Safeway Tour Promotes Eco-Friendly Cleaning Products
(Store Brands Decisions) Safeway’s Bright Green Clean Team tour is showcasing the grocer’s store brand natural household cleaning line while cleaning up America along the way. (Click HERE for full story.)
Hispanic Market Hits Tipping Point
(Ad Age) If you're looking to reach upholders of traditional American values, your best bet might be the Hispanic market. (Click HERE for full story.)
Fresh & Easy Expands “Farm to Store in 24” Program
(Convenience Store News) Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Market is expanding its popular “Farm to Store in 24” program, bringing more produce from California farms to its stores in less than 24 hours. (Click HERE for full story.)
Smarter food
(The Boston Globe) Former Trader Joe’s president Doug Rauch, 58, is now at Harvard, studying how to end food waste and promote healthier eating. (Click HERE for full story.)
Convenience foods continue vast hold on retail market, report finds
(DrugStore News) Fresh convenience foods have experienced a recessionary boon, according to a new study by Packaged Facts. (Click HERE for full story.)
Adversary's Clean Start With Wal-Mart
(The Wall Street Journal) For years, Seventh Generation Inc. co-founder Jeffrey Hollender liked to say "hell would freeze over" before his company's environmentally friendly household products would be sold by Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
He feels differently now. Starting next month, Seventh Generation staples, including laundry detergent, dish soap, all-purpose sprays and disinfectant wipes, will be sold in about 1,500 Wal-Mart stores. By September, other cleaners, diapers and baby wipes will be available on Walmart.com.
The move will bring Seventh Generation's specialty products to the broader, mainstream audience it has long coveted. For Wal-Mart, which draws more than 137 million U.S. customers every week, carrying Seventh Generation could help boost its green credentials by finally winning over one of its most vocal corporate critics.
"We've shifted dramatically in the way we see the world," Mr. Hollender says.
Five years ago, the world's largest retailer by revenue began setting goals to reduce its energy consumption, cut waste and introduce more sustainable products. Last year, Wal-Mart introduced a program to screen chemical-based products for ingredients that could have harmful health or environmental effects. It involved the government representatives and environmental groups like the Environmental Defense Fund in developing the program, which has helped the retailer earn more credit for its initiatives.
"We're not just putting [Seventh Generation's] products on the shelf," says Al Dominguez, Wal-Mart's vice president of household chemicals and paper goods. "We want their help in developing a category that's more sustainable."
To be sure, selling green products is also increasingly lucrative. While many shoppers switched to cheaper labels during the recession, sales of household products billed as environmentally friendly have held up relatively well despite their premium prices.
Sales of green household and laundry cleaning products rose to $557 million last year, having more than tripled since 2005, according to estimates from market-research firm Packaged Facts. Green products are still a niche category, however, representing only about 3% of the overall $19.9 billion household cleaners and laundry market.
Closely held Seventh Generation has accelerated its efforts to compete more directly with mainstream products. In January, the company launched its first TV ads, a departure from its reliance on small, mostly online campaigns. Last summer, Seventh Generation hired Chuck Maniscalco, a consumer-product veteran who most recently led PepsiCo's Quaker, Tropicana and Gatorade business, as chief executive officer. Mr. Hollender now serves as executive chairman and "chief inspired protagonist."
Seventh Generation products, which already are sold through Target Corp., Whole Foods Market Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and grocery chains, typically are among the most expensive in their categories, though still competitive with some top brands. A 45-ounce bottle of Seventh Generation's automatic-dishwashing gel costs $5.49, near the price of Procter & Gamble Co.'s same-size premium Cascade brand, which costs $5.99, according to a recent search on Drugstore.com.
Over the past year, Mr. Maniscalco has worked to lower Seventh Generation's prices across its portfolio so that its products cost as much or only slightly more than the leading national brand. In 2009, Seventh Generation posted sales of $150 million, about flat with the previous year. So far this year, sales are increasing, Mr. Maniscalco says.
