more stores opening at fresh&easy

It was a big opening day for us with three new stores in Southern California, including one in Ventura, CA and our first two in Santa Barbara County, CA.

- Channel Islands & Rose, Oxnard
- Clark & Bradley, Orcutt
- H & North, Lompoc

Lots of our neighbors came out to check us out.



Like we do for every opening, we donated $1,000 to a local charity for each store. Congratulations to The Boys and Girls Club in Lompoc, the Orcutt Aqua Center, and the Parent Faculty Organization of Channel Islands High School!



These new stores created nearly 75 new jobs… and we are creating about 25 more for our next store opening in Delano, CA on August 19th!

For more pictures of the store openings check out our Flickr page.

Cheers!
~Sallie

Wining & Dining with Chef Mike

Last Thursday night we had a great time cooking, eating, drinking and laughing (a lot) with a few blogger friends. Our own Chef Mike cooked for us and even taught us a thing or two about making great food.



LA bloggers gathered to taste our exclusive wines and try out the delicious, fast and easy meals that Chef Mike put together using all fresh&easy ingredients which never contain artificial colors, flavors or added trans fats and only use preservatives when absolutely necessary. The group even donned aprons to make homemade margarita pizzas and prepped the ingredients for apricot chicken tenders, salmon with peanut sauce and veggies, and beef fajitas.

Here are some pictures and a video of the event, the food and the fun. (Special thanks to Oakley for the permission to use some of her pictures.)


These easy Beef Fajitas were a hit and serve four for less than $5 each


Ana, Melissa and Silvia roll out dough for the pizzas


Cynthia, Amy, and Lee tweet and share some laughs


Handmade margarita pizzas made with love by Lupe, Annette, Bernadette and Marsha


Ready to cook in less than 10 minutes and serves 4 for less than $8



And who could forget dessert? A delectable sampling of fresh&easy banana cream pie, tiramisu cake, and gourmet chocolate cupcakes was definitely a hit!

For more pictures of the event, visit our Flickr page and the Flickr pages of bloggers Annette and Oakley. We hope everyone had as much fun as we did!

more fresh&easy stores opening!

Today we celebrated with our new neighbors in Pasadena the grand opening of our 121st store at California & Lake.

Here are some photos and a video from today's event!





You can see more pictures of the opening event today on our flickr page.

Be sure to keep an eye out, because we have three other stores opening this month!
Two in Santa Barbara County and a store in Oxnard all open July 29th and our Delano store will be opening its doors on August 19th. For details on these openings, be sure to check out our What's New section of our website.

Pasadena, thank you so much for the warm welcome. We are delighted to join the neighborhood!

~Cheers,
Sallie

Designer Angel at fresh&easy

We have fantastic & passionate people working hard around our shops to give customers the best shopping trip possible. As a new business, we put a lot of thought into creating a fun and rewarding workplace; after all creating a great place to work is key to ensuring our customers have great service. So we encourage all our team members to voice new ideas and bring their creativity & personality to work.

Meet Angel, a team member at our Las Vegas & Lake Mead store in Nevada.


Angel is a talented artist who designed and airbrushed fresh&easy t-shirts and hats for her fellow team members. To show her green fresh&easy pride at one of our recent City Meetings, Angel designed a fabulous hat which caught the eye of Tim, our CEO. Tim loved Angel’s design so much, that he produced one for everyone in our company!

Each of our team members brings something different and special to our shops and we love to celebrate the creativity, innovation & passion of our team members. Congrats Angel! And thanks for the sweet hat!!!

Cheers,
Gary

Award winning wine at Fresh & Easy

Last month, our Fresh & Easy exclusive wines won 29 awards from the Los Angeles International Wine & Spirits Competition and the San Francisco International Wine Competition. We have now won over 80 awards for our exclusive wines, which are blended with the help of Master of Wine Phil Reedman. (there are less than 300 Masters of Wine in the world)

Nearly 60 of the 170 wines offered at our stores are exclusive to Fresh & Easy – and most of our wine sells for less than $10 a bottle. We’ve worked hard to simplify the wine selection process for our customers by arranging them by varietal instead of region and by putting tasting notes, food pairing suggestions and storage tips on the back label of our exclusive wine bottles. We don’t think wine should be complicated for customers and we believe great wine doesn’t have to be expensive to be…well, great.

Even more good news for wine lovers: we are introducing 25 new wines this summer!

To show off some of our wines and meet a few neighbors, we had a party at the very hip Roosevelt Hotel in – right across the street from our Hollywood & Sycamore store. Chef Mike prepared the food and Karen, our wine and beer manager, picked the wines. It just shows you, you don’t have to spend a lot of money on food and wine to throw a great party!

A Grill-Packed Day at fresh&easy

We’ve recently partnered with an award-winning grilling master Neil Strawder, also known as Big Mista, to give our customers helpful grilling tips. Last week he stopped by our home office and treated our team to a delicious BBQ! He fired up his grill and cooked up all our fresh&easy favorites including our Grill Pack - Nearly 5 lbs of high-quality beef patties, pork and chicken – It was a great day and we certainly ate a lot!

Here’s a picture of Big Mista (right) with the man behind our meat range, Bill Arnold (left).

Happy 4th of July!

Cheers!
Gary