Financial leaders in the food industry must adapt quickly to rising payment fees, cyber threats and regulatory changes by building cross-functional skills and collaborating to strengthen resilience amid constant disruption.
By: Rebecca Daniels, Director, Education, FMI
The phone rings just after dawn. You’re informed by your controller that a supplier paused shipments. A cyber incident upstream has frozen invoices, which means products might not arrive for the weekend rush. At the same time, card processing fees have spiked again, and a new state regulation changed how your team needs to report shrink. None of these issues are new, but for financial leaders across the food industry, this story is becoming familiar. The pace of disruption is speeding up, and the biggest pressures are no longer siloed. Payments, cybersecurity, inventory accuracy and compliance now collide in ways that test even seasoned executives.
Take interchange fees. Once a predictable line item, they now swing with policy debates and evolving network rules. A single basis-point shift can erase the margin on an entire category, and many grocers are looking for ways to cut processing costs without slowing the checkout experience customers expect.
Meanwhile, cyber threats keep rising. Attackers are targeting the food supply chain because they know one delay can ripple from warehouse to register within hours. Finance teams, often the first to notice anomalies, are becoming frontline defenders. Fraudulent payments, spoofed vendor accounts and manipulated ACH instructions show up long before an IT alert.
Then there’s shrink. What used to be a loss prevention issue is now a financial data problem as regulators demand clearer reporting and investors ask for transparency. Accurate shrink accounting affects tax liabilities, insurance coverage and supplier negotiations. Finance and operations must work together more tightly than ever.
Through all this, the food industry’s margin math remains unforgiving. Leaders are discovering that resilience comes from cross-functional knowledge: understanding how a compliance change affects cash flow, how a cyber breach alters cost of goods sold and how payment modernization can free working capital. That’s why many financial executives are investing in deeper peer connections and continuing education. The challenges aren’t slowing, but the people solving them are getting smarter together. For those shaping the next chapter of grocery finance, sharpening those skills today can make the next “week of whiplash” far easier to manage.
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