Target, Inc.

Colin Watts, chief innovation officer at Walgreens Corp., will be jury chair for the second annual Product of the Year USA Awards. On Product of the Year Jury Day (Sept. 30) at New York’s Gansevoort Hotel, Watts and the jury panel, consisting of industry leaders, influencers, and key stakeholders, will preview new consumer packaged goods in competition for the 2010 Product of the Year imprimatur from 100,000 American shoppers who will ultimately choose the winning products.

Celebrity chef Paula Deen is introducing a new line of frozen seafood products expected to hit retail in the fall of 2009.

Target, Inc. plans to build and manage its own platform for its Web site (Target.com), which it expects to launch in advance of the holiday season in 2011, breaking a 10-year relationship with Amazon, which has been a strategic partner for its Web site for the past decade.

Leaner inventories and a shift in state sales-tax holidays hampered U.S. chain store sales in July, which were off 5 percent on a same-store basis, compared with the same period last year, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC).

Advertisers are aiming to reach the value-minded consumer with creative advertising executions that deliver recession-themed messaging. Nielsen IAG examined 67 value-themed ads across 11 national advertisers and found that breakthrough retention rates were not as expected.

The newest version of NCR SelfServ Checkout, the self-checkout solution from Duluth, Ga.-based NCR Corp., is among the 2009 winners of the International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA) competition.

First, the good news: More than half of the nation’s leading supermarkets are making progress with increased sustainability in their seafood operations, according to results of Greenpeace’s latest seafood sustainability scorecard, “Carting Away the Oceans.”

As investors and owners strive to value retail centers, they can draw on a correlation between college education levels, vacancies and gross leaseable area to predict performance.