(Radio Iowa) — The head of Iowa’s largest supermarket chain says market trends show consumers began eating the majority of their food outside of their home three years ago. HyVee C-E-O Randy Edeker says grocers were adjusting to that new reality when the COVID-19 crisis hit. The first two weeks were rough, he admits. “It was like drinking from a fire hose and making hundreds of decisions that we’d never faced before,” Edeker says.

Edeker, who became chairman of F-M-I — the Food Industry Association in January, says crisis often sparks innovation. “A lot of our grocery stores have been buying food from restaurants and selling it out of the stores…Out of this crisis will come good in the end.” He made his comments last Friday when he hosted the vice president at Hy-Vee headquarters in West Des Moines. Rodney McMullen, the C-E-O of Kroger, the largest supermarket chain in the country, was there as well. The company is not only testing its own employees, it’s now in the testing business in 15 states.

“One of the things that we’ve done with our own associates is partner with Microsoft to create a bot where our associates can go through to see whether they should be tested,” McMullen said, “and all our 462,000 associates have access to that.” There are 28-hundred Kroger stores in the U.S.