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In a recent meeting at the PRODUCE BUSINESS headquarters in Boca Raton, FL, Publix’s Maria Brous, director of media and community relations, and Michael Hewitt, manager of environmental services,
sat down with publisher Ken Whitacre and special projects editor Mira Slott.
Mira Slott: Congratulations on a well- deserved award. I also understand you recently reached a major milestone and now have more than 1,000 stores, so we’re excited to hear how you’re enveloping sustainability measures into this growing portfolio.
Publix has been on top of sustainability and corporate social responsibility for many years, long before it became a fashionable trend. Could you share with us how this mantra came about and how you translate this philosophy from corporate throughout the company?
Maria Brous: You must have heard Dave Duncan, our vice president for facilities, talk before because he says that we were green before it was cool to be green.
We started our recycling efforts in the early 1970s, long before other retailers had really taken interest. That began with our recycling that you see in front of our stores where our customers can return their plastic or paper bags back to our facilities. And that’s kind of symbolic for the Publix locations.
Back in the 70s, there weren’t too many companies that were thinking about long- term impacts of sustainability, but that’s where it really began for us.
We thought long and hard about it. We wanted to be a retailer of choice for cus- tomers, to provide conveniences and service. And that’s our mantra no matter what topic we’re talking about: pleasing our customers, making that shopping experience more enjoy- able and understanding what’s important to customers. So, that began our commitment to serving our communities, and that’s grown through the years.
When you look at us today, fast-forwarding to 2009, we are employee-owned and operat- ed — that’s the first part that sets us apart from competition — and really is about how we execute. We have skin in the game. This is a personal investment and commitment that we make to our customers and to our associates, and you’ll hear that throughout our company. That’s what I hope you will note — that we relate to ourselves as associates, because that’s what we are.
We all have a part to play, and when it comes specifically to sustainability, Michael is a part of that team. I’m part of that team, but it began with our CEO Ed Crenshaw, who had a commitment to looking at sustainability long-term. It’s not only about our profit, but it’s about people on our planet and we can combine the three. When you try to sell sus- tainability to some companies, some will do it for the profit and that’s it in the end. But real- ly, what we are about is showing that sustain- ability is kind of a triangle. It comes back full circle, and we truly do it because it’s the right thing to do.
We all have a seat at the table. In every department, we have a cross-functional sus- tainability team at Publix where every major business unit is represented. We look at issues from the bottom up, as opposed from the top down. We really study the different depart- ments. We study the issues. We study the impact on our customers and our associates. We study the long-term affects of different choices and then each person has an opportu- nity to represent their point of view.
So while Michael may be the subject-mat-
ter expert for the environmental component, we have to look at how that transcends and translates into the real world. What do the stores face? How do we help them? There has to be buy-in from every level with your associ- ates. You can’t dictate sustainability from the top down. You have to really understand the process and relate it to people.
Mira Slott: Could you provide some specific examples? Do you have any vignettes that could give a flavor for how the process works, maybe in your own experience?
Maria Brous: Michael will probably defer a lot over this way, but we’ll talk about the areas in which we feel comfortable.
The “Green Routine” is probably the most grassroots effort. It may have seemed like it started on a small scale, but has unequivocally been one of the greatest success stories that we have at Publix, and that truly is how to reduce the amount of electricity and energy that we’re using at our store locations. And today, at 1,002 stores, that becomes even more impor- tant than when we started this in the early 2000s when our store count was not signifi- cantly less, but considerably less.
It really became about looking at our foot- print, and how we can start to reduce the ener- gy consumption at stores. It started with the simple idea of turning off computers, turning off lights, closing freezers and refrigerator doors, making sure that we’re constantly being energy-efficient, and just reminding our asso- ciates to do the small things, not only at the store, but they could also use those simple measures at home — to turn off the lights
26 PRODUCE BUSINESS • MAY 2009