance efficiency in any way possible. You know, as we like to say retail and grocery is a penny business, it's a razor thin margin that our members operate on and Chris will attest to that when he speaks in just a little bit. So anything we can do to stay relentlessly focused on enhancing efficiency through supply chain through information technology through retail and store operations and the like is very much within our bailiwick. And then on the other side, anything we can do to increase demand. So we spend a lot of time on issues like marketing and merchandising and category management and assortment and consumer trends to better understand them so that we can optimize not just the mix in store, but the consumer experience as well. And the consumer experience is changing, which really kind of leads me to the third thing, which is really the digitally engaged food shopper. There's been a massive shift to online and recent years. And that's really led to what we call sort of the omni consumer or the omni channel approach to the business and we'll talk more about that when we get into this because that's also accelerated in the context of COVID-19. Next slide please. So when I think about the food industry supply chain priorities, these priorities actually existed pre COVID-19. When we were looking at emerging technologies and their impact on the business and the interface between our physical distribution and historical store level jobs and how the application of technology might impact them and how we would make the best use of that. However, in the context of COVID-19, the these intense demand spikes, the need to expand the supply chain and I have to say we'll talk more about this in the Q&A. I've been absolutely inspired by supply chain resilience within the food industry, its ability to expand and to deliver what consumers need through a very, very, very unprecedented time at least within our lifetime. We'll talk a little bit about demand and shortages and categories and replenishment all the way to the shelf in a bit as well. But needless to say what a lot of our members are focused on now are touchless transactions and frictionless shopping. The number of applications that are now in the marketplace are expanding significantly. Everything from some would call one touch, still a transaction at the register to absolute seamless transactions for consumers. There's more mobile scanning being done by customers. Obviously there are rules of engagement there. Customers who are going to use mobile scanning devices are going to have to submit themselves to potentially random audits, much like we do if any of you are clear users at airports going through TSA. And there are more and more pilots being put up across the country. And the other thing that retailers are realizing to all of this is that in addition to the customer benefits, there are a lot of front end labor benefits in addition to that as well. Very similar to what we have found in self checkout in recent years as we've given over more checkout lanes to self checkout. Next slide please. So throughout we do a lot of research over the course of the year. We have two significant signature pieces of research. One is consumer based called grocery trends. The other is called fmi speaks which really puts its finger on the pulse of what's keeping retailers up at night and their outlook for the business. But throughout this pandemic, starting in early March, we in partnership with the Hartman group added a series of grocery shopper trends to augment our regular research. And this is just one sort of small piece from the most recent. So from early March all the way through today, we've been sort of taking the temperature of customers. I mean that figuratively of course, about how they are responding to this pandemic. And it's interesting now several months in, you can see from this particular slide, there are still some concern about out of stocks. And originally, you know, we talk about in in the food industry, those peak times over the course of the year. We experienced shortages when there are snow days, for example. And we experienced sometimes shortages around peak holiday days and I had one retailer CEO described this to me as 10 snow days, Christmas and Thanksgiving all rolled into one day after day after day. And you know from your own experiences what it's been like in terms of your own households and whether you're really stocking up or stockpiling in some cases what those key categories are. But I think it's really kind of safe to say that by and large the supply chain and crystal talk specifically to the Ahol del Hayes USA and their banners experiences has been remarkable and its ability to expand rationalize assortments in many cases or skews so they could expand capacity on those most in demand items. And yes, there were some chronic shortages and categories and paper goods and sanitizers and cleaners. Again, due to the psychology of consumers in their shopping trips during that period of time, but by and large if you did not find something on the shelf that you were looking for, come back tomorrow it would likely be there tomorrow or the next day it may not be your favorite brand. So we've seen a lot of brand switching and a lot of trial on brands that consumers wouldn't necessarily buy, but generally speaking, our ability to replenish at the shelf has been somewhat remarkable. Just a bit more on the pulse of shopper behavior. If you go to the next slide please. What's really interesting to me and I won't read the slide to you, but this is really, you know, what we have to better understand as we go through the back end of this. And that is the shifts in shopper behavior. So, you know, virtually 90% of all shoppers have made changes in how they shop. And the changes range from who shops who was primary whose primary today, where