Grocery stores are a vital piece of our communities. But they also consume a significant amount of electricity and generate several streams of waste from plastics to organics to cardboard. Even though they may see potential benefits and rewards in implementing sustainability initiatives, as a whole, the industry’s margins are between 1% to 4%, translating to low profits.
With this challenge, most medium-sized or regional chains are solely focused on controlling costs and making sure they don’t go over budget. Key focuses for controlling their costs include: ensuring hours of operations are consistent, budgets are dependable and predictable, visibility into equipment failure is maintained and emerging regulations are managed.
One regional grocery chain understood that by having visibility into their operations, they could monitor their resources (gas, electricity, water and waste) to manage costs more proactively and ensure their equipment was functioning properly. Additionally, many stores - which operate independently - were facing regional regulations around waste management, they wanted a third-party partner that could help manage and monitor all these initiatives as they focused on serving their local communities.
Already a long-standing partner of ENGIE Impact, the regional grocery chain trusted ENGIE Impact’s teams to leverage their utility and waste data to help create reports that would give them visibility into their usage. The partnership resulted in the following reports and initiatives:
The partnership allowed the regional grocery chain to gain full visibility into their operations, verify the initiatives they implemented are saving money, monitor equipment and predict when they would need to be replaced or scheduled for maintenance and be ahead of any emerging regulations.
In the last six years, the regional grocery chain has saved time and resources so site leads can focus on more urgent business needs, driving the following results:
of the total savings are from monitoring and energy initiatives
waste diversion rate due to increased visibility into their waste streams (up from 20%)
contracts negotiated for corrugated and film recycling
With the benefits of these initiatives being reported and monitored, the regional grocery chain can pivot their business strategy if needed, further optimize their operations, and comply with regulations all while saving money and alleviating some of the margin pressure they face.
Let's discuss how resource optimization can increase cost savings for your grocery chain.