Sustainable Differentiation

The need to stand out from competitors — and to keep an eye toward earth-friendliness — will drive tomorrow's equipment and design.

Two business drivers in food retail today stand to change the way equipment and design are conducted over the next decade. The first is the need to differentiate, as retailers look to set themselves apart in an increasingly competitive environment. The second is the desire to be better corporate citizens.

To differentiate means customized foodservice offerings, customized fixtures and displays, and new store designs and layouts that enhance shopability. And the greening of the industry has become so prevalent that any equipment or design suppliers with no sustainable offerings will find themselves out of business 10 years from now.

Most retailers have already begun tackling both of these initiatives simultaneously. A Cub Foods store that opened January in St. Paul, Minn., for example, was designed with a focus on enhanced service, with an eye toward earth-friendliness. The result is a shopper-centric store that earned EPA GreenChill Gold-Level Certification. What's more, it's the first grocery store in Minnesota and one of the first stores in the nation to successfully achieve LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) NC 2.2 Gold Certification.

"The challenge for us as a design team was to deliver to Cub its most energy-efficient store to date," says Supervalu-owned Design Services Group (DSG) lead architect Bryan Slattery. "We had to significantly reduce our typical carbon footprint, while keeping the Cub brand intact from an aesthetic and operational standpoint, and to do all of this in the most cost-effective manner possible."

Food Lion is another example of a retailer addressing both sustainability and shopability. The Delhaize-owned retailer, which has more Energy Star-certified stores than any other grocer in the country, continues to stand out from the pack with its latest remodel of 38 stores that rolled out last month and feature new signage and cases, enhanced lighting, expanded produce and meat sections, a greater selection of wines and beer, and a Nature's Place natural and organic food section.

The following columns by industry experts take a peek into the future to predict how equipment and design will evolve over the next 10 years as they help retailers meet the dual tasks of increased competitiveness and sustainability. Chuck Campagna, president and CEO of Fairfield, N.J.-based architecture and lighting consultancy Amerlux, addresses the topic of sustainable illumination, while Clive Roux, CMO at Atlanta-based home, school and office supply company Baumgarten's and Jenni Bair of Troy, Ohio-based Hobart discuss the future of foodservice equipment. 

Indeed, Progressive Grocer is peering into its own crystal ball: Our "Lasting Impressions" research project, which we're conducting in partnership with Meridian Consulting, design firm Shook-Kelley and supplier Cadbury Adams, will uncover what the future of front end checkout design will be. The second installment of this research will be available in April.


Less Lighting, More Illumination
By Chuck Campagna, president and CEO, Amerlux

The next 10 years of supermarket design will see a greater incorporation of the world's oldest light source — the sun. While sustainability will be a key factor in the change — as this results in energy savings — it will also be driven by increasingly stringent code requirements and the desire to reduce maintenance requirements and costs.

Skylights will be commonplace, tied to strategic window placement and design, and photo-cell sensors will be integrated into the lighting system, enabling grocers to control the amount of daylight entering their stores, and providing the ability to scale up or down the amount of artificial light needed on a given day. The industry will increasingly move toward daylight harvesting.

Lighting will continue its evolution into store- and earth-friendlier equipment.
Supermarkets are in the middle of a transformation. The grocery stores of today are fast abandoning the dull, distant light of yesteryear and embracing the bold and warm colors of more dramatic lighting options. From sustaining high foot-candles throughout and highlighting very little, to lowering the general lighting levels and featuring accents similar to that of high-end retail, supermarkets are inviting customers to experience the space.

Super-low wattage metal-halide and LED lamps have enabled grocery stores to meet design demands as lamp life maintenance requirements expand. In the future, we will see more of the same as grocers lower general lighting to accommodate newer, greener technologies to fit the maintenance models better, as long as the net result satisfies the need to have a dramatic environment. At Amerlux, we've been impressed by the movement of grocery owners to test the halving of general sales-floor lighting to allow for more focused, cost-effective and dramatic lighting options. In a very short period, we expect to see this trend grow, as the future will be more about sustaining lighting ratios rather than meeting the high total foot-candle levels of the past.

Grocers are already beginning to incorporate long-life LED lighting into new and remodeled supermarket spaces. LED lighting allows for near-custom coloring of light to match the products they're designed to illuminate. Producing no heat and no UV rays, LED lighting allows grocers to bring the light source closer to the product while providing 50,000 hours or more of life, dramatically reducing the associated maintenance costs of historic supermarket lighting. And LED is continuing to evolve — getting better, brighter and warmer in color.