they shop, lots of shifts through primary banners and other things less cherry picking of more formats more frequently, given less frequent shops, how they shop their frequency is down what they buy has shifted there's been a resurgence of center store categories if you look at some of those large cap traditional categories a lot of consumers have hunkered down. And they're seeking comfort and nostalgia through a very, very difficult time and a lot of those center store category product suppliers have seen upticks in their business. So what they buy has changed how much time they spend shopping has changed nobody's sort of lingering and browsing and sort of moving up and down aisles that are leisurely pace or they're getting in and they're getting out. But one of the things that's really interesting about that is they're spending more. So part of that is stock up. And part of that has to do with the shift in the way that they are shopping, both physically and online. So we've seen this tremendous shift to online over this period of time, particularly in cohorts that had never shopped online before, either because they didn't have the time or the or the energy or they were confronted by other limitations. For the first time they went online and they found out that in some cases it's a pretty easy experience to navigate. It's pretty convenient. And although some had some issues with delivery windows and surcharges in some cases depending on crystal address this, by and large, that shift is is here to stay and we've been on a five year journey with a digitally engaged food shopper. Originally, we thought it would shift to about $100 billion by 2025. In the last two years, we've revised that projection three times. And by the way, the last time was to about 140 or 150 billion by 2025. And that was pre COVID. So you can imagine we're going to be doing more work along those lines as well. Just a couple more minutes on fmi and what we're doing in the context of all of this if you go to the next slide please. So I talked about our work with with public policy before in the context of COVID-19 we have been interfacing daily with Congress with the agencies, both at the federal and state level. And in order to provide input as to what our members need as essential industries throughout this time and I mean that up and downstream both manufacturers plants and facilities trucks over the road distribution center and store operations. Also trying to provide guidance to our members on probably job one which is personal protection at store level for employees. That is absolutely our number one criteria. Frankly, the grocery workers in store and those behind the scenes stocking shelves in distribution centers delivering from manufacturing facilities or producing those products have been the frontline heroes and all that. And we take that very very seriously so we've been doing our best to provide guidance to them and we've stood up a number of resources through all of this and you can see on the page here. We've, we've developed a number of best practices and frameworks and methodologies we provided a number of guidance documents I've talked a little bit about the, the shopper trends and understanding consumer trends, a lot of safety resources as well. And a number of other business resources if you go to the next slide please. George you referenced Cisco early on in this and the CEO of Cisco at a White House Task Force meeting mentioned the fact that due to the significant drop off particularly their commercial food service business up and down the street operators that they had significant capacity, both in products, as well as services, trucks, warehousing facilities and the like at a time when our retail members had just a tremendous need and accelerated need for all of those things. So originally, we entered into an agreement with the food service distributors. And what we did was we matched our retailers requirements we quickly developed a fillable form that made it very simple to put down your product requirements and or your service requirements. Which we shared in our counterparts with the food service distributors, they would then match that in local marketplaces with the broad line food service distributors based on product needs availability as well as geography. But we realized although we put this up quickly and it was working it was clunky it was manual and we were in the middle, we needed to expand that so what we did if you'll go to the next slide is we in very short order, put up a new food industry trading exchange. And now, in a very, very automated fashion, we now can on the buy side have category managers and others looking for product, do procurement searches and do product discovery. And then on the sell side those with capacity to do everything from buy now offers to load up and let retailers seek them out. We are, we are putting this up year round so that the idea here was to get this into the marketplace given the extraordinary requirements of the time, but to run it during blue sky days. So as buyers and sellers better understand this platform and it gets to scale. When we have another crisis and it's not limited to the COVID-19 pandemic we're getting into hurricane season. As you know there's one brewing right off of Mexico right now and moving up towards the Gulf. That is when we need to turn up the volume and make sure that these things happen in a very, very quick fashion so we're really pleased with this I'm going to mention just one more thing if you go to the next slide. Another sort of unique circumstance given this pandemic and that is our workforce requirements expanded exponentially all of a sudden we literally had to hire and you saw the numbers. Large publicly traded companies Amazon, Walmart, Target, Instacart and others into the hundreds of thousands into the