Was the champion Iowa grocery bagger in 2023

**Harrison Dahm starts a practice run to bag groceries as quickly and as efficiently has he can, in preparation for a national bagging contest next week in Las Vegas, Nevada.** Submitted Photo

After winning the Best Bagger contest at the Iowa State Fair in August, Harrison Dahm, of Denison, will be off to Las Vegas next week for the National Grocers Association (NGA) Best Bagger Championship.

Harrison competed in the state contest for three consecutive years. He placed fourth in 2021, third in 2022 and first last year.

Harrison, who is in his second year at Iowa State University and is majoring in industrial engineering, has been bagging groceries since May of 2018 at the Denison Fareway where his father, Mike, is the grocery manager.

His father, incidentally, was the champion bagger in Iowa in 1994 and 1995, and then became the national champion in 1996.

The NGA’s Best Bagger Championship is a yearlong contest in which grocery baggers from around the nation compete for the national prize.

The first National Best Bagger Championship contest took place in 1987 in Dallas. This year’s contest will be at Ceaser Forum Convention Center in Las Vegas. That’s where the NGA’s annual convention will take place.

One objective of the contest is to teach and develop the knowledge and skills of successful bagging and customer service.

Harrison will fly to Las Vegas on March 10, compete on March 11 and have a day to roam around the city on March 12 before returning home on the 13th.

He said the biggest difference between the state and the national contest is that the national contest has big sponsors, like PepsiCo and Campbells, so he figures the national contest will feature products from those companies.

“Products like Quaker oatmeal boxes, possibly a full two-liter bottle of pop, a bunch of Campbells cans, a bottle of Gatorade and maybe a single-serve glass bottle of Starbucks macchiato,” Harrison guessed. “The products may differ, but the system of bagging is the same.”

The bagger contest is run in heats, with the championship qualifiers facing off head-to-head.

This year 18 contestants will be in the national contest. This year’s qualifiers are from Alabama, California, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin.

Harrison is acquainted with and has been receiving tips from the qualifier from Nebraska, Nolan McGregor. McGregor was the Iowa champion bagger in 2022 and competed in the national contest in 2023. Since that time he was transferred by Fareway to a store in Nebraska, which did the best bagger contest for the first time in 2023. McGregor won that contest and will be returning to the national contest. In Iowa, once a person wins the state championship, they cannot compete again.

Harrison has also been turning to YouTube videos to hone his technique.

He said the videos give him visual insight.

“That definitely helps with selecting what items I should be bagging,” he said. “That’s where I got the idea of the two-liter bottle of pop, the single-serve bottle of Gatorade and Quaker oatmeal.

“The videos give good insight and also help me with the structure of what’s going on,” Harrison continued. “I want to know where I’m going to go and how much time I will have to look at the table of items before the heat begins.”

Watching videos and getting tips from others is fine, but there is no substitute for hands-on practice.

“For the past month or so I’ve been periodically coming home on Saturdays and Sundays. I wait until my dad comes home and he sets up a table with a random set of groceries,” Harrison said. “We’ll practice for a couple hours and take some breaks, and Sunday morning I try to get a little bit in before I have to go back to college.”

Two hours of practice can be pretty intense.

“It gets very repetitive,” Harrison said. “If you get tired of it or lose your focus, it can really set off your times. There’s a bunch of variations in times once you get tired, and variations in the weights of the bags.”

Time and weight distribution are two areas where a bagger can score points. There’s also bag-building technique, style, attitude and appearance.

Ten points are awarded for times of up to 53 seconds, nine points for 53:01 to 57 seconds and on down to one point for 85:01 or more seconds.

Up to 10 points can be awarded for proper bag-building technique and up to five points can be awarded for the distribution of weight among bags. This is calculated by weighing each bag and subtracting the weight of the lightest bag from the heaviest bag, then subtracting the difference in weights from the total possible points (5).

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**After filling one bag with groceries, Harrison Dahm works on a second and then a third bag. He lifts his arms to signal that he is done.**

Style, attitude and appearance can earn a bagger up to five points.

“I think for as many times as I’ve bagged groceries, I could walk up to a table without practicing for a week and just crush the times and the weights,” Harrison said. “It’s gotten to where I can walk up to a table with anything you throw at me, 30 items or 50 items, I’m almost certain I can get it done in under a minute.”

Still, Harrison is not taking any chances. He talked about taking groceries back to Iowa State this week just to practice some more.

Besides bagging and bragging rights, cash prizes are on the line at the national contest - $10,000 for the national champion, $5,000 for first runner up, $1,000 for second and third runners up and $500 for fourth runner up.

Harrison will have a lot of support at the national contest. His mother and father and his sister will be going along. His brother might be going. In addition, an uncle will make the trip and possibly another uncle and his wife.

And two customers will be going.

“A wife and a husband who I met over the summer,” Harrison said. “I did some work for them and talked to them about the Iowa contest. They came and watched me at the state fair and said they wanted to watch me in Vegas.”

People can watch Harrison and the other baggers compete for the national championship via a live stream on the National Grocers Association Facebook page. The link is https://www.facebook.com/NationalGrocersAssn/.

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