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.