millions of job requirements. While at the same time, there were millions of workers being furloughed and laid off on the other side in the food service business at restaurants and distributors in the airlines in hotels. Excuse me and hospitality providers. We now have three quarters of them. So we put up a talent exchange with eight fold AI. They are in an artificial intelligence based talent platform. And you can see some of the companies that are participating in this and we put up this platform in at clock speed. And we now have over three quarters of a million job openings on the demand side of this exchange and it is our goal to make a million matches over time. And once that occurs we are going to leave this up year round we believe that this is part of the future of talent within our industry mixing and matching needs and resources, accordingly. So with that, if you'll go to the next slide I want to thank you all very much looking forward to the Q&A in the discussion. I'd now like to turn it over to my colleague Chris Lewis, who's executive vice president of supply chain at Ahol Delays USA. Take it away Chris. Thanks Mark. You could flip that slide for me. Just quickly a couple of words maybe about Ahol Delays. We have five brands operating on the East Coast. And like many others on the supply chain always as Mark mentioned trying to optimize and innovate to meet our customers needs and whether that's in store online, if you could flip that slide for me. On the East Coast, you know we have 2000 stores from Maine to the Carolinas. We're just north of 40 billion in sales on an annual basis. And we have somewhere around 16 distribution centers, a couple of manufacturing facilities to support those stores. We manage right around our handle about a billion cases a year. And on the East Coast, we have about 150 million miles we run on our trucks every year. So it's a fairly dense and fairly large supply chain on the East Coast. You could flip that slide for me. What I thought I would do is just share some of our experiences, you know as we went through COVID and internally when I do updates for the executive team, or any team for that matter. We talk about it in three buckets. First on the people side. As Mark mentioned, we had a lot of opportunities from a hiring standpoint. We did partner with many food service organizations and brought folks in from us foods Cisco performance food group and several others. We had certainly capstone FHI and others that were supplying us labor. And we had great response from from those partners. For me, one of the things that was always important is we needed our associates to be safe come into work, but they needed to feel safe to. And so we did a lot like many others around sanitation and cleaning a different protocols like that. We built a lot of programs from a social distancing standpoint, as you know, working in a DC you have fixed walls and when you have that many more people working in buildings. There's a lot to do around simple things like, you know, starts of shifts. And so staggering shifts staggering breaks. Try to get creative in the south where it's warm put picnic tables outside. We try to feed our associates on a regular basis, so that one it was a little bit of an ad for them. But we could also control and close our cafeterias. And that way we kept from a sanitation standpoint it was easier to manage the, both the flow of people and, and their breaks. We incented early with our associates that we paid them if they worked a perfect attendance for a week. And so if they showed up for all of their schedule shifts. We gave them a bonus in their next week's paycheck. So we tried to make it very immediate. We tried to make it very real for them. The other thing that we gave incentives for is with that, you know, crazy demand, we all experienced. We needed more people and more labor hours. And so we, we paid them bonuses for coming in on their day off and doing shifts. And we had a remarkable amount remarkable amount of people that actually took us up on that. So they worked on their days off to help us catch up. And one thing that we're proud of is, on average, we had about a 90% attendance rate at our facilities. In some weeks and some DCs, more than 80% perfect attendance. So with all the pressure and all the news and all the things that our associates were going through, either kept coming to work. And part of that was all the activities we're talking about. But we used alert media to push messages and communicate with them when they're not in the building. We had one instance that somebody put on Facebook. We had an issue in one of our facilities, which we didn't. And the next day we had a high call out. And so we deployed quickly, trying to reach out to them every single day that will say, here's what the workload looks like. Here's if there's any news from a COVID standpoint and that specific facility from somebody they know they were hearing this from. And then what's for lunch. And so we were trying to keep a positive connection with our teams as we were dependent on them to serve our stores. We've had Department of Agriculture come in and inspect one of our facilities in Pennsylvania. That went so well they invited the CDC to come visit that location. And so that went really well. They wanted to test whether, you know, our all the things we were articulating to them were actually PowerPoints or in in place. They found that we had those in place and whether they talked to our associates, or our leaders. And maybe one thing just that I think is pretty important we did have a rapid response team which I know most others did. We had to have the distribution and transportation group for us is an engineer by background, and they built detailed playbooks for the facilities to execute whether it was sanitation cleaning communication. The tools