While Hannaford Brothers has been the subject of bad-news stories concerning compromised credit and debit card numbers, the supermarket chain has also been showing up frequently in good-news EPA press releases.
Amidst the usual EPA blotter of oil spills and hazardous waste fines, the Massachusetts-based grocery chain quietly has been making headlines for being an industry leader in energy conservation.
Most recently, EPA New England announced that Hannaford, along with Whole Foods Market, has joined the agency’s Green Chill Partnership program. Green Chill Partners agree to use only ozone-friendly refrigerants and cut refrigeration energy use with new technologies and efficiency strategies. EPA New England believes the program, if implemented nationwide, could cut 1 million metric tons of carbon emissions annually and save the grocery industry some $12 million a year.
Hannaford recently also achieved Energy Star certification for 16 of its 160 stores, including ten along the southern coast of Maine. These stores use a combination of energy-efficient lighting and heating strategies to cut power use by 40 percent. And the grocery chain also has been busy phasing in lighter trucks for its shipping fleet and installing automatic idle shutdowns. The upgrade should save some 115,000 gallons of diesel fuel a year. Retail stores often use less power than manufacturers, but grocery stores use more power than most retailers, said Lucy Edmonson, an energy expert with EPA New England.
“Grocery stores do use a lot of energy because there’s a huge amount of refrigeration” and shipping, said Edmonson.
Hannaford isn’t the only New England grocery chain getting into the efficiency act. Whole Foods stopped offering plastic bags at the checkout line and purchased green energy credits for all its stores. Stop & Shop also has been experimenting with energy-efficient lighting in its freezer sections and recently purchased renewable energy credits for its Kennebunk store.
The push toward energy efficiency is partly a matter of good publicity, said Bob Vosburgh, group editor for the grocery magazine Supermarket News. Grocery customers are becoming more environmentally aware, so supermarket chains want to impress customers with their greenness. “It’s a thing retailers can show off,” said Vosburgh. “They get to wear the halo.”
But increased energy-efficiency also may be a matter of economic survival, Vosburgh said. Grocery chains typically only realize a 3 to 4 percent profit margin, although natural food grocers like Whole Foods can sometimes enjoy a 15 to 100 percent markup. Usually, grocers are desperate to find anything to stay ahead of the competition. And spiking fuel costs mean some grocery chains must cut energy consumption just to stay in place.
Interestingly, the push toward large retail energy efficiency began with Wal-Mart, a chain that supermarket companies feared and environmentalists decried in the past. Wal-Mart has been working closely with the Rocky Mountain Institute, an energy-efficiency think-tank, to cut both power consumption and packaging. Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott pledged to redesign the company’s trucking fleet, one of the largest in the nation, to make it at least twice as efficient as it is today. And this winter, Scott further promised to cut the energy needed for the store’s products by 25 percent. Vosburgh thinks Scott is laying a strong foundation for continued economic growth in a future of diminishing oil supplies.
“He’s thinking long-term,” Vosburgh said.
And Edmonson believes Wal-Mart has the economic clout to revolutionize both the retail and trucking industries. “If Wal-Mart asks its suppliers to stop idling, they will stop idling,” she said.
But critics contend that retailers like Wal-Mart are only building a green façade, and independent natural food store owners are skeptical of how far supermarket chains like Hannaford are willing to go.
Kathryn Arbach, co-owner of A&B Natural Foods in Bar Harbor, applauds any move the Hannaford store across the street makes to be more energy-efficient, and she says the natural food products offered there help expose more people to the concept of organic. Still, she thinks corporations are just latching onto going green because it’s a new consumer trend.
“They tend to grasp onto keywords and phrases”¦without actually considering the entire product that they’re selling,” Arbach said, adding that a supermarket can’t be sustainable if it continues to sell factory-farm meat.
Whether it’s a publicity stunt or an economic tool, many feel the supermarket efficiency trend will only continue to grow, especially as heightened fuel costs make efficiency investments look better.
“What was once a 5-year payback is now a 2 ½-year payback,” said Edmonson.
And as more money gets invested in energy efficiency, more energy-efficiency strategies will be developed, say some analysts. Recently, the Rocky Mountain Institute estimated that a completely redesigned grocery store could save 70 percent to 80 percent of the energy cost needed to run a typical supermarket.
And that’s a lot of green.