Shownotes
In this Omni Talk Retail interview, recorded live from the Consumer Goods Forum Global Summit 2026, Chris Walton sits down with John Ross, President & CEO of IGA, as the organization celebrates its 100th anniversary and reflects on the evolving role of independent grocers around the world.
Ross explains how IGA's network of more than 8,000 independent stores across 30+ countries is helping local retailers compete at scale while preserving their community-first approach. He also shares why collaboration across retailers and manufacturers is essential to addressing human rights in global supply chains, how IGA is simplifying retail media for independent operators, and why long-term sustainability must remain a business priority regardless of shifting political climates.
Key Topics Covered:
- IGA's 100-year history and its global network of independent grocers
- Why IGA describes itself as an $80 billion alliance of independent retailers
- The unique role of the Consumer Goods Forum in bringing retailers and manufacturers together
- IGA's leadership in the CGF Human Rights Coalition
- Addressing forced labor, debt bondage, and child labor across global supply chains
- Why local retailers need scalable technology and shared infrastructure
- How IGA simplifies retail media for independent grocery operators
- The challenge of normalizing data across thousands of retailers
- Why retail media success depends on simplicity and measurable ROI
- Balancing local community needs with global retail collaboration
- Why sustainability should remain a core business strategy regardless of political change
- Keeping customer expectations at the center of every retail decision
Special thanks to the CGF Leadership Studio sponsored by Vusion for supporting Omni Talk Retail's coverage from the Consumer Goods Forum Global Summit 2026 in Vienna.
This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis:
Podcorn - https://podcorn.com/privacy
Transcripts
Hello, this is Omnitalk Retail.
Speaker A:I'm Chris Walton and I'm coming to you live once again from the Consumer Goods Forum Global Summit in Vienna, Austria.
Speaker A:From the CGF Leadership Studio, which is sponsored by Vuzion.
Speaker A:Now, I'm pleased to introduce John Ross.
Speaker A:John is the President and CEO of iga.
Speaker A:John, thanks for joining us.
Speaker B:Well, I'm glad to be here.
Speaker A:Yeah, no, it's great to have you.
Speaker A:So maybe for those unfamiliar back home particularly, tell us about IGA and what it is.
Speaker B:Yeah, we're the most interesting and probably misunderstood 80 billion dollar company you'll ever meet.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:IGA is like a franchise.
Speaker B:It's an alliance of independent retailers.
Speaker B:They tend to be independents, very regional, often very local.
Speaker B:In more than 30 countries all over the world.
Speaker B:Largest market is the United States.
Speaker B:It's our home market.
Speaker A:Okay.
Speaker B:We're 100 years old this year, which is kind of interesting.
Speaker A:Wow, congrats.
Speaker B:With 3,000 stores, happy birthday.
Speaker B:Yeah, I know, exactly.
Speaker B:Happy birthday.
Speaker B:3,000 Stores in the US, about 8,000 globally, with markets in Australia and China and Fiji and Canada and the Caribbean and all over.
Speaker A:Got it.
Speaker A:So what brings you to cgf particularly?
Speaker B:CGF is the only industry conference where you get both manufacturers and retailers together operating at the C suite level.
Speaker B:So there's presidents and CEOs of these major companies.
Speaker B:And so imagine if you had all the Illuminati of the industry all together in one room.
Speaker B:And you said, now how could we working together, make our planet a better place and in so doing, also grow our businesses?
Speaker B:It's a unique challenge.
Speaker B:No other industry association does.
Speaker B:And so if you're not here, then you're not working on the good stuff.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:But is Illuminati the right reference?
Speaker A:Because that's kind of like a secretive thing.
Speaker A:Right?
Speaker A:You guys don't want to be secretive.
Speaker A:You want to actually make the impact.
Speaker A:Right, Jon?
Speaker B:Well, I'm on a TV show right.
Speaker A:Now, so I'm blowing it.
Speaker A:Right, right, right.
Speaker A:And part of your role here is you're co sponsor of the Human Rights Coalition too.
Speaker A:So.
Speaker A:So talk about the due diligence you put into that effort.
Speaker A:And what's the key message you want to get across at this conference this year around that subject?
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:So there's multiple pillars within cgf.
Speaker B:Reducing plastic from the world's oceans or forest, positive business practices, these sorts of things.
Speaker B:One of the pillars is human rights, and it's really focused on removing debt, bondage, slavery, child labor out of the supply chain that feeds the consumer.
Speaker B:Packaged goods in the food industries, it's especially keen in agriculture.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:So no business wants to have it found out that some nefarious practice is happening in the products that end up on the shelf of your local grocery store.
Speaker B:And our consumers would not want that.
Speaker A:No.
Speaker B:And there's certainly been some instances, you know, Nike, for example, came under fire many, many years ago about, you know, a bunch of impoverished children making soccer balls and tennis shoes that they would never wear or play with that were sold to rich kids in developed nations.
Speaker B:And so as an industry, you have a responsibility to have visibility into your supply chain and use your collective buying clout to influence our suppliers to make sure that they're.
Speaker B:That they're behaving responsibly.
Speaker B:It's a really complicated issue.
