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PB: Did that also involve you merging your legal background with sustainability initiatives?
Carlos: I’m a corporate attorney, and have practiced law my entire career. Before Sprouts, I was in big private law rms, but sustainability was always a passion of mine, and to live sustainably to the best of my ability with the knowledge I had at the time. I had the incredible luck of having parents also passionate about sustainability, and not just the environmental side but also the social governance side.
So, when I joined Sprouts as corpo- rate council, I started having conversations with senior of cers here at the company, including our current president and chief operating of cer Jim Nielsen, and we started talking about how we would build the brand and further develop the Sprouts identity.
One thing that popped in our heads... what do we do with all this food once it’s no longer in saleable retail condition? We throw it in the trash for the most part. Some stores have ad hoc programs here and there where they donate to local food banks but it’s not organized, it’s not structured. So, Jim, Brandon Lombardi, our chief legal of cer and chief human resources of cer (who’s also very passionate about sustainability) and I put our minds together and started devel- oping a program to donate food. In 2013, less than a year from when I joined Sprouts in October 2012, we started the Sprouts Food Rescue Program.
PB: What challenges did you face?
Carlos: It was an incredible effort because it required legal analysis to get the company comfortable with donating food without having a high risk of liability because, of course, it was a question in some of our senior of cers’ minds, what if we donate food and get somebody sick. That’s a great point, so we did some legal analysis. You’re probably familiar with the Good Samaritan Act, signed into law during Bill Clinton’s presidency.
This law protects retailers and food estab- lishments from donations that may cause some type of injury, as long as those food establishments are taking precautions to make sure they are not knowingly putting out food that could make people sick. So of course, that was never going to be the case. How do we get everybody comfortable, especially people who have never undergone a program like this at the executive level?
We looked into this and developed guide-
lines throughout the process from collec- tion at the store level when the food was no longer at retail condition but still perfectly edible, to storage depending on the category of the product, into coolers, or boxes, for instance, taking into account our small foot- print. And then we need to be coordinating with the foodbanks to assure they are picking up the products before they spoil.
So we developed a network of foodbanks. At the time it was just a pilot in Arizona with three food banks, mainly one, St. Mary’s Food Bank Alliance. We established guide- lines and standard operating procedures for the stores to follow and established an entire structure around that.
PB: Did everything go as planned?
Carlos: We developed the Food Rescue Program in 2013 and the response was over- whelming, and by that I mean the response of our team members; they were hungry for this; they welcomed the idea that they no longer had to deal with these one-off programs.
It was like a light switch went off in our stores. Our store managers, regional direc- tors, vice presidents, our executive team, everyone from top down saw it and we said OK full steam ahead.
PB: Can you point to the program’s effectiveness?
Carlos: Fast forward to 2017... last year we donated 23 million pounds of food, an equivalent of 19 million meals to our communities, directly in the local communi- ties where we operate. We work with more than 350 hunger relief agencies, more than 80 percent of those af liated to Feeding America, so we have a very strong relation- ship and partnership with Feeding America.
PB: What other steps do you take to divert food waste?
Carlos: As we developed this Food Rescue Program, we asked, what do we do
now with the food we collect that is not edible or safe for human consumption? We started working with the EPA at that point, following the EPA’s food recovery hierarchy. What other outlet can we divert this food to that would also contribute to reducing food waste?
Diverting food waste to animal feed programs was the next obvious choice. We started to establish networks with different cattle ranches in areas where we operated, providing food not t for human consump- tion to animal feed programs.
Last year, we donated 25 million pounds of food to animal feed. This is helpful as well because it reduces the amount of new crops needed for this feed. We work with more than 36 farms in the United States, in some cases feed going to cattle ranches or dairy farms that produce milk, make it into our stores for us to sell, so we are closing the loop, completely going full circle.
After that, there are certain areas where there may not be any farms around, so the next level in the food recovery pyramid is compost. We started working with compost facilities, and last year we donated ve million pounds of food for compost, which would be enough rich compost for covering 100 acres of cropland, or the equivalent of seven football elds.
PB: Could you elaborate on how these sustainability measures are integrated throughout the different stores?
Carlos: Let me explain how it works. A few years ago, we went down the path of how do we make sure these sustainability measures we’re pushing out to the stores are being carried out in the stores? We can designate a person to be a champion of these ideas, to be the green leader, and who should this person be. It could be a courtesy clerk or a department manager.
So, we have our assistant store manager designated as the green leader. We actually embedded this in their job description, so when they’re hired, there are functions and duties they must carry out, and they need to support and advance the sustainability initia- tives of each store. So, they’re responsible for tracking these initiatives and reporting on these initiatives here at headquarters. They are responsible for disseminating any new procedures or processes to their teams at the store level.
Rather than a couple stores doing it as a hobby or there’s a few people passionate about it, this is a way to benchmark coast to coast, you can see top performers, and
PRODUCE BUSINESS / MAY 2018 / SPROUTS-13