Grocery and Retail Campaign
Securing Quality Jobs for Supermarket Workers
and Access to Healthy Food for All Communities

For more info on the Alliance for Healthy & Responsible Grocery Stores visit: http://www.goodgrocerystores.org Fact Sheets Supermarket Chains’ Broken Promises To Poor and Minority Communities A Missed Opportunity for the Supermarket Industry Major Supermarket Chains Neglect South and East Los Angeles The Major Supermarkets’ Abandonment of the Inner City and the Impact on Communities Other Related Materials Coalition One Page Info Sheet Industry at a Crossroads Report

In September 2006, LAANE began working with the Alliance for Healthy & Responsible Grocery Stores – a coalition of community, faith-based and labor organizations committed to ensuring that the Southern California grocery industry provides access to healthy foods in all communities, is a source of stable, middle-class jobs, and is environmentally responsible.

An important strategy for the grocery campaign is development of a policy to mitigate the problems of redlining, which leaves low-income communities without major grocery stores or access to quality, healthy foods. LAANE’s plan represents, in part, a response to the fact that all major supermarket chains in the regional market are planning to expand, yet the locations for their expansion are in relatively affluent areas already well-served by markets. Since virtually every new supermarket must apply for a Conditional Use Permit (CUP), LAANE proposes that the L.A. Planning Commission and City Council add a condition to the CUP application requiring compliance with anti-redlining and food and job quality criteria.

LAANE and the Alliance for Healthy & Responsible Grocery Stores are also urging major grocery chains to sign Community Benefits Agreements that would guarantee job access for local residents, good jobs, healthy food, and more stores in neighborhoods chronically ignored by the industry. TESCO – described in a recent report as the “Wal-Mart of the U.K.,” – is planning to open hundreds of “Fresh & Easy Neighborhood Markets” across the Southwest United States within the next year, including over 60 in Southern California alone. Despite their much-publicized promises, however, they have slated very few of these markets for areas suffering from an absence of healthy food options and they have refused to make firm committments regarding job quality for their employees. The Alliance, therefore, is demanding a Community Benefits Agreement that will guarantee they develop stores in underserved communities, provide good jobs for local residents, and establish substantial environmental protections for the neighbrohoods they serve.

The Alliance for Healthy & Responsible Grocery Stores has made its demands known to Tesco and has mounted a campaign organizing community support for the proposed CBA.