Staying True to Form

It never fails: Every time Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market opens a new location, the media takes note of the free parking for hybrid automobiles.

It doesn’t hurt that the spaces are front and center. But the El Segundo, Calif.-based grocer, a subsidiary of British retailer Tesco PLC with more than 150 stores in California, Arizona and Nevada, does a lot more to encourage environmental responsibility — and not all of it is marked with a sign.

Sustainability efforts are deeply ingrained in the company culture. On a basic level, says the company’s director of communications, Brendan Wonnacott, “We try to be a good neighbor. And a big part of that is being responsible with the environment.”

Parent company Tesco, one of the world’s largest retailers, has set a high bar in terms of sustainability. Those efforts range from labeling products to show the amount of carbon released in their production, transportation and consumption to offering customers green “Clubcard” points for things like choosing bagless deliveries. Wonnacott is quick to say that Fresh & Easy is “an American business, designed from scratch with the American consumer in mind,” but the fact that its stores were recently rated 30 percent more energy efficient than other grocers fits in with the larger Tesco philosophy.

“We’ve brought ideas over from our other businesses throughout the world,” Wonnacott says. “And we’re still a very young and growing company. We’re always looking for new ideas and innovations.”

A different feel
A “green building” link on the Fresh & Easy website connects to a live solar panel feed on the company’s Riverside, Calif., distribution center. The center’s 500,000 sq. ft. of solar panels — considered one of the largest roof-mounted solar installations in North America — provide nearly one-third of the property’s energy. Not only does the live feed offer daily and monthly metrics, it also provides a tally of the total solar energy generated and how that translates to the equivalent number of cars taken off the road, acres of trees planted and tons of emissions removed from the air.

“It’s quite neat,” Wonnacott says. “Our commitment is not just about reducing our carbon footprint. In the end, it’s also about saving money, and being able to pass those savings on to our customers.”

As for the individual stores (being added at a rate of roughly one per week for the next year), features like concrete flooring offer less expensive installation, maintenance and repair, and skylights and large windows reduce lighting costs as well as “give the stores a different feel,” Wonnacott says. “We also use LED lighting, and that’s something customers are very aware of. It’s brighter, it looks better. We hear back a lot about the lighting in our stores — people are very happy.”

There is, however, a balance; too much natural light, without the proper windows, could bring in too much heat. The company’s first LEED Gold Certified store, which opened in September in Cathedral City, Calif., includes prismatic insulated skylights to reduce the impact on temperature. The rest of the lights in the store automatically dim in response to sunshine.

The effort is conveyed to customers through signs beneath the skylights that say, “Look up.” Night shades on refrigeration cases ensure the cool air won’t escape and can be reused by the secondary-loop systems. There’s also increased insulation overall to reduce the amount of needed heating and air conditioning; the use of only eco-friendly cleaning products; and the employment of farm-to-shelf crates to reduce shipping materials.

Tracking sustainability
Further in the background is the way Fresh & Easy deals with maintenance, utility bills and the monitoring of various sustainability efforts. Even before the first store opened in late 2007, Fresh & Easy partnered with Verisae, provider of the Sustainability Resource Planning (SRP) enterprise solution. SRP allows companies to measure, manage and monetize energy costs and carbon emissions. Verisae already had a longstanding relationship with Tesco, but in many of the locations Tesco serves, sustainability efforts are legislated. That’s not the case in the United States, so Verisae was excited by the opportunity to work with a proverbial “clean slate.”

“For a good percentage of time, people didn’t necessarily look at sustainability as a cost savings or business strategy,” says Art Quinn, Verisae’s director of U.S. professional services. It’s only recently, he says, that stateside businesses have begun to ask, “OK, operationally we’re doing pretty well. What is the next piece we can do?”

Verisae performs pre- and post-examinations of various sites, looking for energy saving opportunities and methodologies, “and then offers software to come in and track it all, so [retailers] can capture and understand the changes that are making an impact on their operations,” Quinn says. With Fresh & Easy, great strides have been made in maintenance timeframes, and having repair vendors clock actual labor hours rather than rounding up charges has offered another “really large win.” There are other little changes tracked by Verisae’s software modules, including night light usage in open refrigeration cases.

“They’ve really taken a great approach to energy efficiency,” Quinn says. “While they try to make things repeatable from a business practicality respect, they’re also trying to improve that model each and every time so that not only are they able to do it better and faster, but also more economically sound and sustainable.”

Wonnacott says he’s been consistently surprised with the reception the eco-friendly stores have received from local officials, environmental groups, curious competitors and the public at large. Even the response to Fresh & Easy’s 99-cent unbleached cotton shopping bags has been “unbelievable.

“It’s great to see such an effort that’s really built into every part of the business,” he says. “And it goes all the way through the stores to our home office and our distribution center…. It’s automatic. It’s built into our DNA.”