Speaker B:There's all kinds of.
Speaker B:There's political issues at the local level.
Speaker B:There are societal issues.
Speaker B:You can't just paste your Western sensibility on top of another country and just assume that your values are theirs.
Speaker B:You have to be very sensitive and a really good listener.
Speaker B:But at the end of the day, the reality is if we say no, these behaviors are not acceptable.
Speaker B:We need you to improve the plight of workers.
Speaker B:We don't want people buying jobs.
Speaker B:We don't.
Speaker B:People in debt bondage, so they can never leave those jobs.
Speaker B:And if you're using those practices, we won't buy from you.
Speaker B:If this industry and this group of CEOs can make a difference here, then shame on us.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:And that's hence why you come here.
Speaker A:Back to that.
Speaker A:Back to the question originally.
Speaker A:So, all right, so, you know, I'm curious too, like from.
Speaker A:In terms of CGF and its role, you work with a lot of regional operators.
Speaker A:Like you said, you work across the globe.
Speaker A:$80 Billion, you said.
Speaker A:How do you make sure that you create a framework that is generally accessible to all of them?
Speaker A:And how does CGF play a role in that?
Speaker B:Well, that's a great question for a global conference where there may be common cause, but the way we go to marketplace, the complexity of the businesses are.
Speaker B:Are radically different.
Speaker B:And IG is the perfect example of that.
Speaker B:So even in any country, even take the United States, the difference between our stores in rural West Virginia, which are some of the poorest communities in the United States, versus our stores operating in Connecticut, for example, where you're surrounded by households with an average income of 150 or $200,000.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Those are radically different businesses.
Speaker B:Their assortments are completely different.
Speaker B:The customer base has different expectations, and yet at the core of it are some really Basic values, which is listening and taking care of the customer, making sure that you've got a value proposition that works for that community, that you're bringing support and savings to the shopper, regardless of their economic conditions, so that they can win and they can feed their family.
Speaker B:And doing it all in an environment where your supply chain is as short as it possibly can be, because it allows you to connect to local producers, local suppliers, and put those on the shelves right as next to the global brands that are all here.
Speaker B:And getting that right in the United States or in the Caribbean or in China.
Speaker B:The mission is the same no matter where you go.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:So one of the other, if we double click into what you just said too, one of the interesting issues facing the industries, well, not issues, but opportunities facing the industry too, depending on how you want to look at it, is retail media and all the data that's required for that.
Speaker A:So I'm curious, because where you sit in terms of your organization as a CEO across, like you said, a large network of people, large network of retailers that requires a lot of coordination of data, and yet there may be a reluctance to share that data.
Speaker A:So how do you meander through that?
Speaker A:How do you operate through that?
Speaker A:How do you get people to buy into the pre competitive nature of trying to move the business forward, whether it's retail media or anything that requires data sharing?
Speaker B:So there's a lot there in that question.
Speaker B:So just on the data sharing part, we do not have trouble getting our retailers to share data.
Speaker A:You do not?
Speaker B:No, that's not an issue.
Speaker B:It's not a privacy issue.
Speaker B:You have to set your standards really high.
Speaker B:You have to make sure that they understand that you're not making money off of their data and that the aggregation will create products which drive value for their shoppers.
Speaker B:As long as you behave in that way and are consistent, getting them to share the data isn't the issue, the problem in our channel.
Speaker B:And so, for example, this is about probably a third of the world global industry in terms of total volume comes from intensively local retailers.
Speaker B:The problem is the complexity of the technology stacks.
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker B:So each retailer may be on a different POS system, they may be in different bills, they have different levels of sophistication.
Speaker B:So the issue is not their willingness, but how portable and liquid that data is.
Speaker B:And so a company like iga, we have to invest a lot of energy in normalization, in aggregation and making sure that we got taxonomies right, so that the skew here and the skew here are the same thing.
Speaker B:All this heavy lifting in order to get the data to move.
Speaker B:The good news is that once you do that work and the data starts to flow, you're able to deploy manufacture, investment in this channel in a way that could never move before.
Speaker B:We were too complicated, it's too hard.
Speaker B:And so what do people do?
Speaker B:They go to the easiest choice.
Speaker B:You pick up the phone, you call a national brand called Tesco, call Walmart, Care for who are all here.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:It's really easy.
Speaker B:One call and you got something moving.
Speaker B:In our world, you're gonna call 8,000 stores?
Speaker B:No.
Speaker B:So we have to provide this intermediary layer to take all the effort that they're doing that allows you to be hyperlocal and turn that into a product that's easy to access, easy to buy and easy to report on.
Speaker B:If we do that, it all works.
Speaker A:How do you actually do that, John?
Speaker A:Like that sounds, I mean it sounds in theory great, but like, what are some of the tips and tricks that, that enable you to help the operators that are working inside of what you just described?
Speaker B:So at the core of it, simple.
Speaker B:It's got to be really, really simple.
Speaker B:I think there's a tendency in the world of retail media and we started our retail media journey 10 years ago.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:And we started it for a very different reason than a lot of big retailers.
Speaker B:It's not a for profit adventure for us.
