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SR Inc selects Ahold as Charter Member of the Sustainable Real Estate Roundtable

Ahold is an international retailing group based in the Netherlands with Corporate Center offices and powerful consumer brands in the United States, Europe, and Switzerland. With over 2,970 stores and 213,000 employees, the company is focused on innovation to ensure it continues to offer great products, services, and store formats, and stay at the forefront of consumer trends and customer needs. Ahold’s vision is to offer all of its stakeholders – its customers, employees, suppliers, shareholders, and the communities it serves – better choice, better value, better life, every day. They are committed to acting responsibly in all that they do, and hold ambitions of sourcing safe and responsible products and reducing the environmental footprint of their supply chain. Ahold believes that increasing the sustainability of its products means that they aim for them to be grown or produced with consideration for – and responsibility towards – the people, animals and environment involved in their production. They have set four targets in their strategy for sustainable trade to 2015, including:

• Ensuring that 80% of own-brand food suppliers are Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) certified by 2012
• Sourcing 100% of the six critical commodities for own-brand products in accordance with accepted industry certification standards for sustainable production by 2015
• Ensuring that 100% of own-brand suppliers in high-risk countries are audited on social compliance by 2012
• Mapping the environmental footprint of 50% of own-brand suppliers and their supply chains by 2015

In order to meet these targets over the next five years, Ahold has put a program in place to manage certification and auditing programs for product safety and social compliance; has committed to further develop and implement sourcing strategies for critical commodities; and has started to co-develop a tool with The Sustainability Consortium to map the footprint of its products’ supply chain.