The movement toward being green can't be overestimated. By 2019, LEED certification will be the standard by which all supermarkets are built. This certification process imposes considerable energy restrictions that can only be met using smarter, longer-lasting and more energy-efficient lamps made with a percentage of reusable material. But retailers benefit in the end, as this longer life and reduced energy consumption will mean more green going into the operation, and less green spent making this happen.


Natural Solutions

By Clive Roux, CMO, Baumgarten's


For most of human history, we made do with the materials that nature provided us, such as wood, glass and metal. That all changed with the Industrial Revolution, which led to the development of hundreds of plastics and chemicals that weren't natural at all. We invented electronics — silicon-based devices that combined materials in ways never seen before. While this delivered many advances, it also resulted in byproducts that aren't integrated back into nature in the same way that natural materials are.

As an industry, we've just begun to go down the path of rethinking and developing natural materials to use in our operations. This is especially important for tools that give us short-lived benefits, such as disposable tableware and packaging. Three natural resources have begun to make inroads in this area, and we can expect them to become further integrated into the business over the next decade: sugar cane, cornstarch and bamboo.

Sugar Cane 

When sugar is extracted from cane, there's a mass of fibrous matter left behind, known as bagasse. In the past, this mass was often simply set on fire, releasing carbon dioxide and other harmful carbons into the atmosphere. Today, however, we have the ability to break down this fibrous mass and reconstitute it into a material that acts like paper or cardboard. 

The huge advantage sugar cane has over paper is that it's made from an annually renewable resource — sugar cane crops — vs. trees, which take 15 to 20 years to grow, and are important for cleaning the atmosphere of carbon dioxide. The second advantage of this material is that it is compostable and will biodegrade in six weeks with the right composting conditions.

Sugar cane-based paper is finding its way into products such as disposable plates, bowls and coffee cups, and it will soon be available for the packaging of CPG products.

Cornstarch
Until this century, all plastics were made from oil or coal. During the past decade, commercially available plastics made from the cellulose of natural, annually renewable crops such as corn have begun to enter our industry. As with sugar cane-based paper products, the benefits of these materials are that they are made from annually renewable resources and biodegrade quickly.
 
The development of this new field of chemistry is at about the same place that plastics were 50 years ago. It's feasible to think that within the next 15 years we will see the rapid development of natural crop-based plastics that deliver the same benefits as the plastics we use today.

Bamboo
Bamboo is one of the fastest-growing natural plants, and so it's not too surprising that it’s being used to create new natural materials. Already, we can find the use of bamboo as a replacement material for wood, for such items as bowls, plates, food containers and other storage applications. What's relatively new about using bamboo is the breaking down of it into its fibrous strands and the weaving of these strands into a soft yarn. This allows the material to be turned into textiles and results in products such as shirts, dish towels and lanyards.

Until now, there have been two obstacles to the use of natural technical materials such as those mentioned above: They generally cost more because their technology is newer and less widely used, and it was once almost impossible to find these technologies in China, where 80 percent of the world's plastic goods are created. That's not the case today. Bamboo is an indigenous material to China, and sugar cane and corn are now being grown there as well. And with the increasing demand for earth-friendly alternatives to plastic, we can expect to see increased use of these resources in years to come.


EXCLUSIVE WEB CONTENT

Feeding the Next Generation

By Jenni Bair, LEED-AP, brand marketing manager, Hobart
The future of foodservice equipment will focus on applications that provide food retail customers with a competitive advantage, and prepared foods is one area retailers will increasingly turn to as a key differentiator for their operations.

Ready-made meals — especially those consisting of healthier choices and organic options — will become increasingly more popular as the next generation of shoppers hits the stores, cooking less than their predecessors, yet with a stronger desire for healthier options. As a result, cooking equipment that's more frequently seen in foodservice operations today will become more common in food retail operations a decade from now. 

For example, the versatile combi-oven will be desired for baking, grilling, roasting, steaming, proofing, rethermalization and low-temperature cooking. Char-broilers will become more common for their grilling and barbecue advantages. Equipment that enables food to be displayed, such as rotisserie ovens with large viewing areas and glass-door refrigerators, will also continue to increase in popularity. 

Not surprisingly, sustainability and energy-efficiency will play a heavy role in the next decade, and equipment qualifications such as Energy Star will expand into more product categories. Waste management, involving both the reduction and elimination of organic waste, will become increasingly more important as the volume of solid waste sent to the landfill, and the business and environmental costs of hauling it away, affect sustainability and the bottom line. Equipment such as pulpers will be used more frequently, due to their enterprise benefit of saving money on hauling and tipping charges while reducing waste-to-landfill volume. Warewashers will also become more mainstream as food retail operations choose reusable and sustainable bio-based systems.


Source: Progressive Grocer (http://goo.gl/w9313K)