Buying Local
Buying local is just as important to Albertsons Companies as it is to you.
Albertsons Companies believes buying local means the groceries you buy are as fresh as possible when they reach your table. We’ve spent decades nurturing partnerships with suppliers and farmers in our neighborhoods, helping to create jobs and allowing our communities to grow.
Albertsons Companies works with hundreds of suppliers that offer local products. Each of our divisions has local goods unique to their communities, allowing us to offer the highest-quality products available in each area. Our stores also support local flower growers across the United States.
Buying local has far more benefits beyond your kitchen. Farmers hire workers to harvest, clean, pack and ship their produce, creating jobs and helping communities grow. Working with suppliers in the United States also helps the environment since food doesn’t need to be shipped as far. This limits the fossil fuels used for transportation and reduces the greenhouse gas emissions released into the atmosphere.
Food Safety
We’re proud to sell safe, high-quality products for you and your family to enjoy worry-free. Albertsons Companies adheres to the highest standards in food quality and safety, from the store level up through our national operations. We take a proactive approach to ensuring our products are safe for our customers.
All of Albertsons Companies food manufacturing facilities are GFSI-certified, and we are working toward the same certification for the vendor community that manufactures our private-label products — a goal we have almost reached. To ensure that we maintain the highest standards of quality, we participate in the Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI), a collaborative initiative among food safety experts and service providers from retail, manufacturing, food service and supply chain sectors. The GFSI benchmarks existing food standards against food safety criteria and existing practices.
Responsible Palm Oil Sourcing
At Albertsons Companies, we’re always working to improve the sustainability of our products and consider the impact of the ingredients we use. Palm oil is one such ingredient with well-known environmental and social consequences.
The oil squeezed out of oil palm fruit is used in cookies, mayonnaise and soap, among many other products, and it comes from oil palm plantations based in tropical countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia and Nigeria. Some palm oil production has been linked to deforestation, wetland destruction and human rights concerns, such as child labor and human trafficking.
We are a member of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), an organization that seeks to make sustainable palm oil the norm, and are working with our suppliers toward a goal of using 100% responsibly produced palm oil. Our goal is to have a fully traceable palm oil supply chain free of all destructive impacts. Tracking palm oil from plantation to the final product is complex, and we’re investing time and effort to trace all of it.
We are also in the process of calculating exactly how much palm oil we use in all of our private label items.
Human Rights
People are at the core of our operating philosophy. Our responsibility to care for our community also extends to our suppliers, who play a critical role in ensuring that we manage our business ethically while taking care of those who work for us.
We engage our suppliers in meaningful ways to address human trafficking and collaborate on finding solutions to supply chain challenges. We made big strides in 2013 to address human trafficking risks in our supply chain, surveying our finished good suppliers and working with third-party consultants to analyze and identify risks in our supply chain. With this research, we were able to identify our riskiest suppliers and consider possible solutions. We expanded this survey to ingredients and packaging suppliers in 2014. We plan to revamp the survey to gather even more information in the future and develop a mitigation plan to address the risks identified throughout our supply chain purchasing.
We have worked diligently with human trafficking experts to offer a course for our business leaders, managers and employees. Over 1,000 employees who directly work with our many suppliers have successfully completed comprehensive training.
In 2013, we opted to require an annual refresh on the training for all employees who purchase goods for our company, as well as two quarterly refresh training efforts for new hires and employees who transfer into these roles. Our plan going forward includes updating the survey when needed as well as making the training available to our vendor partners.
GMOs
Albertsons Companies believes you should always have a choice in products that align with your lifestyle and budget. As part of our ongoing efforts to provide you that option, we require that all of our private label-suppliers meet USDA and FDA regulations. To date, the USDA, FDA and available science make no health or nutrition distinction between approved Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) and non-GMO products and ingredients.
Our stores carry more than 45,000 products. This includes approximately 9,500 private label-products, which feature a range of options regarding GMOs. For instance:
- Our O Organics™ line meets USDA organic standards, which do not allow the use of GMO ingredients. We further require that all O Organic™ suppliers obtain third-party organic certification. Our stores also carry a wide variety of organic produce, which is not genetically modified.
- Many of the ingredients used in our Open Nature™ products are non-GMO. We’ve begun the process to obtain Non-GMO Project verification for our Open Nature product line.
Although Albertsons Companies supports the voluntary labeling of products making non-GMO or GMO-free claims, we are also committed to continuing to provide our customers with choices across our many categories and brands.
Learn more about GMOs on our
Position Statements page.
Genetically Engineered Salmon
Genetically Engineered (GE) salmon has been a topic of debate recently. We are not considering nor do we have any plans to carry GE salmon. The seafood products we offer will continue to be selected consistent with our Responsible Seafood Purchasing Policy.
Learn more on our seafood sustainability page.