Trump, Tech and Toughness: Top Themes at NGA Show 2025
The National Grocers Association’s (NGA) annual show is a time for independent grocery retailers to recognize leadership, to reconnect in community, and to reimagine the future of the industry. This year’s show also offered time to reflect on what went right for the industry in 2024, and how to develop a strategy to build on those wins in 2025.
From a packed Technology Innovation Summit to an M&A-focused Financial Symposium — plus several uplifting awards ceremonies celebrating grocery legends — this year’s NGA Show, which featured 340-plus exhibitors, 50-plus education sessions, and a record 3,700-plus attendees gathered in Las Vegas, offered up insights that independent grocers can apply to navigate industry challenges and drive success in their businesses in 2025.
Here's the top takeaways from the show:
Trump 2.0 Will Have Big Impacts
From the consequences of trade wars to crackdowns on illegal immigrants, President Donald Trump’s second term is off to a raucous start and is bound to have big impacts on the grocery industry.
Chris Jones, chief government relations officer and counsel at NGA, gave an eye-opening presentation at the show, outlining the effects that Trump’s executive orders, tariffs, deportations, appointees, DOGE effort, foreign policy, Make America Healthy Again movement and other moves might have on grocery.
Jones noted that recent changes in Washington, including budget cuts and staffing reductions at various agencies, are being closely monitored. “We are watching that extremely closely. In the grocery world, we touch the government in many different ways, whether it's SNAP, WIC, USDA or FDA,” he said.
Jones also warned about the looming federal government shutdown. Current funding expires on March 14. If a funding bill is not passed, then the government will see itself forced to furlough thousands of federal workers and reduce federal services, trickling down to SNAP.
“Anytime there's a government shutdown, the SNAP authorization side can no longer process applications. So if you're opening up a new store, you're moving locations, new ownership, all of that shuts down,” Jones said.
He also touched on issues such as antitrust, payments, PBMs, and another try on the Credit Card Competition Act, which would provide much needed relief to independent grocers. Visa and Mastercard set the fees that they charge banks, the issuers of credit cards, and, under this current duopoly, these two card networks institute fee changes that almost always lead to increases in merchants’ costs. They also block competitors from handling credit transactions by restricting processing to their own networks, stifling competition from independent competitors with lower fees and better security.
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But what really keeps Jones up at night, he said, are two issues: food traceability FSMA 204, and the EPA refrigerant requirements coming online around the same time.
So where is that going?
“We think we have a pretty good shot under a deregulatory administration, to at least give us more time on these things,” Jones said. “So we're going to spend a lot of our political capital in the early days trying to get both the White House, the EPA, and the FDA to think about, you know, giving us more time to meet these requirements, at a minimum.”
Tech Gap vs. Talent Gap
It’s common to see people get on industry show stages and berate smaller or even medium size operators for being too slow to adapt to the tech transformation happening across grocery. But at the NGA Show tech summit, speakers didn’t do that. In fact, they argued that the gap is actually in talent, not so much tech: Talent that understands how to implement the tech, and the various solutions the tech needs to play with.
“Innovation is hard, doesn't matter if it's merchandising, something new in the bakery, etc. And technology in particular is really hard,” said Casie Broker, chief marketing officer at Price Chopper. “So you get the issue where the vendor knows a lot more about the technology than the client. Because the vendor has hands on it every day and we do a bad job catching people up like we'll assume some level of understanding or fluency or even capability that just doesn't exist with the client and those problems typically show up during implementation. If you think about a retail grocery business, it's very silent. So you have the merchandising, marketing, store ops, finance, logistics. And everybody's got their purview, but there's nobody really charged with a single point of view across that customer experience. Outside of the grocery industry, we call those people product managers. Product managers, all they do is talk with the customers, understand the customers, and then bring that knowledge back to the organization in a cohesive way. That role doesn't really exist oftentimes in grocery, you know, oftentimes it does fall into the marketing department because you're generalists and that sort of thing, but everybody's got a lot of stuff on the plate and um technology innovation in particular, especially early stage stuff like what we're doing. It's not gonna move the needle this quarter, so it becomes priority number 52.”
But other speakers during the summit said, despite the organizational, talent and budgetary challenges, indie grocers must make some inroads, or get left behind.
“You're never gonna be able to compete with Walmart on everything, right?” moderator Kevin Coupe said. “But figure out very surgically where are the places to make a move; maybe it’s food as medicine, maybe a smart cart that becomes a self checkout lane that's basically wandering the store. You never have the resources to be Walmart, but you can certainly make a plan.”
Treat Your Customers Like Family
Retailers attending the NGA Show mostly expressed optimism about the coming year, despite the myriad challenges poised to disrupt the industry in 2025. Tough talk about resilience in the face of persistent inflation, tariffs, still-rising incidences of theft, and expense pressures related to the costs of health and property insurance, construction and energy — not to mention investments in wages, assortment, supply chain and retail tech solutions, spilled over in the corridors of the show venue.
But ever a beacon of hope, IGA CEO John Ross told the show audience on Feb. 23: “Retailers are facing domestic and international challenges. Domestically, it’s increasing government legislation that seems designed to try to prevent them from doing well in business. Internationally, the incredible pressure coming on from global retailers. Challenges in the marketplace. Yesterday was not as difficult as today, and tomorrow looks like it might be worse. And in that environment, you might think, ‘How do we win?. …
“And the answer to that is what you all know and do every single day. We walk into our stores and take care of customers as if they are our family. And when we’re cutting meat or we’re baking fresh or we’re taking care of produce or buying from local farmers, all the things that we do and all the people that we say yes to that come and ask us for help in our communities. … Whether it’s inflation, whether it’s COVID, whether it’s tariffs, no matter what comes, the resiliency in this industry has probably positioned it to grow even faster over the next decade. What is it about it? It’s our ability to take care of our shoppers and our associates the way we take care of our own family.”
