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individual efforts and brought everybody to one table.
Michael Hewitt: We brought a focus to all these great things that Publix had been doing for decades and we started to pull all of that under the umbrella of sustainability. Ever since, it’s been going 100 miles-per-hour.
Ken Whitacre: Maria, how do you fit into the whole sustainability picture as the commu- nications director?
Maria Brous: I’m a Publix lifer. It’s my 19th year with Publix, so I bring a different perspective to the company. I’ve been very privileged to be able to work with most areas of our business, and that’s how I became the mouth and the face of the company. Being privately owned and operated, we typically speak under one voice, so that is my official capacity, along with community involve- ments. I take care of media relations and community relations.
My part in the sustainability effort is to look at the steps that we’re taking as a compa- ny, how that affects our customers and associ- ates, how we get the message out and how we really balance what we’re doing.
Because we’re in the forefront of sustain- ability, and innovators in this area, we must determine how much is too much to put out there, and when is the right time. There are many companies doing great things, but we’ve always been very conservative.
Our customer base challenges us now. Many are choosing where to shop based on what companies do for the greater good. So as a company that was always very conservative and private about what we’ve done, we’ve had to take an introspective look and really put it out there. Because we always want it to be right the first time we do it, we’re going to enter a lot of pilots. We’re going to study, study and study again before we make a com- mitment. This represents who we are. Our commitment is long-term. We’re not fly-by- night, so sometimes the rollout is not as fast as some would like it to be and sometimes, it’s not as slow as others, but finding that bal- ance is my expertise.
I play Devil’s advocate. When we have all these great things, my job is to look at it from opposing points of view and examine where that leaves us at the end of the day. I ask the hard questions, leave no stone unturned, and then my job is to go out there and market what we do so that there’s an awareness.
Ken Whitacre: Was there any specific area of the sustainability efforts that you had a hard time convincing upper management, “We really need to do this?”
Maria Brous: That’s an interesting ques- tion, but the most simplistic and honest
Solar power is an ongoing priority for Publix. The company currently has four different locations that benefit from solar energy.
answer is no, because it started from the top, with the buy-in from our CEO. Ed Crenshaw was very adamant and committed to the things that we had done as a company. That doesn’t mean that everybody agrees on all the small projects all of the time.
We spend a lot of time discussing the issues. Whether it’s organic recovery, getting into the “Green Routine,” looking at suppliers and the wax alternatives, or our bailing sys- tem. We will not always agree on everything we do. The table is big and we each have a dif- ferent piece of the pie that we look at.
What we always put at the forefront is whether or not it’s right for our customer, our associates, the environment, and what the long-term will be.
Mira Slott: How do you prioritize what you’re going to emphasize? As you so aptly pointed out, sustainability is broad in scope. It has these different silos; there’s the environ- ment, there’s the social aspect with people and there’s also the business aspect.
Michael Hewitt: It is very challenging. If we had unlimited resources, you might be amazed at all the things that we’d like to do. But because we have certain constraints we have to deal with, that everyone has to deal with, we try to prioritize what initiatives get worked on and which ones have to wait. It’s unfortunate that we can’t do everything we’d like to do, but it’s a reality.
We have to approach our sustainability efforts in a fiscally responsible manner, as well. If it costs too much money to do, it’s not sustainable. We have to maintain the business
while we’re working on our sustainability efforts, so we spend a lot of time looking at financially viable opportunities.
We have a team that meets every month to do just that, to look at all of the opportunities that come from individual associates and through other various avenues that must get evaluated. Those that we have the resources to pursue the project and those that have merit get elevated to project status. Then we assign people to work on those projects and we track progress so that if it works, we can implement it across the entire company.
THE GREENWISE LAB
Mira Slott: Tell us more about how you see GreenWise as an experimental lab.
Michael Hewitt: A Publix supermarket we build today is much more efficient than one we built just five or six years ago — more energy and water efficient. We build those effi- ciencies into every new store that we construct and we’re constantly looking to do better.
Our GreenWise Markets are an opportuni- ty for us to try out some things that we might not have otherwise had the opportunity to do. Our vice president of facilities who’s responsi- ble for all of the design and construction work that goes into building a new Publix likes to call the GreenWise Markets a lab, a working lab, because it provides us the opportunity to try out new ideas and if those ideas work at a Publix GreenWise, you’ll most likely see them implemented across the entire company.
Maria Brous: Lab is a good word for our GreenWise Markets because they are the minority of our business. We have 999 other
36 PRODUCE BUSINESS • MAY 2009