were very easy for them to pick up and replicate every day. And I think that was helping us show continuity to not just our associates, but certainly our retail partners as we were on time. And we were very remarkably well considering what what we were going through in the supply chain from the product standpoint. We had, you know, demand overnight increased by 100% across the East Coast. And if you can imagine, which I know many of you have that kind of demand pull on the supply chain was really tough for the first month. We had all those associates showing up for work, but our product depleted fairly quickly. You can't, you know replenish the stores of when they're selling at 100%, even though we were increasing our output by 35 or 40% we were still slipping behind. When that happened, you could see that move up the supply chain and then our suppliers started having issues. And we had more than 5000 items that were either not being produced anymore, or being allocated to us. And so from a year over year standpoint from PO's that we were cutting to our suppliers. You know we saw somewhere between 500 and 800% increase in vendor cuts. And that was with obviously this is a mark mentioned, you know, we're really good at the regional impacts and hurricanes and those things. But when national events having like this, you know, our supply chain ran out of product and then the suppliers ran out of product in their supply chains and they had to retool and have responded really well. But we did that was somewhat creative. Not only did we work with the food service industry to take different pack sizes different cans or vegetables and all of those things to both help our food service. So our customers, you know, we have a meat manufacturing facility and so we were able to take a lot of that product and produce it, break it down for our retail partners. And then in other cases we sent those directly to store and they actually cut those up or actually sold large packages. If you went into our stores they adjusted pretty quick their planograms and what they're offering. And we did go through a lot of that product. Mark mentioned the shifting issues and you know George mentioned this a little bit to, you know, toilet tissue, bath tissue, paper towels, some of these categories, you know spiked more than 100% since the beginning of the event. And you wouldn't know that it still sustains that high because a lot of the stores you go into, you'll see a half aisle full of paper, not a full aisle and you might not see every brand that you used to see about we have paper, but the sales are still remarkably high. And it is funny that you could watch demand spike bank based on the new cycle. And so we were working with our protein partners and we knew about some shortages that were coming. But we really saw those issues multiply because on CNN for three days in a row it was the world was ending from meat supply. And although we had service issues, we had meat in all of our stores, we had all of the different options you could look for maybe not all the variety used to or pack sizes. And so that we've seen that the other thing that we're seeing that many of the retail organizations in the US are there's, you know, things like baking that this time of year are not huge sellers but everybody's at home cooking. And so this is the time of the year that most of our manufacturing partners build for the fall and winter months and whether that's soup, baking or other categories and those are already under pressure now. And those will be under pressure in the fall and potentially into next year. You know on the operation side, since March we've shipped more than 60 million cases above what we had expected to out of our DCs. We never closed the DC, which I'm pretty proud of. We had our exposure. We have some DCs that have zero positive covid and we had others that had more than 150. And so we had a range of situations that we had to deal with. But we never had to close a facility. And we worked really close with our associates on, you know, cleaning sanitizing what would make them feel safe. What did they want for PPE, whether those are masks or gloves. We never dictated those but we always supplied them for our associates if they wanted them. And we mentioned the Cisco's of the world and the food service. We also used because their trucks weren't running. And so we had an opportunity to partner with many of these other companies that were struggling right now to deploy their trucks and drivers to help deliver to our stores. So a lot of that activity happened not only on the people side, the product side, but also on the equipment side. One thing that we did quickly and we've done this a lot over the last couple of weeks, a couple months is we've changed the way that we distribute product to the stores and items that we used to ship as an each we shipped as a case things that we shipped as a case we shipped as a tier. Other items we just pushed pallets out to the stores as fast as we could, as our DC inventory was holding up better than our retail inventory was. And so retooling basically every week to recalibrate or optimize both the labor and the product available to get it to our customers. So the complexity that a lot of us face. You've got, you know, regional local state folks telling us what they're dictating for terms of operation and whether that sanitation curfews and operating and, you know, navigating all of that was and not always I would say logical, truthfully, because we would have in one state, different expectations from one county to the next. And when the counties about each other. That makes it difficult to to manage through all of that. I thought maybe on the fulfillment side, you know, Mark mentioned some of the shifts to online. We've certainly seen a significant shift in testing of that new