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pant. The FRC consists of organizations that pledge to improve sustainable food management practices and report results. The FRC is part of EPA’s Sustainable Mate- rials Management Program (SMM), which seeks to reduce the environmental impact of materials through their entire life cycle.
“We formally adopted the EPA’s food waste reduction hierarchy as the core of our program,” says Berman. “The rst thing we are working to do is reduce our shrink and our overproduction of product. The second thing is we are far more aggressively donating unsalable, but still edible, food by salvaging whole-food products with produce items increasingly viable to that undertaking.”
“The legislative paradigms that allow
for organizations like ours to participate in food donations changed a lot over the past ve to 10 years, with modi cations to Good Samaritan laws. Thirty years ago, we started off donating food to pig farmers because that was what was allowable, now we’re dancing through very sophisticated legislative frameworks to provide food where it is most impactful and in a much more conscientious, structured way,” says Berman.
MANAGING SHRINK
In that food waste reduction hierarchy, “whatever we have to decide, whether it is to donate, to repurpose, to compost, or to send product to the dump, my rst job is ensuring that main number keeps
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SYSTEMATIC EDUCATION
Ellie Wilson, senior nutritionist, plays a key role in conveying the importance of health components to consumers. She is also an important liaison with all the stakeholders, staying deeply connected to the grower community, government and private health organizations to translate legally allowable claims and cutting-edge health and wellness developments.
To further guide consumers toward smart eating choices, the chain incorpo- rates the NuVal Nutritional Scoring System, which utilizes an algorithm to assign foods a score from 1 to 100 based on its content of more than 30 nutrients. The criteria integrate data from a range of sources including The Institute of Medicine, the FDA, USDA National Nutrient Database, and World Health Organization. Vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, ber and other food components associated with health add points to the score, while “negative” nutrients, such as sugar, sodium, trans fat, and cholesterol bring down the total.
“Produce is our framer for the NuVal system. We can really enforce with those scores that the produce department is the best place to be when it comes to nutrition in the store,” says Wilson.
“I think it’s very much a selling point,” contends Joe Berman, manager of corpo- rate social responsibility. “It’s the only sort of inclusive nutritional metric I have seen that really facilitates purchasing decisions. It de nitely gives a lot of attention to the produce department — one of our primary value propositions that we’re best in fresh — and generates consumer con dence in what they are buying,” he says. pb
“Produce is our framer for the NuVal system,” says Ellie Wilson.
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