green is the culture at fresh&easy...

In our kind of business, we have hundreds of thousands of contacts with customers every week - people shop our stores frequently.

And it's those contacts in the end, that determine how people perceive our brand.

So from the start, we set out to build a culture based around shared values, and a sense of purpose. That way, our people would just live the brand, while being themselves, with no need rule books or scripted conversations.

I was reminded just how far we've come on this path by our recent set of city meetings.

We do these 3 times a year in all our markets. Tim, our CEO, me and my Executive colleagues go along. We invite all our new team members from the last 4 months, as well as our store managers, to talk about what kind of business we're trying to be, and where we're going.

We've been doing these since we started, when we only had a handful of people, and they've become a real symbol of our culture.

Some of us go on a bit, about the business, about our values, and what's coming up. Then, increasingly central to these sessions, there's a Q&A, where anybody can ask us anything: it's proving a great way us to continually improve the business, as there's no holding back. Finally, Tim closes, with his usual flourish.

What really amazes me though, is how, unprompted, people are increasingly coming dressed up, in green: T-shirts, hats, green wigs, face painting, often to their own design, but all reflecting fresh&easy values (although if you walked in off the street, you might think it was St. Patty's day!).

Attending these, you can understand why we receive hundreds of emails from customers every week, letting us know how great our team members are in the stores. Or why, in our regular surveys, more than 9 out of 10 of our customers are very satisfied with how friendly and helpful our people are.

It demonstrates a simple point - by creating a great place to work, based around shared values, you end up giving your customers great service.

And that, surely, is how it should be...

This is what its like. Check out a video from our last city meeting in Las Vegas..

5th fresh&easy opens in Gilbert, AZ!

Another great opening in Gilbert, AZ yesterday at Higley & Queen Creek!


We have received a few questions about specific store openings recently. You’ll be glad to know we are continuing to open more stores each month; we just haven’t accelerated as quickly as we initially planned given the state of the economy. As soon as we set opening dates we’ll be sure to let our neighbors know!

To find your local store or if a new fresh&easy is coming to your neighborhood, check out our store locator...

Cheers,
Gary

Simon is now on Twitter!

Want Simon’s latest thoughts on fresh&easy and potentially anything else? He’s now officially on Twitter! Click here to begin following him…

Are you on Twitter? We are! Click here to get our latest fresh&easy tweets…

Cheers!
Gary

More ways to share your fresh&easy favorites

One of the striking things about talking with our customers and our people is that everybody has favorite fresh&easy products.

A few months ago, I asked you to tell us your favorite fresh&easy products, and was amazed by the number of responses! Your enthusiasm inspired our in-store fresh&easy favorites poster, where customers can post their favorite products for others to see. Check out the poster in this video we took recently asking a few employees and customers for their fresh&easy favorites…



Given the amount of product comments and all the different favorites we hear about each day, we thought we'd introduce a way to vote for your fresh&easy favorite!

Here’s how it works… Periodically through our Friends of fresh&easy emails, we’ll feature a category of products and then ask you to pick your favorite. Since we just introduced 6 new family-size prepared meals, this month we’re asking which family-sized entrée you enjoy the most. Here are the results for this month’s fresh&easy favorites.

Once voting's finished, we'll then highlight your favorite in-store and use the results to help us develop even better products.

As I've said many times, customer feedback (good or bad) is the lifeblood of our business, it helps us continually improve our shopping trip, so please let us know what you think!

Family packs at fresh & easy

We've always followed a very simple approach - listen to what your customers want, and then try and deliver it, better than anybody else.

That's why we encourage customers to give us feedback - through our website or comment cards - and why we carry out exit surveys around our stores every month.

So when customers told us they enjoy our prepared meals, but would like to see more family sized meals, we took action!

We’ve just introduced a selection of 6 new prepared meals suitable for a family of four, including favorites like Lasagna with Meat Sauce or our Chicken & Bacon Mac & Cheese. And with no trans fats and no artificial colors or flavors, we’ve introduced these dinners at just $8.00! Now families have more options without having to compromise on quality or price.

There's several other areas where our customers have asked us for larger pack sizes, so again we're busy working on them. Some have already hit our stores, like bigger packs of chicken breasts, and Huggies diapers.

It's a simple approach, but it means our shopping trip is always improving for customers. After all, everyday our customers vote with their feet, and that surely is how it should be...

Next time you’re in, be sure to check them out…



Lasagna with Meat Sauce, 44 oz. & Chicken & Broccoli Pasta Alfredo, 40 oz



Spaghetti with Turkey Meatballs, 45 oz. & Chicken Teriyaki with Rice & Vegetables, 45 oz.



Chicken & Bacon Macaroni & Cheese, 40 oz. & Chicken Burritos with Green and Red Sauce, 40 oz.

Saving 400,000 pounds of plastic from the landfill

We are working hard at fresh&easy to live up to our value of being a good neighbor by finding innovative and practical ways to reduce our carbon footprint.

We have found that by being thoughtful and paying attention to the little things, we can make a big impact. Take our ultra violet light sanitation machine for example. This one-of-a-kind machine was built by UV Doctor, a business based in LasVegas, that gives us the ability to sanitize and reuse our plastic display trays.
















This handy little machine sanitizes 60 trays per minute, which has already kept a whopping 400,000 pounds of plastic out of landfills. That amounts to approximately 24 elephants, or one full sized blue whale!

We have also committed to build LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified buildings, and voluntarily joined the California Climate Action Registry and The Climate Registry to disclose our greenhouse gas emissions. Check out our 500k square foot solar roof live-feed on our distribution center in Riverside which currently produces over 75% of the center's energy.

For the full scoop on the F&E UV sanitation machine and to find the ways you can make a difference, visit Earth911.

Exclusive peek into the F&E wine tasting room

Every wonder how we select our award winning wines at Fresh & Easy?

Meet our wine buyer, Karen, and our master of wine, Phil. They have the lucky job of sorting through vintages, and working with wine makers from all over the world to bring fantastic quality wines at great prices to our shelves.

Here is a sneak peek into their tasting room, where Karen takes us through some of her favorite wines.



(You heard correctly -- new wines to be introduced on the shelves in April!)

Here is a list of our recent award winning wines.