capability. We were running somewhere around 30 plus percent same store sales growth in that area, we've doubled that and then some brands tripled that we see folks that are adopting that as a new method, I think they found that the ease of it. And I think we've surprised them with the quality of it. And so one deterrent for folks to test that in the past has been the quality of things like meat and produce. And I think we've surprised a lot of the customers with what they would experience from a product quality and a cost standpoint. And so I'll go to the next slide. And I'm going to turn it back to George. Hey, thanks, Chris. That was that was fascinating. And I know we probably have a billion questions in the audience right now. And I'm just going to look quickly at my Q&A here. And here's one for you, Chris. Sure. It's from a robust side. If you're if an alternative supply runs at a production. How were you able to get product, especially the same brand. This is the question that's been so the way that we try to manage our prior procurement hierarchy is we do have primary suppliers that we try to first fulfill demand there. We have a creative team that actually was out looking for other product. And whether that was one example there's a company we partnered with that serves college bookstores. We've done business with before, but they were selling the same products in college bookstores but most of the colleges were closed. And so we found north of 500 trucks of paper goods, more than 300 truckloads of hand sanitizer hand soap and different items like that so we got creative and other parts, or other industries to look for items. In fact, we shifted more work towards either our prior brand supplier or brands none of well, none that I've ever heard of. And probably we won't have again. But if you go through the paper aisle, for example, you would see items from Chile, different parts of the world that we just never had in our stores before. And that's, I think that's great because I think you know your examples are are super good because they just point out the need to be agile, innovative and resilient, you know you can't get the way you used to. So what else can you get. In fact, we have another question from can I just ask Chris one quite in the context of product supply, Chris because I think I don't know that this would be an intuitive question for people but can you talk a little bit about your own brand experience to all of us. Sure, so we have really good partnerships with some of the biggest private brand manufacturers and one to probably leads our private brand group on the whole deli side. And what paid dividends for us is that level of partnership and data sharing. And so we talked to them a lot about demand and production and I don't think that's necessarily unique, but we were trying to do is extend the window so they would understand what we knew. We saw a lot of our private brand manufacturers step up and go from producing at 100% demand 230. And then when our partners couldn't go to that next level. They also got creative and finding, you know packer labels, because really if you're looking for hand sanitizer, if I could put it on the floor. People were buying any hand sanitizer they can find. Yeah. And if it was a paper towel they were going to buy any brand. And so that's, I think our prior brand suppliers supported us very well through the issues we've had. In fact, Mark, I have a question for you from Caitlin. She thanks you for your excellent presentation and she's talking about resilience. So, can you she wants to know, can you explain some things you've observed in with respect to resilient supply chains over the past few months resiliency agility, could you talk about that a little bit. And then Chris, if you want to bring it to life within your own trading partner relationships, I think the hallmark of our ability to expand the supply chain is needed to be agile to be flexible. And specifically, we were better at all those things and maybe I thought we would be through all of this but the key to that is trading partner collaboration and open dialogue and communication. So we knew if products were going on allocation, what the rules of engagement were going to be and manufacturers could look across the country again we've never faced this happening across the entire country at the same time. They may go on allocation in some places and not others we were trying to do that communication be able to shift product supply to where demand was the greatest. We were able to rationalize and rationalize assortment and you know change up on a lot of these sort of line extensions to those most in demand items those core items within the supply chain and that consumers have come to expect. We've learned a lot through this this process a you know what is a reasonable amount of safety stock to have on hand, knowing that you know this switch can flip and things can happen very very quickly. I think this has implications, going down the road also that we need to continue to collaborate in those what I call those blue sky days when we are in a period of calm to develop mechanisms to better understand when this is coming how it's coming almost like a traffic light system or early warning system that we can use as an industry to expand the supply chain, much more quickly than we were able to at this particular point in time. And then the last thing which is I think maybe just not so much a resilience question but maybe an open ended question about what inventories going to look like going forward with the contraction within these categories of that focus on core items. What are the full assortments look like going forward what the what are the implications for product innovation and new product introductions and line extension some might argue we, you know, this will change the footprint