Hannaford Makes Sustainability Strides
Hannaford Supermarkets, the first U.S. food retailer to use Manomet’s Grocery Stewardship Certification (GSC) program to benchmark its annual sustainability progress, saved more than $23 million, or $125,000 per store, last year through such efforts, according to Manomet, a Plymouth, Mass.-based nonprofit organization.
“The Grocery Stewardship Certification program provides Hannaford with tools to quantify and benchmark how our stores are saving energy, reducing waste and cutting greenhouse-gas emissions,” said George Parmenter, manager of sustainability for Scarborough, Maine-based Hannaford. “We work hard to implement a comprehensive sustainability program in each of our stores and at our corporate headquarters, so that we can minimize our environmental impact. The GSC helps us to do that.”
Hannaford’s sustainability achievements include 78,000 tons of waste diverted from landfills, nearly 97 million gallons of water saved from being used, and more than 261,000 tons of greenhouse gases prevented from being released. The company’s total value of sustainability in 2015 includes an additional $5.4 million in savings from newly measurable practices that weren’t quantified by the GSC in 2014, the year Hannaford joined the program.
“Hannaford was the first food retailer in the nation to enroll all of their stores in the GSC and continues to demonstrate that they are leading the pack when it comes to sustainability,” noted Peter Cooke, Manomet’s GSC program manager. “Now, nearly 700 stores and more than a dozen retailers later, Hannaford has stepped up again with an annual benchmarking to show how sustainability is truly embedded into their business model.”
Run by Manomet's Sustainable Economies program and launched in 2012 as the nation’s first and only grocery sustainability certification program, GSC aims to substantially reduce the environmental impacts – waste, water use, energy use and greenhouse gas emissions – of grocery stores, consumers and entire supply chains.
A Delhaize America company, Hannaford operates 179 stores in Maine, New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont, employing more than 27,000 associates.