The top brass at Ahold USA has fostered diversity initiatives—a crucial component of any successful diversity management strategy, according to the experts. For years the catalyst for that has been Bill Grize, who recently retired as president and CEO of Ahold USA. Grize displayed a “real passion” for making the business more diverse, according to Emerson Foster, Director of Talent Aquisition for Giant/Giant of Landover.  

“Back in the mid-1990s, Giant was building more stores in urban areas,” recalls Foster. “We made sure we were casting the net as wide as possible to staff those stores, and wanted to do right by the communities in which we operated. Bill Grize’s vision and leadership during that time really allowed us to gain a strong focus. You have to walk the walk, and Bill definitely did that.”

As the company staffed its growing store count, it added more management-level positions within those stores, as well. That gave Giant an opportunity to give new employees more responsibility and a better career opportunity, says Foster. “More than 200 assistant store management jobs were open, and we went headstrong to make sure we had a significant impact in bringing in women and people of color. In fact, in that group of 200-plus positions, we recruited more than 50 percent women and people of color. We really looked at that as an opportunity to start changing the makeup of our business.” 

The focus on diversifying store operations extended to the corporate level, too. “We tried to go after both levels as far as recruiting, although I’d say we may have had more impact at store level,” notes Foster.

Grocery as a career
One of the retailer’s challenges was that people of color didn’t necessarily see the supermarket industry as a destination point. That’s why it was so important to have minorities represented in management positions in stores where these students live, explains Foster. “We decided we wanted to convert 80 percent of the interns to employees upon graduation from college. Since 1999 we’ve met or exceeded that goal every year.”

Ahold’s partnerships with community groups and organizations such as the NAACP and the Urban League have yielded great dividends in this initiative, according to Foster. Giant has built relationships with smaller groups, too, such as the New Hampshire Cultural Diversity Council (NHCDC). 

“New Hampshire’s population of color has probably grown at a faster rate than the overall population,” he explains. “The group brings in middle-school students to a ski resort around Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, to conduct cultural diversity awareness training. We work with them and provide trainers. Our folks have done a great job in putting that program together.”

Another way Giant has gotten its name out in more diverse communities, such as Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, is by advertising job openings in the Bay State Banner, an African-American-run community newspaper in Boston. The retailer even profiles one or two of its current minority employees in the paper.

“We want the community to see that we have people like them in every area of the business,” notes Foster.

Internally, Giant’s minority employees meet frequently in informal settings to discuss their jobs and the company. The diversity roundtables, as they’re called, started in 1997 when five African-American employees got together for dinner and talked about how they could help the company to become more diverse.

“We wrote up the minutes from the meeting and sent them to Bill Grize,” says Foster, who was one of the attendees of that initial meeting. “We told him we were going to meet once a month. He said he wanted to meet with us, and that’s basically how the roundtables were started.”