"We're back up into healthy growth rates for the first half of the year," he says.
Company representatives for Seventh Generation and Wal-Mart declined to specify Seventh Generation's prices inside Wal-Mart stores. "We're committed to bringing our customers affordable prices, and that will be the same here," says Wal-Mart's Mr. Dominguez.
Seventh Generation isn't the first small, environmentally conscious company to sell through Wal-Mart. Stonyfield Farm, which is partly owned by Danone SA, started selling its organic yogurt in Wal-Mart stores in 1999. "Many of the things Stonyfield stands for, whether it's taking toxins out of the food supply, or saving family farms, or reducing climate footprint requires scale to make our point," says Gary Hirshberg, Stonyfield's chairman and CE-Yo. "Anywhere food is sold is where we should be."
Seventh Generation's change of heart toward Wal-Mart came gradually. Mr. Hollender reached out to former Wal-Mart chief Lee Scott after hearing Mr. Scott was reading his book. In 2006, Mr. Hollender began traveling to Wal-Mart's Bentonville, Ark., headquarters to help the company develop its first sustainability report, working as an unpaid adviser.
Since then, Mr. Hollender has continued working with the retailer on various environmental initiatives. Seventh Generation and Wal-Mart are both members of the Sustainability Consortium, a group of manufacturers, retailers, nongovernmental organizations and government officials that is developing tools and strategies to evaluate the environmental and social impacts of products' lifecycles. Wal-Mart plans to eventually incorporate the data into a sustainable product index, which it plans to make available to consumers.
"What I realized is if you could get Wal-Mart moving quicker and more aggressively in this direction, we'd be able to solve the challenges we're facing much more quickly and much more efficiently," Mr. Hollender says. "Wal-Mart can move quicker than probably any government on the planet."
Still, Seventh Generation knows it has a delicate communications effort ahead as it must face its loyal—and vocal—consumer base that has long admired the company's willingness to sacrifice profit for principle.
When Seventh Generation decided to test Seventh Generation in four Wal-Mart Marketside shops in 2008, Mr. Hollender posted a 1,670-word treatise on his blog to justify his decision, explaining that Wal-Mart's social and environmental targets were specific and its reports seemingly transparent.
"At this point, we now believe that we can have a bigger impact by partnering with Wal-Mart than by shunning it," Mr. Hollender wrote.
Coca-Cola taps new drink textures, functions
(Reuters) Scientists at Coca-Cola Co (KO.N) are working on developments ranging from plant-derived plastic to beverages with new textures, as the world's largest soft drink maker aims to stay ahead of consumers' quickly changing tastes. (Click HERE for full story.)
The Great Crate Crackdown
(The Wall Street Journal) Private investigator James Rood watched as a rental truck pulled up to a stack of plastic bread trays behind a McDonald's restaurant.
The truck's passengers jumped out and loaded hundreds of empty trays into the truck. Mr. Rood called police. Shortly after, officers pulled over the truck and arrested two men and a woman, later charged with felony theft.
Mr. Rood, of J.R. Investigative Services in Maryland, is part of a new effort by food companies to stop the theft of tens of millions of dollars a year in hard plastic—the trays, baskets and crates used to deliver bread, milk and soda to grocery stores and restaurants.
Such thefts have become big business over the past five years as the value of petroleum-derived plastic has climbed along with oil prices. The thieves typically take their loot to recycling centers that shred the plastic and resell it. Prosecutors say bandits collect about eight cents a pound in profits. Recyclers resell it for more than 15 cents a pound to manufacturers.
The costs add up quickly for companies. The bakery industry alone loses at least $75 million a year to tray theft, according to the American Bakers Association. The trade group says bakery-tray purchases over the last five years have tripled—a sign bakeries are losing them faster.
JR Paterakis, vice president and principal at closely held H&S Bakery Inc.—which owned some of the trays stolen behind the Baltimore McDonald's—said he got fed up when he realized that his company's tray purchases had tripled in recent years because it was losing so many to thieves. The trays—typically stamped with the owner's name—cost between $3 and $10.