Speaker B:It was designed as a promise to manufacturers to say, I'll take this complexity and I'll make it easy for you to access.
Speaker B:I'll report on it and I'll make sure that your dollars get all the way to the consumer without, you know, horrendous infrastructure cost.
Speaker B:And if I do that, then I want you to treat me as a local or, I mean, excuse me, as a national or a global retailer.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:You move me into that class, you make the dollars flow, I'll make it easy for you to access and then on the tail end, I'll make sure the ROI that you get out of my segment is as good or better than anything else that you can do.
Speaker B:And as long as we do that, then there's this really virtuous circle and then the incentive for the retailer is really high.
Speaker B:Because if you're an independent, it doesn't matter whether you got one store or 400.
Speaker B:If you're doing half a million dollars a week out of the store or you're doing 6 million a week, it doesn't matter.
Speaker B:You don't have access to manufacturers and suppliers and the technology companies like the big guys do.
Speaker B:And you always feel like you're fighting sort of one hand tied behind your back.
Speaker B:So when we come in and say, we'll provide this sort of air cover.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:We'll provide a layer of infrastructure that allows you to access their investments in the same way the national or global chain gets.
Speaker B:They're really excited about that.
Speaker B:All of a sudden, the dollars start flowing, promotions happen, sales go up, shoppers are happy.
Speaker B:And now, now you're rocking.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Because if you think about it in aggregate, right, John, like $80 billion.
Speaker A:I mean, that makes you one of the largest retail media networks there is, potentially, if you can unlock.
Speaker B:If you can unlock it now, retail media is a country by country thing.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Because that's the way brands spend money.
Speaker A:That too, yeah.
Speaker B:So in the United States, you have a very developed ecosystem for investing in shopper marketing, for example, for brand dollars or marketing.
Speaker A:That's a great point too.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:That market may be nascent in some other countries, so we're in various stages of deployment and at the end of the day, it has to be local back or it won't work.
Speaker A:Got it, Got it.
Speaker A:All right, well, let's get you out of here on this.
Speaker A:It's a really great conversation.
Speaker A:What's the one message that you hope to bring to the conference here over the last three days?
Speaker A:What is the one thing that you've been actively talking about with your CEO compadres of the retailers, the brands?
Speaker A:What's the message you've been trying to drive home?
Speaker B:I think we live in a world.
Speaker B:So politically our world has swung from perhaps liberal to more conservative.
Speaker B:And that would be true in the United States.
Speaker B:That would be true a lot of the countries that we serve.
Speaker B:And when that happens, and that's kind of natural course.
Speaker B:And you will see that if you take a long term view.
Speaker A:Yeah, ebb and flow.
Speaker B:It happens all the time.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:And so a lot of, a lot of the kind of sustainability issues, ESG issues that perhaps we, you know, were government mandated, a lot of legislation, a lot of cost legislation, which wasn't necessarily producing a lot of results.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:I think a lot of business leaders are like, thank God.
Speaker B:But that does not change the core mission.
Speaker B:And especially if you talk to our customers.
Speaker B:And I'm not talking about baby boomers, I'm talking about my generation.
Speaker B:But the younger generations, and the younger you go, the more their expectation.
Speaker B:That's the wrong word.
Speaker B:The more their fear is that the older generation has set them up for failure in a world which is going to be increasingly complex, dangerous, expensive and.
Speaker B:And perhaps unhealthy.
Speaker B:And so in our industry, no matter what you do here, whether you're a supplier, whether you're a technology partner, a manufacturer or retailer, we all work backwards from that customer.
Speaker B:And so I think we have this mission, this really important mission, to make sure that while we're talking about AI or GOP1 or robotics or whatever the new thing is at the core of it, we also have to work backwards from the expectation our shoppers have of us and to make sure that we're doing the things that make them feel like we have their backs.
Speaker A:So if I was to capture what you just said.
Speaker A:So regardless of the ebb and flow of the politics, it's important to keep your eye on the ball in terms of what the customer is demanding of you and of the industry.
Speaker B:If we rock with AI and we do a great job with robotics or whatever and make our businesses more efficient and our shareholders are proud of us, at the same time, we won't survive and prosper of an industry unless we pull more plastic out of the ocean than we put in.
Speaker B:Unless we make sure that there's a responsible agricultural processes that allow us to bring products sustainability sustainably to the marketplace.
Speaker B:I don't mean that word in kind of the buzzword way.
Speaker B:I mean, if you start running out of food, then prices go up and when prices go up, we hurt our shoppers and you get into.
Speaker B:So these messages are not divorced from core business.
Speaker B:They are a function of how we have to go to market.
Speaker A:Yeah, it's kind of just business every day, if you get down to it.
Speaker A:Right, John?
Speaker B:That's the way you have to think of it.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Well, that's a great point to end on, John.
Speaker A:Well, thank you, John.
Speaker A:John Ross than of IGA for sitting down with us and interviewing with us today.
Speaker A:And thanks to all the executives that spent time with us at CGF this week from Vienna.
Speaker A:Thanks to CGF and VUSION for allowing us to bring these interviews to you as well.
Speaker A:And as always, to everyone, be careful out there.