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RETAIL SUSTAINABILITY AWARD - PRICE CHOPPER’S MARKET 32
FOLLOWING THE FOOD
Price Chopper’s partnership with Feeding America is exempli ed in several pickups throughout the week at the back end of each store, where Darren Dyer (pictured above), who is one of the drivers from the local food bank af liated with Feeding America, receives unsaleable produce and other perishable foods collected in banana boxes in store.
After they make their rounds to several stores, drivers take truckloads of food to the Regional Food Bank of Northeastern New York in Latham, where the food is repacked within the food bank’s modern refrigerated warehouse. Joanne Dwyer, director of food industry relations and Kathleen Samaniuk-Hayes, administrative assistant (above right photo), are part of the team that coordinates the delivery to the food bank as well as redistribution of food to various groups in need.
able; it is just a mentality ... we can still do something with this food and feed and nourish people with it.”
In a broader sense, the industry still grapples with a lack of standardization in how something is selected at the store level to go into the Feeding America system.
“It is dif cult in the absence of a normalized set of quality criteria — not just for us, but for any retailer trying to make the same kinds of subjective value judg- ments,” says Cerrone. “Feeding America is in the process of putting together indus- try-level guidance on what those deci- sion-making criteria should look like.”
At the same time, Reed points to the strong mechanisms in place at the company by which decisions are made around food resource recovery and diver- sion to food banks due to its standardized quality control infrastructure.
“One of the things I think is really important to emphasize around our local sourcing hub system is you are not going to get the idiosyncrasies of subjective
44 / MAY 2016 / PRODUCE BUSINESS
value judgements, where each individual store is making those decisions. There’s consistency in the quality assurance and a core competency that normalizes the process.”
EXTENDING COMMUNITY
The chain relishes its determinative role in the retail sustainability community,
where business competitors join forces to advocate mutually bene cial sustain- ability solutions. Price Chopper is the longest standing founding member of the Arlington, VA-based Food Marketing Institute (FMI), serving on sustainability and energy executive committees since its inception.
“The challenges that 2,000-store retailers have, and the challenges that 137-store retailers have, are not radically dissimilar,” says Berman, “although, they may scale differently, and the solu- tions at scale may mechanically manifest differently. What we end up seeing at a national level is a really extraordinary infor- mation-sharing and best-practice effort between the sustainability practitioners operating across the industry. It helped to drive sustainability through the super- market industry,” he says.
A salient part is also trading informa- tion on what didn’t work so others can circumvent those pitfalls. “This is a close- knit community with some of the best folks I ever met. We work and play really well
“A main obstacle was confronting perceived dif culties and fears people had about what could potentially
be a problem when donating food we’re saying is not
saleable. ...”
— Pam Cerrone, manager of Community relations


































































































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