2020 Outstanding Independents, Sustainability: PCC Community Markets

PCC Community Markets has a deep and long history of environmental responsibility. Last year, the Seattle-area grocer and largest community-owned food market in the nation became the first grocery store in the world to pursue Living Building Challenge (LBC) Petal Certification, the most rigorous green-building standard. The retailer also became among the first to launch compostable deli containers, thus removing 8 million pieces of single-use plastic from the waste stream annually.

Yet while PCC is perhaps best known for its environmental work, it’s also a formidable competitor within the grocery industry, consistently raising standards across all aspects of its business.

In 2019, that included:

• Made-From-Scratch Innovation: PCC is among a dying breed of grocers that still insist on making all of their prepared foods from scratch every day. Each of its 13 stores runs a restaurant-quality kitchen producing 300 made-from-scratch items from original PCC recipes in each store daily. In 2019, the co-op added two new concepts to its already vast array of prepared offerings (i.e., pizza, taqueria, hot bar, soup and full-service deli): self-serve grain bowls and a seafood-forward fast-casual restaurant offering made-to-order dishes from PCC’s sustainably sourced seafood case, paired with local wine, beer and cider. Both have outperformed expectations and provided valuable learnings in operations, customer experience and labor models.