FMI ADDS ENERGY CONTENT TO WEB SITE

DAN ALAIMO

WASHINGTON -- The Environmental Protection Agency is expanding its activity in the supermarket industry and the Food Marketing Institute here is adding energy content to its Web site to take advantage of the additional resources provided by the federal agency.

This week, in conjunction with its annual Energy and Technical Services Conference in Cleveland, FMI plans to add a prominent link on its front page to serve as a portal to energy information important to supermarket executives. During the conference, there will be a seminar on how the EPA's Energy Star program relates to supermarkets, said Chad Stark, senior manager, education, FMI.

Also at the conference, the recent award to Shaw's Supermarkets, East Bridgewater, Mass., of Energy Star's Partner of the Year honor will be acknowledged, he said.

"Energy is a huge cost zone for grocery stores. It impacts the bottom line; it is one of their largest expenses," Stark said.

"By participating in programs like Energy Star, as well as the other energy-efficient upgrades and strategies that various retailers are implementing in their stores, it shows a real awareness of the need to become more energy efficient, and the benefits that running a more energy-efficient store can have for the bottom line," he said.

The Energy Star program will play a significant role in the energy-related content FMI is putting on its Web site. The site will include links to Energy Star and other Web sites, and will provide direction on where retailers can find information about energy-efficient best practices and strategies, Stark said.

"We are looking to create a destination for people who have questions about energy management, costs, benchmarking and related issues. It's going to be continually changing destination and we will be hopefully adding links and more and more resources that are relevant to retailers," he said.

The FMI energy page will be a single location where supermarket executives can find information specifically related to their questions and issues. "All this stuff will already be filtered so the retailers don't have to search through it themselves for a source or a document or an article that is relevant to them," he said.

Energy Star is an independent, non-regulatory program at EPA, Stark said. "It's a voluntary business education program that companies can use as a resource. We are working with them to inform our members about the advantages of Energy Star, while they provide our members with information about ways to be more energy-efficient and more strategic in their energy use," he said.

Many people are familiar with the Energy Star symbol that appears on many products, notably electronics like televisions and computers. "They have now created a similar label for buildings," Stark said. One of Shaw's stores and a new Charlotte, N.C., store of Food Lion, Salisbury, N.C., have received this label.

"The industry has already embraced Energy Star, and we plan to use this conference to get the word out to people who may not be aware of the program yet," Stark said.

"The beauty of the Energy Star program is that it is free and voluntary. There are no restrictions put on you that you have to do anything to take advantage of the information. They do ask that if you install some energy-efficient technologies that you let them know, and you let them know what the results are, so they can benchmark it and figure out whether it is really working. But there are no mandates behind any of it," he said.

Energy Star has also created a benchmarking tool that has about 1,800 stores participating in it, he said. "Supermarkets can dump energy data into it and benchmark themselves on energy efficiency against other stores," Stark said.