FMI announced that Tim Steiner, co-founder and CEO of Ocado: the online supermarket will be the keynote speaker at its 2018 Midwinter Executive Conference.

The conference is slated for Jan. 26-29 at the National Doral Miami in Miami, Florida.

Tim Steiner

"There's a real appetite for change among food retailers and the excitement is building to produce rewarding food experiences for a digitally engaged consumer," says FMI president and CEO Leslie G. Sarasin. "Ocado is using machine learning to create new experiences and opportunities for customers, even supplying its scalable technologies to other retailers."

Ocado, a British online-only grocery chain, offers more than 50,000 products and is tackling complicated issues of logistics in its pure-play eccommerce model. Steiner co-founded the company in 2000 when online and grocery deliver were still new concepts. The modern-day company is profitable, with over $1.4 billion in sales in 2016, and is often described as a model for online retail due to automated warehouses, early adoption of a mobile strategy and its recent developments in voice capabilities using Amazon's Alexa. 

"The channel shift to online grocery shopping continues to accelerate internationally bringing increasing pressure on retailers to adapt and evolve to meet these changing dynamics," Steiner says. "I am delighted to have the opportunity to share insights of some of the challenges and successes we have experienced in building our business into a sustainability profitable company, and our experience of working with other retailers to help enable their online businesses."