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WAKEFERN/SHOPRITE RETAIL SUSTAINABILITY AWARD
WAKEFERN/SHOPRITE Supermarkets:
Co-opting GREEN the RITE Way
Armed with Wakefern’s innovative sustain- ability platform, ShopRite members champion personal sustainability paths and team up to maximize winning strategies. BY MIRA SLOTT
This year's sixth annual retail sustainability award beckons a new and unique dimension. As the first cooperative to win the honor — this is not just any co-op — it's the largest retailer owned co-op in the U.S. Capitalizing on inherent and rare dynamic structural attributes, corpo- rate executives and independent members collectively breathe sustainability and jettison green across a wide and varied swath.
Wakefern Food Corporation, based in Keasbey, NJ, is ShopRite Supermarkets’ procurement and warehouse distribution arm. The company provides members with a host of services and resources, from common marketing and advertising programs to engineering systems, promising technologies, and food safety best practices, among others. The core pillar, though, is its cleverly collaborative sustainability platform and tactical implementation and measuring tools, such as its Retail Green Team Sustainability Tool Kit, which garnered a coveted Award of Publication Excellence [APEX] for Education.
Wakefern corporate executives modestly accepted the award, crediting the success to its members, and emphasized the impor- tance of honoring the 50 multi-generational families, who independently own and operate some 250 ShopRite Supermar- kets, as well as seven Fresh Grocers between them. Wakefern also has a group of 33 wholly owned ShopRite stores and 54 corporate- owned PriceRite stores.
The cooperative’s sustainability commitments strongly intersect with the produce department and its operations as well as procurement, critical touch points in the members’ individual accomplishments as well as their collective mission toward green, according to Derrick Jenkins, vice president produce and floral at Wakefern Food Corp. [See Q&A on page 30.]
ShopRite members/owners serve a wide spectrum of commu-
28 PRODUCE BUSINESS • MAY 2014