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reputation as a premier fresh foods aficionado and merchandiser, with the produce depar t- ment a cornerstone, so any sustainability measures – from flooring to lighting systems to refrigerant management -- can only proceed with that in mind. Wegmans teams tech- nology experts with retail floor executives to strategize compatible solutions.
“It was a big changeover going to green floor care,” says Guido. “During the summer months, we use ionized water and basically that’s all we use to clean the floor. When you’re
done with the chemical, you’re leaving a residue, so we’ve found things stay cleaner longer.” It’s electronically charged water, which duplicates the chemistr y of chemical cleaners, where the chemical puts a positive and negative charge on the water to attract the dirt, Wadsworth explains.
“We thought we had a perfect solution, 100 percent chemical-free, but in the winter with snow, you use a lot of salt if you’re in the north- east -- it’s back to neutral cleaners to help break that salt down. Even so, we still reduce
our chemical usage by half, “ says Guido. “While in the new stores, floors are concrete, but some stores, where we have tile, present challenging floor situations. We are looking for long-term floor care products and try different things,” says Guido, quick to point out, “but our very first order of business is to make sure it’s going to do that primary function.”
A sweeping chainwide lighting retrofit and newly designed lighting systems for stores have dramatically slashed energy usage, while cleverly enhancing produce displays to better highlight products and the overall shopping atmosphere, according to Carol Duquette, vice president development group, design services and maintenance. “The payback on retrofitting LED spotlights in all our existing stores, with LED lasting seven to eight years, amounts to a 70 percent reduction in energy,” she says.
“On new stores, we did two things: reduced the amount of light fixtures in stores roughly in half from six years ago to now so that in itself is a savings, and I believe all the lighting in stores is now considered to be high efficiency,” she says, adding, “we’ve also gotten rid of halogens.”
At Wegmans, where proper lighting plays an integral role in merchandising and the customer shopping experience, messing around with the lighting fixtures can create quite a stir with produce managers and merchandisers, according to Frank Auria, project manager, who describes his role as more of a “grassroots, boots-on-the-ground approach to energy,” where Carol Duquette’s group focuses on the design side and larger scale picture.
“Tackling sales floor lighting was the most difficult piece,” says Auria. “When you’re on a sales floor in a retail store, the look and feel is the most important thing. Obviously, there are going to be a lot of passionate people as far as changing lighting systems.”
Lighting alternatives that maximize effi- ciencies can be counterproductive to showing off fresh fruits and vegetables in their most appealing ways. To get a clearer under- standing from a produce depar tment perspective, “We basically set up a program where we looked at each store; the guidelines on number of lights per foot, where and how people were directing spotlights and the ef fects they were hoping to achieve,” according to Wadsworth.
“Part of the issue we found with merchan- dising was that people were moving the displays around but were not readjusting the spotlights. In turn, people were putting up
48 PRODUCE BUSINESS • MAY 2013


































































































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