of the store will change what you see where and what the consumer experience is going to be going forward. And if we have time I'll come back to because I want Chris to weigh in I'd like to talk maybe a little bit about the, what I'll call the food supply chain ecosystem between retail food service and then just feeding people. And you know that that those are good points and I think you, you're raising an issue which I think is front and center for all of these discussions which is the customer. And what does the customer want and you know I think fundamentally it seems like the customer behavior has shifted during the COVID-19 crisis, but how much of that will remain how much of the buying beat patterns will remain similar and I guess I'm going to ask. I have a question about how is that going to play out what you do a great job talking about what you've done but as you look forward, and you think about some of the things that Mark mentioned and other topics around assortment and home versus in the store versus all those. How do you see things being different as you look forward to one two or three years ahead. And if you go back to one of Mark's slides he was talking about the, you know, the shift to online and contactless frictionless. I think, you know, we're going to see more of a prevalence of a desire to have that. And I think that's spot on. And so what we've heard from our, our customers that are picked up our new customers on the in our online business. There's maybe different words but this is what they talk a lot about is they don't want to have to go into a store. They don't want to have to be the one that touches all the product or assembles a meal. They want it to be easier for them and I think we're going to see, you know, a greater shift Mark mentioned the number of dollars going that way. And I think, you know, we do the same thing that Mark mentioned FMI has done is try to re estimate okay what will it be and every time we updated it gets bigger and faster. And you know, COVID seems to have pushed people to that space that might not have even thought about it they might have been aware of a P pod, which is our e commerce business. But this I think pushed them into actually trying and testing it. And after trial, even with higher out of stock still preferring. Hey, that actually is a method I like. And I think that we'll see more of that and, you know, if you think about the future there could be new partnerships will see. You talked about restaurants people still like restaurant food and you know is there some kind of a combination with a grocery store business that combines shopping and you know meals. And there could be synergy in the scale of that and the last mile is expensive so if you can take cost upstream out and deliver a service for a customer. I think we'll see more of that. I'll build on that just a little bit and I actually have another question for Chris as a result. One is you asked the question what nobody's got a crystal ball. The people do enjoy dining out and pre COVID-19 roughly 50 cents of every food dollar was being spent away from home. And I think we've changed that dynamic dramatically. The return to restaurants to to certain restaurants. I mean if you look at QSR quick serve restaurants, they haven't been as dramatically impacted limited menu, a lot of drive through and carry out anyway. Either casual dining or sit down white tablecloth dining those experiences radical shift. And as we know, you know the forecast is for like 20 to 30% of them to close permanently which is really sad. But a lot of it will depend on consumer confidence and how confident they are being in those establishments and whether that experience will be anything like the experience they enjoyed before. That said, a lot of retailers are in the on premise dining business now as well. Some have actually put up partnerships. So those restaurants that are very popular in localities, HEB down in Texas is actually taking meals and putting them together from local restaurants and making them available to consumers when they come into those stores. Well that as Chris pointed out, will that lead to a long term partnership as opposed to the competitiveness that existed between them. Some retailers may go to kiosk on premise dining and partner with local restaurants and just put them into the stores instead of doing it themselves. Food service operations are very expensive labor, food waste, etc. A lot of retailers don't have a lot of experience with that and don't have an operator mentality, and that might happen as well. And then the last point and this will go to my question to you Chris, which is, you know, we frequently say the last mile is the most expensive. And this is what I'm talking about this massive shift to click and collect and home delivery. We think a lot of retailers are going to be putting up micro fulfillment centers and that's going to be a change in the supply chain as well. I wonder Chris, if you would like to comment on that last point at all. Sure, so people at digital labs, which part of our company really is our, you know, omni channel developer, and they've done a great job of partnering with different micro fulfillment organizations to try to understand the design. And how would it work with the supply chain and today we really have a core supply chain, and we have an e commerce supply chain and the work that we're trying to do to your point mark is, how do you, where in that supply chain do you put automation. And can you put it closer to the customer that takes, you know, closer to consumption that really takes more of the cost out downstream. And from a proximity standpoint, you save on the delivery side. And so, you know, transportation is a killer and the last mile standpoint as well as the labor. I think we will see more and new solution, new solutions