Giant Eagle remains steadfast in our commitment to create equitable opportunities for our Team Members, business partners, and neighbors. Even though we are always mindful of being at the beginning of a journey, we are encourages by the progress we have made.
We must continue to embrace diversity, together.
We are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive culture that respects all Team Members and creates a space where everyone’s voice is heard and valued. We know that different perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences contribute to a successful business. Our team must reflect the Guests and communities we serve, enabling us to better understand our Guests and feel connected to our communities.
Complete a compensation equity study by race and make necessary adjustments, if they exist.
We completed a compensation equity study in 2021. It showed no systemic differences in pay related to race or gender throughout our company. We remain committed to a recurring cycle of compensation equity studies, the next of which is planned for the upcoming fiscal year.
Help solve food access challenges in our communities.
We made significant strides in understanding which of our existing food access solutions have been impactful to our neighbors. As we experienced growth of the Giant Eagle Mobile Market and our targeted free grocery delivery initiative, we conversely struggles with Guest acceptance of our Community Pickup Point Program. For this reason, we have replaced the Community PickUp Point Program in the communities it has served with the more robust and accommodating benefits of free grocery delivery and have seen positive results.
Still only 16 months since its inception, the Giant Eagle Mobile Market offers more than 550 fresh food items and grocery staples to eight Pittsburgh-area neighborhoods, including: Rankin, Manchester, Homewood, Larimer, Sheraden, Mt. Oliver, Homewood South and Braddock. Across those communities, we serve approximately 150 people each week. TO maximize its impact, the Mobile Market hosted community wellness activities with Giant Eagle Pharmacy and other partners to offer an array of services ranging from COVID-19 vaccines and flu shots to information about Veteran services. More recently the Mobile Market expanded its impact by becoming the only store of its kind in Pennsylvania that accepts WIC as an authorized payment.
Our targeted free grocery delivery service also continues to be well-received by Guests. By waiving delivery convenience fees for Guests across four communities, including Pittsburgh's Hill District and Larimer neighborhoods as well as the Youngstown and Maple Heights areas of northeast Ohio, we are creating incremental access to food for more than 200 people each week.
As we look toward the next 12 months, we are challenging ourselves to both improve these programs for existing Guests and introduce them to new communities. We are learning from each Guest experience and benefiting from the guidance of community partners such as Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank, Catapult Pittsburgh, Just Harvest and others.
Partner with new diverse businesses.
Giant Eagle is actively seeking out and building partnerships with more diverse suppliers. This work is critical because we can leverage our buying power to invest in the growth and development of diverse businesses and therefore the economic well-being of the communities in which we operate. Our relationship with more than 200 diverse businesses allows us to offer products from partners such as Booker's Soul Food Starters, Crazy Horse Coffee, Sierra Sage Herbs, and Casablanca Foods and engage with HBCUconnect.com, Pack Elephant, and Ten10.
In our first three years with this reinvigorated focus on Supplier Diversity, we have learned a great deal about the needs and challenges diverse businesses face. As a result, in the past 12 months we have worked diligently to strengthen our external business relationships and internal Supplier Diversity Councils to better reflect how we support these businesses with a focus on the success those business partners experience when working with Giant Eagle.
Continued education and dialogue.
While it is imperative that our progress be measured in various quantifiable ways, we must not overlook our responsibility to ground this work in an inclusive working and shopping environment. Ultimately, we will only truly be able to end racism when we successfully build bridges between one another. This requires that each of us takes responsibility for building our own understanding of and empathy for our differences and individual life experiences. To that end, we continue to conduct annual Team Member inclusion surveys to understand the unique perspectives of our diverse workforce and the sense of belonging each Team Member feels. We nurture our Team Members through an ever-growing framework that begins with a true sense of ownership among company leaders. In recent months, the entire Giant Eagle executive leadership team participated in a learning session led by a diversity expert.
Our Commitment
We committed to Stand Up Against Racism in the wake of the tragic killing of George Floyd in 2020, as well as so many others after him. These murders led us to deeply reflect on racism and social injustice. We remain steadfastly committed to doing what we said we’d do, and there is so much learning and hard work ahead of us. We thank all those in our organization and across our communities who make an impact and help us along our journey.