Sprouts Farmers Market 2015 Annual Report Download - page 13

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Customer engagement is critical to our culture and we place great importance on training our
team members on customer engagement and product knowledge to ensure there is friendly,
knowledgeable staff in every department. Our team members are trained and empowered to
proactively engage with customers throughout the entire store. This includes investing time to
educate them on the benefits of different vitamins, sharing ways to prepare a meal or cutting a
piece of produce or opening a package to offer customers product tastings throughout the
store. We consider customer education and engagement to be particularly important as many
conventional supermarket customers that have not shopped our stores believe that eating
healthy is expensive and difficult.
Our stores are typically staffed with 80 to 90 full and part-time team members including a store
manager, an assistant store manager, eight department managers, five assistant department
managers, store office staff and other team members.
xRecruiting, Training, Development and Promotion. We strive to create a strong and unified
company culture and develop team members throughout the entire organization. We have
prioritized making investments in training that we believe enhances our team members’
knowledge, particularly with respect to our expanded and evolving product offerings, so our
team members can continue to engage and assist our customers. We also have regional
department level merchandisers and trainers who are focused on training team members
within departments and also assist with store and local merchandising strategies and
execution. For new stores, we typically have team members on site approximately three to
four weeks before opening to optimize initial and long-term store performance and customer
service. We also have approximately 100 people in the field as regional support teams in
human resources, operations and compliance. These teams focus on hiring, retention,
training, food safety, security, financial management and other operational best practices. We
regularly perform audits of our stores to assess customer engagement, inventory quality and
control, merchandising and other factors. We believe our team members contribute to our
consistently high service standards and that this helps us successfully open new stores.
We believe Sprouts is an attractive place to work with significant growth opportunities for our
team members. We regularly assess prevailing wages in the markets in which we operate and
offer competitive wages and benefits as we believe active, educated and passionate team
members contribute to consumer satisfaction. In 2015, we promoted approximately 4,800
team members. We also host quarterly Team Member Appreciation Days at each store, hold
town hall meetings between team members and company management and provide our team
members with discounts on purchases in the store.
xStore Size. Our stores are generally between 28,000 and 30,000 square feet, which we
believe is smaller than many of our peers’ average stores. Our stores are located in a variety
of mid-sized and larger shopping centers, lifestyle centers and in certain cases, independent
single-unit, stand-alone developments. The size of our stores and our real estate strategy
provide us flexibility in site selection, including entering into new developments or existing sites
formerly operated by other retailers, including other grocery banners, office supply stores,
electronics retailers and other second generation space. Further, we believe our value
positioning allows us to serve a diverse customer base and provides us significant flexibility to
enter new markets across a variety of socio-economic areas, including markets with varying
levels of fresh, natural and organic grocer penetration.
Our Product Offering
We are a complete food retailer. We focus and tailor our assortment to fresh, natural and organic
foods and healthier options throughout all of our departments.