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locally. It’s advantageous for us as a retailer as well. We can bring the freshest product, and there’s a lot of citrus and different products that grow locally that we can bring to cus- tomers. Plant City strawberries are the best example that I have. It’s the closest to home to us being in Lakeland.
But, we have started a campaign for our customers called, “At Season’s Peak.” Cus- tomers would ideally know what is the grow- ing season for that particular item and that would be at the sweetest part, but also, that their chances of being more local to them would resonate.
This is the third year that we’ve worked on At Seasons Peak. It’s the first year that we’ve put much more media value and we’ve actual- ly done spots that customers will see on TV. The first one that we did this year was for the strawberries. The next go-around, I believe in June, we’re going to be doing the berries that are all in season, the raspberries, blackberries, blueberries-type deal.
We worked on that really hard so that we can tell customers, “You’ve asked, we’ve heard. Here At Season’s Peak.” It doesn’t mean that everything is going to be defined as local to all customers — for some customers that are holistic and live the lifestyle, it may be a 20- mile or 30-mile radius that they’ll consider local. However, depending on where you live,
that may not be a realistic kind of expectation. You know, at times Miami is not going to be able to give you that locally grown pro- duce. But, you look at it and customers have that freedom of choice. And we work hard. I mean, whenever possible, we do look local to
our growers and develop those relationships.
Mira Slott: Do you put more emphasis on local versus organic? Do you view organic as more sustainable as a product than local, con- ventional or other choices?
Michael Hewitt: Maria gave a couple of great examples about the information we put in front of customers to try to help them make the best decision that they can, the deci- sion that is best for them. We’re listening to our customers. We’re providing them with the information that’s available. We also want to be careful not to confuse the customer by pro- viding them with information that might be hard to understand or contradictory.
Mira Slott: You’re right. It can be complex.
Michael Hewitt: It can be very complex. It can be so complex that if you look at the car- bon footprint of a product, one product that might be considered a healthy choice might have a larger carbon footprint than another one that a customer might consider to be not as desirable an option for their child. A bottle
of soda might have a smaller carbon footprint than a gallon of milk, and we don’t want to try to put a message in front of the customer that might say one is better than the other. We just want to be able to provide customers with useful information they can use to make their own buying decisions.
Maria Brous: Right, and organic is more of a lifestyle choice for some customers. It does not necessarily point to sustainable. They may be looking for perceived health benefits, and we’re not there to make those claims of whether there is or isn’t a health benefit to eat- ing organic over conventional, but, it is being said. When we look at traditional Publix stores, we have GreenWise product available. GreenWise symbolizes a couple of different things to us: Publix GreenWise products are our private label of health, natural and organ- ic products.
GreenWise is also the section of health, natural and organic products; so not just our private label, but just the category itself. The stores are laid out a couple of different ways. In some stores, the product is integrated throughout. When you travel up and down the aisles, usually it will be in GreenWise sec- tions. Actually, organic product will stick out so that it is easy to identify, so customers who are looking to make that organic purchase can see it easily. In other stores that may not have
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