WASHINGTON -- Food Marketing Institute here said it will give its 2004 Maximizing People Potential award to Raley's, West Sacramento, Calif., for the company's human resources initiatives aimed at identifying and training exceptional assistant store managers to prepare them to become store directors.
Supervalu, Minneapolis, for an initiative at its Shop 'n Save division in Pittsburgh that seeks to educate associates about perishables merchandising.
According to FMI, the Raley's program encompassed several aspects, including:
A talk by Bill Coyne, the chain's president, chief executive officer and chief operating officer, on the importance of lifelong learning and leadership, followed by workshop sessions with other chain executives and department managers on sales planning, perishables marketing, advertising, energy management, employee relations and legal issues.
A project entitled "Sell-A-Grand/Save-A-Grand," in which each participant was asked to develop a selling initiative that would result in $1,000 of incremental sales and a cost-reduction initiative that would result in $1,000 of savings on an expense item.
Classroom instruction on situational leadership and building an individual development plan.
On-the-job training based on a manual that set learning objectives, leaving it up to the participant to determine how to complete the training.
Tours of the chain's support facilities, with each tour ending in a question-and-answer session.
Doug Shorey, senior training manager at Raley's, said training assistant store managers "is an area we identified as a priority, and we put a lot of effort into making the program a top-notch vehicle for meeting our company's leadership needs and for recognizing individuals who we believe will be our next generation of store directors."
According to FMI, the Bi-Lo diversity initiative was designed to create and maintain a process for managing diversity, with a focus on individual development efforts, diversity roundtables and affinity groups, youth education programs, workforce retention initiatives, supplier diversity and ethnic community involvement.
The Shop 'n Save program seeks to educate employees in such areas as produce science, product care and handling, produce identification, customer service, and management functions that affect sales, gross profit and expenses. It is taught in two, eight-hour classes.
