Fresh food in South LA

We were thrilled today to partner with Los Angeles City Councilwoman Jan Perry to open our South Los Angeles store – one of the first store locations we identified over two years ago!

This store is part of a broader redevelopment program to revitalize the Central Avenue corridor. We’re excited to be a part of the effort and hope to encourage even more business and growth as a result.

Providing food access and healthier foods to underserved communities has been getting national attention with First Lady Michelle Obama taking up the torch to try to get Americans to eat better and tackle childhood obesity by encouraging better eating habits. We continue to open stores in all types of neighborhoods because we fundamentally believe everyone – regardless of where they live – deserves access to quality, fresh food at affordable prices. In reviewing our the best selling items across all Fresh & Easy stores – from Hollywood to Pasadena to Compton, we have found that fresh fruits and vegetables and quality meats and poultry are consistently best sellers, regardless of the neighborhood.

The opening was quite the neighborhood event – lots of local leaders, friends from the City of LA and neighbors showed up to see the new store. We even had the Jefferson High School marching band perform outside the store!


We presented Councilmember Perry today with a Fresh & Easy Superstar Shirt. Each week, at our company team meeting, we award Superstar Shirts to employees who have gone above and beyond the call of duty to do something extraordinary for our customers or their neighborhoods. This is the first time we’ve ever awarded a Superstar Shirt to someone outside our Fresh & Easy family, but we certainly feel Councilwoman Perry deserves one for her work in revitalizing the area and bring fresh, quality food to residents in the neighborhood.

We also had a team of Fresh & Easy volunteers in the neighborhood to help beautify 28th Street Elementary School by painting murals later this afternoon. One mural of the U.S. Map and the other one reminding kids to eat their fruit and veggies!


For more pictures and stories of the South LA opening, visit here, here and here!

Cheers!
~Sallie

Fresh & Easy now in Fresno!

We’re excited to share that yesterday we opened our first stores in Fresno, CA with the help of Mayor Ashley Swearengin, Councilmembers Mike Dages, Andreas Borgeas, Larry Westerlund and Blong Xiong, Congressman Jim Costa and Marlene Murphey from the Fresno Redevelopment Agency. We opened our doors in Fresno at Cedar & Nees, downtown at Tulare & R, and in Clovis at Shaw & Willow and were happy to meet our new neighbors. Thank you to everyone who came out to celebrate with us!



Check out a video of the Mayor’s speech at the grand opening of the downtown Fresno location.



There was such a great positive response from our new neighbors in Fresno that we thought we’d pass along what they’re saying about their new neighborhood market.



Blog Posts:

Fresno Famous
Central Valley Moms
Fres-Know
Fresno Beehive
Fresno Biz Journal
The Fresnan
Lyndsay Lou
The Lulu
Vida en el valle blogs

Some Twit-Pics from tweeter @SmokeyBehr here and here

If you have a blog post, tweet, twit-pic or video you would like to share with us, please be sure to leave a link in the comment section!

Cheers!
SallieB

Fresno bound at fresh&easy

Last week, we held an event at our Downtown Fresno store to announce the opening dates for our first few stores in the Fresno area.

-- Lemoore & Cinnamon, Lemoore: December 2nd
-- Tulare & R, Fresno: January 13th
-- Cedar & Nees, Fresno: January 13th
-- Shaw & Willow, Clovis: January 13th

The outpouring of support from the community and city government in Fresno was a great indication of what lies ahead for Fresh & Easy. A big thank you to Fresno City Council President Cynthia Sterling, City Council Member Lee Brand and Redevelopment Agency Exec Director Marlene Murphey who were on hand to speak.



With these six stores we are proud to be creating 125 more good paying, quality jobs with comprehensive benefits. If you are interested in joining our team, job listings and the application process are posted here.



For more on the Fresno story check out what Fresno bloggers like The Fresnan, Fresno Fusion and the Fresno Bee News Blog have to say about it.

LEEDing the way to gold certification

Last month we took another big step in our commitment to being a green retailer – we opened our first LEED® Gold Certified store! LEED is the nation’s preeminent program for the design, construction and operation of high performance green buildings.



Our Cathedral City store achieved LEED certification for energy use, lighting, water use and incorporating a variety of other sustainable strategies, such as using 90 percent recycled steel for the building’s structure. On average, all of Fresh & Easy stores use 30% less energy than a typical supermarket and utilize technologies like solar tracking skylights, automatically dimming lights, and LED lighting.



We are also pilot members of the LEED Volume Certification Program which allows companies building multiple buildings with similar formats to streamline the certification process. Because of our membership, we look forward to several future LEED certified stores to come.

Of course, we do this not just because it’s the right thing to do for the environment – it also helps keep our costs (and your grocery bill) down!

Take a look at what these blogs had to say about our opening:

Mother Nature Network
Greenandsave.com
Green Retailing News

You can visit the Green Building section of our web site for more info!

Shop for Schools

Two weeks ago we launched our Shop for Schools program at the opening of our 126th location in Long Beach.

Earlier this year we piloted the program to raise money for K-8th grade schools in the neighborhoods around our stores. We saw an incredible response as schools raised more than $130,000 for whatever they need the funds for. Our store employees, parents and customers all pitched in with ways to enhance the program for this year’s version, so we are hopeful that even more schools will participate!

We have also added a Shopping Night to the program, which allows all registered schools to receive 5% of a store’s sales on a particular evening. One of our Las Vegas team members – Jackie Urban –came up with the idea, which we tried out with such success we decided to roll it out for all of our participating schools.

Check out a video on Shop for Schools from earlier this year.

Be sure to check with your local school to see if they are participating – it is not too late to participate! Schools have until October 1st (THURSDAY!) to sign-up at our website

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

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

Planting Trees In South LA With fresh&easy

On Saturday, April 18th we partnered with the LA Conservation Corps and Councilwoman Jan Perry to plant 60 trees around South LA in celebration of Earth Day.

We met at our future store site at Central and Adams and had a great time helping to beautify the neighborhood!

Special thanks to all the volunteers from the community who came out to help make South LA greener, one tree at a time. Here's some footage from this fantastic day!



Cheers,
Gary