Grocery leader Willard "Bill" Bishop passes away at 80

Willard “Bill” Bishop, a grocery industry and private label leader, has died at the age of 80, according to his family.

Bishop was named by the Private Label Manufacturers Association and Store Brands to the Private Label Hall of Fame in March of 2020, and was interviewed for the corresponding issue of Store Brands Magazine.

Bishop’s family described his experience in the food retail business as “reaching from the earliest introduction of the UPC code to the online grocery revolution that was fast-tracked due to the COVID pandemic.”

Bishop first got into retail when he attended Cornell University in the 1960s and got involved with its Department of Food Marketing. After college, while in the U.S. army, he routinely would check in with the National Association of Food Chains to entertain himself, which later led him to joining the Supermarket Institute for five years while it transitioned into the Food Marketing Institute (it is now FMI — the Food Industry Association). In 1976, he started Willard Bishop Consulting, and for three decades would be one of the grocery industry’s primary thought leaders.

After leading his Willard Bishop Consulting (WBC) for almost four decades, Bishop co-founded Brick Meets Click, which studies the digital impact on the grocery industry, in 2011, and led as chief architect. Brick Meets Click is now ran by Bishop’s children.

The full obituary can be found here.