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lot of people wonder how leadership and sus- tainability fit together,” Consler says.
The integrated policy hit a transformational turning point when the progressive leadership resolved to put more focus on CSR and knit together all the different, multi-faceted sustain- ability initiatives scattered piecemeal across the company. “We decided as a company that we wanted to make sustainability a part of how every leader operated, and we wanted everybody to operate with that mindset. One of our senior executives, Larree Renda, execu- tive vice president, chief strategist and admin- istrative officer, said, ‘Hey, as we’re putting together a more formal coordinated strategy in educating the leaders across the company on this, I want to make sure that we bake this right in to our leadership development plan.’”
Consler helps manage and coordinate the efforts of the broad CSR task force, involving senior leaders from across all functions and departments, who work together to develop overall strategy and then specific measurable goals around four strategy platforms: Commu- nity, People, Planet and Products.
The vast scope of these varied platforms could be difficult to get one’s hands around. Companies pursuing sustainability objectives often isolate these into silos, and target one at the expense of another, yet fail to grasp the
consequences of doing so. Safeway, however, seems to have intermeshed these four plat- forms into each department’s overall strategies, often pulling strengths from one department into the other to provide synergies that couldn’t be attained alone. When looking at Safeway’s entire sustainability program and the interrela- tionships connecting the people involved, one might visualize a circle of leaders all relying upon each other to make the sustainability “wheel” move forward.
Group Decisions
It is easy to agree on saving energy and avoiding waste. Yet choosing to buy locally in an effort to reduce food miles and carbon foot- prints may not necessarily be more environ- mentally friendly, based on alternative produc- tion methods, supply chain efficiencies and numerous other factors. The choice to buy locally presents social issues. For example, eliminating an import program in favor of locally grown could lead to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of struggling farm workers in a third-world country.
The produce team is fully aware of the complexities. “I’ll tell you that the decision doesn’t rely on anyone’s sole shoulders,” says Steve Burnham, vice president of produce. “As an organization, we have an entire task force
devoted to bringing together all of the compo- nents the company works on relative to sus- tainability, because there are so many compo- nents. We have identified hundreds of initia- tives within this organization... from perish- ables, from produce, from supply, from retail. So we are cautious to commit to any one thing without it filtering up and discussing it as a team and as a group so that we’re consistent,” says Burnham. “What we don’t want is for produce to take one avenue while non-perish- ables takes another avenue. We’re committed to getting all the facts and doing the appropri- ate due diligence of studying all the potential outcomes,” he adds.
Geoff White, group vice president for pro- duce and floral, is quick to acknowledge, “We don’t have all the answers yet, but there are some initiatives we’ve built baselines around, and programs like packaging that are relatively easy to figure out, or at least it’s easy to base- line yourself and show what kind of improve- ment you can have from there,” he says. Regardless of the challenges, he continues, “We’ve made a significant commitment as an organization in manpower and funding to do the right thing.”
Doing the right thing, however, is often open for interpretation. Safeway’s premise is that these policies often overlap, interconnect
20 PRODUCE BUSINESS • MAY 2010
SAFEWAY’S GREEN LEADERS
Accepting the 2010 Retail Sustainability Award — flanking PRODUCE BUSINESS Editor-in-Chief Jim Prevor — are (left to right): Joe Pettus, senior vice president, fuel & energy, Christy Consler, vice president of leadership, development and sustainability, and Geoff White, group vice president for produce and floral.