Industry mourns death of Robert 'Bob' Vosburgh, PLMA news director and veteran trade journalist

Robert D. Vosburgh Jr., a veteran supermarket trade journalist and most recently a familiar spokesperson for the U.S. store brands industry through his online video work for the Private Label Manufacturers Association (PLMA), died on July 15. A resident of New Milford, Conn., he was 54.

Vosburgh joined PLMA in 2013 and served as news director of PLMALive! where he oversaw various aspects of the organization’s video and digital platforms. A major focus of his was PLMA Category Profile reports, an ongoing series of informative and well-received videos that examined individual private label categories.

He compiled dozens of such reports over the past four years, which were watched by visitors to PLMA’s website. He annually filed a series of live reports on new and innovative store brands products from the exhibition floor during PLMA’s trade shows in Chicago and Amsterdam. He also contributed to monthly news desk reports, wrote scripts and recruited experts for a wide range of PLMA presentations.

PLMA President Brian Sharoff said that “Bob’s insight and experience will be impossible to replace. He understood the industry and the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which it operates. He was a reporter’s reporter, and that is the highest praise journalism offers.”

Prior to joining PLMA, Vosburgh was longtime group editor at Penton Media’s trade publication Supermarket News (SN), now a publication of Informa, where he oversaw coverage of fresh foods and natural/organic. During that time, he helped initiate SN’s award-winning quarterly supplement, SN Whole Health. He previously worked as an editor at Griffin Publishing’s Modern Food Service publication.

Vosburgh was awarded a number of prestigious business journalism awards, including Fairchild Publication’s Newsmaker of the Year in 2001.

Early in his career, Vosburgh was an on-air reporter and the New Jersey state correspondent for WCBS News radio 88 in New York; and prior to that, an editor and anchor for WPDH and WEOK radio in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. He was a 1987 journalism graduate of New York University.