to try to drive that cost down closer to the consumption and I, you know, there's a lot of venture capital dollars going out to try to solve that. I think somebody will solve that for us. It's trying to find what that solution is, but also all the way back through the supply chain we have to take cost out to fund more of that ability. And so whether that's taking capital out of core to try to drive the automation closer to to where the customers are. I think that's really important for us and whether that's virtual automation with certain jobs that we can automate or whether it's physical where we can take and build orders, whether it's direct to customer orders or, you know, even the product that goes into these e-commerce centers that takes labor out there. I think we'll see more of that and I think it will happen. As we were talking about the advancement at things, you know, seem like they're far out and because of COVID I think it's going to be a heightened point for all of us to try to solve. So I think that we will see that and I think we'll see it in our company too. And Chris, Chris, let me ask you another question about that. You know, as you struggled through this whole crisis, some of your suppliers must have been in challenging times as well. Did you find it necessary to, I don't know, place advance orders with your suppliers to keep them going as you went through some dry spells or is the food chain, the supply chain in your business so strong that you didn't have that issue? No, I think there was opportunistic times when you shopped our stores that I think the way my wife would describe it is like Christmas. I know I'm going to get meat. I just don't know if I'm getting poultry today or I'm getting beef. And so, you know, part of it was if you go up the supply chain, manufacturing got hit hard with COVID. If you think about the proximity of how they do their work, we saw lots of closures in that space. And some of those were a day, somewhere a week, some closed for two weeks. And if you think about just to pick on poultry, if you're in the poultry side of the industry and you had multiple sites down, your flow of products to all the retailers at a time when the demand is higher than ever, it's, you know, you feel it really quick and it's hard to catch up. What we're starting to see is more stability in the manufacturing side. And we did work with them and they have, like, lowered the number of items they're producing to increase the demand on fewer items. And so what we'll probably see in the fall, we might not go back to the same level of variety we had. We'll increase what we have today. And I think that will help the manufacturers catch up. We'll see some of that. And, you know, the first week when this really hit us hard, we bought out two extra weeks in all of our DCs, but we only probably got 60% of it because the manufacturers didn't have the product. And so we react on a daily basis based on what we see for retail position, our customer traffic, but going upstream, there's still a lot of challenges. They're catching up, but there's still a lot of challenges. You know, I might add, George, that all delays is in a better position than many with suppliers just given their size and scale. So you talk about scale and their ability to source and get what they need from their manufacturers and even they were limited. And the other thing is within those protein categories, they don't travel well. So, you know, if you have slow downs or shutdowns and center store categories, you can shift from one plant to the other, your cost basis may go up, but it's doable. You can't move cattle around the country if one plant closes from the east coast to the west coast or vice versa. It's just not happening. So that added to that. But I do want to say, and I think it's important because I know we don't have a lot of time. But there is a there is another message in all this and that is, there were lots of questions around, are we going to run out of food? Is there enough product in the food supply? And the answer to that is no, we're not going to run out of food. And there was always product. And I said there are, you know, three components, three supply chains within the food ecosystem. There's the retail supply chain. There's the food service supply chain. And then there's the feeding supply chain. And that's an important component as well. When you have 40 million unemployed, you've already been feeding a lot of people who are at risk or have the need. And it was never for, and you saw the pictures of farmers plowing under crops and the spilt milk. And by the way, it's more devastating to them than anyone else. That's their livelihood. And they work the land. It's really important to understand that. They were not shortages. What we had challenges with was moving product point to point. And we are in the process. One of the lessons learned of setting up what I'll call the new food deal, like the new deal of the FDR era, which is better understanding the connectivity between those what were disparate and parallel supply chains to figure out how we have a more integrated supply chain, regardless of what, where and how you procure or you're being fed. