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can make informed sustainability choices. “Mary Ellen Burris blogs every week, and we also have a lot of other people throughout the company who we ask to blog about their area of expertise, so you often find talk about new products or other sustainability initiatives,” adds Colleluori.
“If we find something sustainable that is either cost-neutral or even if it’s marginally a little bit higher, but we still need to do the right thing, we’ll try to bring that in,” says Bill
supplies. On the packaging side, we tr y to find things either upstream or downstream that can be recycled or contain less plastic. For example, our food containers now have 40 percent less plastic going into them. We switched from polystyrene containers, which were not sustainable at all, and also a little more costly.”
In this case, customers instigated the change, according to Wadswor th, who notes that Wegmans fields up to 1,400 consumer communications a week. “What customers say
Guido, categor y
merchant
packaging
and
42 PRODUCE BUSINESS • MAY 2013
Bill Guido, category merchant packaging and supplies, discusses Wegmans’ decision to change food containers based on customer input.
within the sustainability area is fragmented, but we listen very closely. In fact, the move to get rid of Styrofoam came because our customers said, ’We don’t want Styrofoam’.”
Yet, customers don’t always know the whole story. Styrofoam gets maligned, but it is not necessarily bad; it’s just not recyclable, explains Wadsworth. “So our mission is to get more recyclable containers so the customers can do the right thing with them.”
ROCK, PAPER, SCISSORS AND OTHER QUANDRIES
Similarly, the merits of using paper bags, plastic bags, or reusable bags depend on a variety of factors, and the choice is not so obvious. “A lot of customers don’t like plastic bags and would prefer paper as they feel paper is more sustainable,” says Guido. “We now have a plastic bag that is 40 percent recycled content, but it took us a while to get there because we wanted the bag to be strong. It’s pretty important that customers’ groceries are intact. If you decrease strength or weight of a package so much that the bag fails, you’ve increased customer frustration, whether it’s in our parking lot or home on their garage floor, and product is ruined, food is wasted, so you’ve just gone backwards.”
As Colleluori puts it: “Obviously, we are a retailer and we’re in business to sell product, so that’s the focus of the rest of the company. Now with that said, we go into select products with that mentality. We work with the best suppliers to make improvements.”
These more sustainable plastic bags are part of Wegmans’ closed loop, bag-to-bag program now, where Wegmans collects plastic bags at the store level from customers, and the