In May, grocery chain Trader Joe's, of Monrovia, Calif., reported to the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department that it lost some $2.5 million of plastic trays to theft over an 18-month period, according to the sheriff's office. Trader Joe's declined to comment.
In Chicago, bakers came together last year to try to stem tray theft by looking out for each other's property.
In Maryland last year, five people were indicted for allegedly stealing $10 million of plastic containers from businesses including H&S Bakery and Rite-Aid Corp., according to the state attorney's office for Prince George's County, Md.
To fight back, companies including H&S Bakery, Coca-Cola Enterprises Inc.—Coca-Cola Co.'s largest U.S. bottler, food company Sara Lee Corp. and Bimbo Bakeries U.S.A. last year formed Combat, or Control of Missing Baskets and Trays. Its initial efforts have been focused in the mid-Atlantic region, but it aims to expand nationally.
In addition to investigating alleged thefts, the group is training employees to guard against theft. It is also lobbying state and federal lawmakers to impose stiffer penalties for such thefts.
"There are huge business disruptions when bakers run out of trays," said Robb MacKie, president and chief executive of the American Bakers Association, which belongs to Combat.
Some theft rings are organized by criminals with international ties, companies and law-enforcement officials said. Recyclers that buy and resell stolen plastic also have drawn scrutiny.
Mr. Rood spent months watching and videotaping G.E.G. Recycling of Landover, Md. Prosecutors allege that G.E.G earned $443,000 in a seven-month period by selling nearly three million pounds of stolen plastic. Two company owners were recently charged with multiple counts of felony theft. Mr. Rood says the company went out of business this month. A company representative couldn't be reached for comment.
Sleuthing by Mr. Rood, a retired Baltimore police detective major hired by Combat, has led to the arrests of at least a dozen theft suspects, according to prosecutors and court documents.
As a cop, "I did shootings, robberies, drugs," said the 60-year-old Mr. Rood, who wears three-piece suits and carries Bushnell binoculars. Now, he said, "I spend every day of the week on plastic."
Sometimes he will stake out a location for days, snapping photos and jotting down license-plate numbers. He often uses rented or borrowed vehicles so he can't be easily identified. He also helped assemble a theft-awareness video that has been shared with other Combat companies and law enforcement.
Professional thieves aren't the only problem. Many companies don't have a sophisticated system in place to track their trays' whereabouts. Also, customers of companies that own these trays and baskets also wind up keeping the trays. "The smaller guys kind of feast on the bigger guys who are buying these trays," said Robert Gonnella, vice president of purchasing at Gonnella Baking Co. in Chicago.
Mr. Paterakis of H&S Bakery recently started sending warning letters to customers saying the trays are H&S property and keeping them is tantamount to theft. He also has enlisted his team of more than 1,000 sales-delivery drivers to report suspicious activities and to capture license-plate numbers and photos when they see anybody misusing the company's trays.
REI: Taking design to new heights
(The Seattle Times) The most creative companies in the world understand that design is about creating experiences that consumers crave. In a new book, "Design Is How It Works: How Smart Companies Turn Products Into Icons," former Seattle Times and BusinessWeek reporter Jay Greene explains how several companies, including Kent-based REI, use design to address needs consumers never knew they had. (Click HERE for full story.)
Maine’s ‘superfruit’ — blueberries — making strides in frozen food market
(Bangor Daily News) This year’s wild blueberry harvest has begun and as sweet and wonderful as the little round berries taste fresh from the fields, producers are banking on capturing the frozen fruit market. (Click HERE for full story.)
Paper Mate has biodegradable pens for back-to-schoolers
(USA Today) It may be less crucial for your kids to have Iron Man or Hannah Montana's images on their back-to-school supplies this fall than it is to have a currently far cooler word stamped on the stuff: biodegradable. (Click HERE for full story.)
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