Dorothy Lane Market CEO receives national award

Norman Mayne, CEO of Dorothy Lane Market, has received a national award for entrepreneurial excellence from the Food Marketing Institute.

“I was honored, humbled and very appreciative,” Mayne said in a phone interview from Scottsdale, Ariz., where he accepted the Robert B. Wegman Award Tuesday. Mayne said he is “just the front person to all of the wonderful people who work at this company.”

The privately owned DLM operates three grocery stores in the Dayton area, in Oakwood, Washington Twp. and Springboro.

The Robert B. Wegman award, named for the former head of Wegman’s Food Markets, “celebrates the food retailer or wholesaler responsible for creating exceptional retail innovations” and is presented to someone in the field “who is exercising entrepreneurial leadership in the design of retail strategies and imaginative merchandising,” according to a spokeswoman for the Food Marketing Institute (FMI).

Danny Wegman, the 2012 inaugural recipient of the award and the son of the man for whom it’s named, said in an FMI news release that Mayne “is a truly unique merchant. He has a special ability to identify concepts and products that will enthrall customers. Furthermore, he has allowed his people to pursue these same ideals. The result: his stores are masterpieces.”

Mayne’s father Calvin founded Dorothy Lane Market as a fruit stand in Oakwood in 1948.

Mayne serves on the board of directors of the Washington D.C.-based Food Marketing Institute, which has 1,250 food retail and wholesale member companies in the U.S. and around the world. The organization’s U.S. members operate more than 25,000 retail food stores and almost 22,000 pharmacies with a combined annual sales volume of nearly $650 billion, and its international members operate stores and businesses in 65 countries.

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