Obituary: Gerald E. Peck

Gerald Edward Peck, known affectionately as “Jerry,” who spent the majority of his professional career working for and eventually leading the National American Wholesale Grocers Association (NAWGA) as its president, died March 22 at the age of 93.

Born in 1923 in North East, Pa., Peck studied aircraft engineering as a young man and was an apprentice in the GE training program to become a machinist before enlisting in the U.S. Navy during World War II. After the war, he studied at the former Carnegie Tech (today known as Carnegie Mellon University) on the G.I. Bill and became a civil engineer.

As well as his work with NAWGA, which he was instrumental in relocating to the Washington, D.C., area from its headquarters in New York, Peck was a founding member of the Food Industry Crusade Against Hunger (FICAH), a nonprofit organization dedicated to funding programs to alleviate hunger and malnutrition by fostering long-term, self-help solutions both in the United States and globally. He received Food Marketing Institute’s (FMI) Herbert Hoover Award in 1981 for humanitarian service to the food industry.

Peck was also “a fantastic mentor, a low-key leader who never sought the spotlight,” according to Mark Baum, chief collaboration officer at Arlington, Va.-based FMI.

After his retirement in 1986, NAWGA established a fellowship in his name at the Academy of Food Marketing at St. Joseph’s University (SJU) in Philadelphia to support teaching and research in food wholesale management. The fellowship has since evolved into a series of three-year appointments of SJU food marketing professors to contribute to the understanding of distribution as it relates to food retailing and foodservice. FMI’s work on digital apps with Prof. Nancy Childs was made possible by the Peck Fellowship.

Predeceased by his wife of more than 60 years, Anne Griffin Peck, who died in 2012, Peck is survived by his son, Andrew, and his daughter, Sarah (“Sally”).

A funeral mass will be held: Saturday, April 8 at 11 a.m. at St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church in Martinsburg, W.V., to be followed by a reception at his daughter’s home to celebrate Peck’s life.