ShopRite, Hill Phoenix Team for GreenChill Gold
Wakefern Food Corp. and Hill Phoenix, a designer and manufacturer of commercial refrigeration equipment, have joined forces on the new GreenChill Gold Award-winning ShopRite store in the Hatfield Pointe Shopping Center in Hatfield, Pa., which celebrated its grand opening on Oct. 19.
The Hatfield ShopRite is the result of a team effort to combine green refrigeration technologies with merchandising supporting the store’s commitment to organic, local and specialty foods. Representatives from AMF Sales and Associates Inc. in Langhorne, Pa., and Conyers, Ga.-based Hill Phoenix worked with ShopRite to design a mechanical and merchandising plan that would not only fulfill the company's branding mission, but would also meet Environmental Protection Agency GreenChill Gold standards for sustainable refrigeration.
“It is important for us and for the community that ShopRite is environmentally responsible with our refrigeration technology,” said Jim Madanci, director of operations at ShopRite, the banner under which members of the Keasbey, N.J.-based Wakefern retailer-owned cooperative operate. “Our investment in sustainability sends a strong message to our customers, our vendors and our community.”
GreenChill Gold Award certification requires that a store use only non-ozone-depleting refrigerants. It must also achieve an average HFC refrigerant charge of no more than 1.25 pounds of refrigerant per 1,000 BTU per hour total evaporator cooling load, and a store-wide annual refrigerant emissions rate of no more than 15 percent.
“Our gold certification standards are so tough that only 30 stores out of about 36,000 in the nation currently hold GreenChill's Gold-Level Store Certification,” noted Keilly Witman, manager of EPA’s GreenChill Partnership.
ShopRite installed a Hill Phoenix Second Nature MTLTX2 system that combines a medium temperature secondary coolant system using glycol and a low-temperature direct expansion cascade system using CO2 as a refrigerant.
The Hatfield store is operated by KTM Supermarkets Inc., which also owns and operates ShopRite in West Chester, Pa.