Free bag for Earth Day, reusable bags for everyday

At Fresh & Easy, green is more than just our color, it’s our way of life. We’ve worked hard to make our stores and our products eco-friendly and we want to help you be green too!

So instead of Earth Day, we’re celebrating Earth Week this year with a free reusable bag for our customers who spend $20 or more through April 22. All you have to do is visit our Facebook fan page get the free canvas bag coupon.



We want you to love the bag you use, so we are giving you the chance to design it! We would like to invite you to enter our Design-A-Bag Contest by submitting your original bag design by May 31st.

In June, our “friends of fresh&easy” will have the chance to vote for their favorite designs to pick the winner. If you haven’t already, you can sign up to be a friend of fresh&easy at freshandeasy.com/friends to be able to vote and to get our latest news and exclusive discounts.



Did we mention the winner will get free groceries for a year? To get more details on our Design-A-Bag contest, and to enter, visit freshandeasy.com/designabag. Good luck!

Using reusable bags is only one way to help the earth. You can read about some of the other eco-friendly things we do in the Green Architecture and Building Report or you can visit freshandeasy.com/greenbuilding. By being green, we not only get to help the environment, we also keep our business costs low, which helps our customers save some green as well!

Happy Earth Day,
Sallie

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!

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

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

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.