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Here's a question we have that I don't, I don't know the answer to this question. It's a really good questions. It's from one of our colleagues in Africa. And they're asking about maybe to comment on how these things are playing out in the African continent. I don't have good visibility. And we do a lot of work in Africa, but not in the food business. What do either of you or both of you know about the situation in Africa and how things are being handled there? Chris, do you have a perspective, Chris? No, I don't. I don't have a large perspective. We have members who operate there and we've we've had several what I'll call international sharing sessions with our board. And so we share perspectives from Asia, Europe, Africa, Latin America, UK, US, and obviously, just by the way, just so everybody knows, I'm sure you do, but Chris's, Ahobel Hayes USA is a division of Ahobel Hayes, the European based company. So they do have far flung operations, maybe not so much in Africa. But in southern Africa, one of our members to buy swastikas spar operates in in South Africa. And so in South Africa, the countries in Bobway neighboring areas, they handled things differently. There were much more restrictions on what consumers could buy. And again, this is probably a month old. So this could be stale by now on the basis of, you know, the ever shifting sands of COVID-19 and its impact. There were some concerns about needing to contain significantly because the infrastructure is not quite as mature as it is here, the hospital system, the lack of ventilators, etc. So I can't comment too much more on supply per se. But we can get it. George, if your colleague in Africa would like more information, we can get answers to those questions with a much greater degree of specificity. I wonder whether we've lost George. I just, I don't know. Mark, I'm sure you had a great answer that question. I didn't hear all of it, but, but I have another, I have another question. We have a person on the phone. I just noticed on zoom with us, who's professor at Cornell. Vishal Guar. Do you have a comment? I want to mark you made a point about food waste and about in the supply chain, you know, dumping milk and so forth. Maybe, Professor, you could comment a little bit on your observations about what's happening in that area. I know you've done some good work in the supply chain space. Thank you, George. And thanks, Mark and Chris as well. It's a pleasure to hear about all of the things and especially the supply chain resilience that we are seeing when there was a lot of anxiety earlier about shortages, etc. So I do work in food waste. And the, the interesting thing here is that many of the things that you're doing now to increase cross supply chain collaboration, or bring in ideas like the food industry exchange, or improve communication in the entire supply chain are going to be helpful in reducing food waste also, I think. Because what we have discovered in our research is that food waste is not a problem that can be solved only by the retailer or only by the manufacturer. It's a problem that requires collaboration across the entire supply chain. We used data from retailers and from CPG manufacturers to study this problem and found that product can get wasted because of decisions that were taken anywhere in the entire supply chain. And so having coordination across the players is really helpful. And the interesting thing is that all of these players share the same goal. They all want to reduce food waste. They're working at it independently. And then when they collaborate with each other, it gets so much better. So I think the things you're doing about using technology and improving collaboration are going to be helpful. The waste we used to see earlier was more because of expiration or at the consumer. The waste we are seeing now is a little bit different because of the challenges in movement as you described. So those are things that we'll have to be very thoughtful about. And you're right. It used to be, you know, there's still some food waste that occurs in the household. In food service, it's a little different. A lot of it is at the plate at the table. And you might know, and if you don't, I'd be happy to put you in touch. We are one of three founding members of the Food Waste Reduction Alliance where we work upstream with manufacturers and across over with the restaurant operators with the National Restaurant Association. And we're expanding our partnerships there as well and would love to include you in that discussion given the good work that you've been doing. Thank you. This is, believe it or not, the hour is almost done. We're just about finished. I just want to say a couple of things to wrap up. First of all, I want to thank our two panelists who are just fabulous. Mark and Chris, you did a great job laying out the issues and some solutions and where things are going. We have a bunch of other questions that were not quite answered and I'll work to make sure that all of you get some answers back. And you can always visit our website, DigitalSupplyChainInstitute.org to see the data here and get copies of the presentation. We'll make sure that all of you get that. So you'll have that and we'll have you go to talk with you again if you'd like about these same topics. One thing I'll just note for you is that we just completed a big in-country survey of India and then we did a second report. We just published it yesterday about Germany. So as we go around the world, we pick different markets that are important and we focus in on supply chain issues that are being at least prompted by the COVID-19 crisis. So please go ahead and look at dcinstitute.org if you want to find out about Germany or India or some other reports as well as a bunch of other research. And of course, you know, there's a lot of other information out there that I'm sure you have that we can share and talk through again as we go forward. But thanks everyone for coming, especially a great thanks to our panelists and we're going to have another one of these collaboratories in just a few weeks. I'll let you know the date and I'll invite everyone to it as well. It will not be on the food industry, but it'll be on industries that have some of this very same topics in common. So thank you all for coming and we look forward to talking to you again soon. Thank you, Mark. Thank you, Chris. Thanks, Chris. Take care. Bye bye. Thank you. Thank you.