Keeping the green in fresh&easy (and your wallets)

We received some exciting news this week from our partner Verisae, who helps us lower our environmental impact – our energy consumption is 32 percent lower than the industry average for energy usage per square foot.

This is good news not just for the environment... Through the energy saving innovations in our stores, like LED lighting, skylights and energy efficient refrigeration units, we have achieved recurring energy-related cost savings of millions of dollars per year. Savings like this allow us to keep our prices low, everyday for our customers.

See what Environmental Leader had to say here.

Take a look at the Green Building page on our website for more info and check out the amount of energy our 500,000 sq ft solar panel on our Riverside distribution center is producing.

Cheers,
Gary

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!

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.