Beat the heat - and high prices - with SM Supermarket‘s fresh and cool offerings Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Source: The Philippine Star 
Make your own fruit salad at the fruit cocktail bar of SM Supermarket. Photos by FRANCES CRISOL
MANILA, Philippines - Have you noticed how green-minded a lot of people have become? Well, green is certainly in. And the fresh news is that shoppers get the freshest greens at SM Supermarket.
Why, it’s a vegetarian’s dream come true!
At SM Supermarket, your salad days have just begun. If you want organic greens and other organic foods, they’ve got it all at SM. But just what are organic foods? The USDA describes them as those produced without using antibiotics, hormones, pesticides, fertilizers made with synthetic ingredients or sewage sludge, bioengineering or ionizing radiation. Certainly, you wouldn’t want to put these harmful chemicals into your body.
Going Organic
It was in the early 2000s that SM Supermarket started going organic at its branches in Makati, Megamall, Southmall, Sta. Mesa, and Cubao. Soon, its sister supermarket Savemore Market Mezza also took on a deeper shade of green.
Going organic is part of SM Supermarket’s efforts to retrofit evolving consumption trends into the stores with customer satisfaction in mind. Constant dialogue with shoppers validated that the organic market is growing exponentially, given the trends towards health consciousness and environmental protection.
Available are 100-percent organic vegetables under the brand name Organiko. There are organic amaranth spinach, Taiwan pechay, pechay Baguio, romaine lettuce, kailan (Chinese broccoli), cabbage, cauliflower, carrot, wansoy (coriander), celery, cucumber. You’ll go bananas over the organic bananas. And when it comes to herbs ad spices, SM’s herb it all for you, too. Ripe for the picking, too, are the assorted dressings to go with your green salad.
To ensure that the products it carries are according to the production standards of organic foods, SM Supermarket works only with suppliers who have organic certification. These suppliers are either certified by the Organic Certification Center of the Philippines (OCCP) — an independent, private, membership-based organic standard setting — and organic certification body or PilCert.
It’s In The Greenbag
In its desire to cater to its shoppers’ needs and to sustain its efforts to save the environment, SM Supermarket encourages the reduction of plastic bag usage through its environment-friendly SM Greenbags and My Own Bag Day at the stores. It has also switched to energy-efficient light bulbs in all the branches.
Did we mention climate change? With the temperature rising, SM Supermarket has come up with cool ways to beat the heat — and for shoppers to beat today’s high prices, too. Let’s start with the cool shaved ice (P30 per cone) with sprinkles, fruit syrup, and available in blueberry, green apple, cherry, grape, strawberry, and bubble gum flavors.
“Or try our yogurt,” Supervalue, Inc.’s marketing manager Leah Lee and assistant marketing manager Grachel Binag, invite us. “We have frozen yogurt, yogurt smoothie, yogurt float.”
At only P60/cup, you get one free topping for your yogurt. You can choose from an assortment of fruit toppings, mini marshmallows, rice crispies, chocolate chip cookies, mini choco droplets.
With a lot of fruits in season this summer, you’ll have a field day choosing from the selection of fruity treats at SM Supermarket’s fruit shelves. There are cut-up, ready-to-eat fruits (melon, watermelon, honeydew, dragon fruit, pomelo (a best-seller), ripe mango, and green mango, which comes with its own bagoong. Grab some and take home to your family.
If you’d rather drink your fruit, have a fresh fruit shake using only the freshest fruits. And if you prefer to drink your salad, go ahead and have a salad drink (P35/cup). Or have a refreshing glass of lemonade (P35).
If you’re feeling corny, hop over to the corn section, where you can order either the corn kernels in a cup with cheese or buter or fresh corn on the cob.
There are salads to go for only P50/180 g — buko salad, buko pandan, chicken potato salad, chicken macaroni salad, tuna macaroni, buko corn.
At the fruit cocktail area, you can make your own fruit cocktail — simply choose from the many cut fruits and toppings.
Ready To Eat, Ready To Cook
Aside from the ready-to-eat goodies, there are the ready-to-cook ingredients that let homemakers cut the long hours they spend cooking while helping them cut corners. The selection includes ready-to-cook sinigang mix, chopsuey, pinakbet, and ubod mix.
From the takal-takal section, you can choose odds and ends of ingredients you need for cooking — at just the right portions you need and the right price. There are marinated foods ready for grilling.
There are vacuumed packed vegetables that are hard to peel like kamote, squash, gabi, and ube.
Quite a boon to budget-conscious (but who isn’t?) housewives are the products that fall under the name SM Bonus (vis-à-vis the branded ones).
For instance, at the SM Bonus veggie section, you can buy a kilo of sayote for only P27, pechay for only P23/830 g, white onion for P16.87/456 g, garlic for P27.55/284 g, tomato for only P6.02/376 g, okra for P8.53/328 g, squash for only P10.98/578 g, eggplant for P24.20/526 g, ampalaya for P25.39/552 g, etc.
Family Bonding Time
Going to the grocery on weekends has become family bonding time — no longer a chore but a fun experience where parents, along with their kids, happily push cartloads of groceries. Since kids love making trips to the grocery, SM’s chain of hypermarkets has thought of getting them involved in grocery shopping. This time, preschool kids in Metro Manila will have a different kind of learning outside the classroom – a first-hand experience at the grocery store.
A community related service of SM Hypermarket, the Master Shopper program is an educational trip for preschool students at the nearest SM Hypermarket. The kids go on a grocery trip to the nearest branch, listen to a basic nutrition lecture on the food pyramid, and start a tour of the store, specifically sections for fruits, vegetables, bread, live seafood, meat and chicken, milk and juices, cereals, vitamin supplements, and toys.
At SM Hypermarket, the kids realize that groceries do not just provide food and drinks. Grocery stores offer vast choices of healthy and nutritious food for the kids and whole family. They soon learn that fruits are sources of vitamins and nutrients and bread, a good source of carbohydrates, gives energy. Also, green leafy vegetables are good for the body and seafood is a good source of protein. They further learn that milk is good for the bones as it contains calcium, that vitamins should be taken as supplementary diet, and candies and chocolates should be eaten in moderation.
After the tour of the store, the kids together with their teachers, parent, or guardian play a game called Master Shopper. Divided into three groups, the kids are given a budget to shop for nutritious items. The group that manages to shop for the most items within the allocated budget wins.
The kids will also have a first-hand experience in cashiering — they stand at the checkout counter and scan the bar codes. The program then ends with the awarding of certificates of participation, loot bags, and “Hyper Kid” special award, plus the winning group for the Master Shopper game.
Started last year, the Master Shopper program has begun to engage communities where SM Hypermarket, which now has 19 branches, operates. Recently, preschoolers from the Little Kids of Isaac visited SM Hypermarket Makati. Everyone had fun — the kids, their parents, and teachers. The kids actively participated during the whole tour and were very receptive of the different learning stimuli presented to them.
SM Hypermarket plans to invite more schools like the Little Kids of Isaac to the Master Shopper program in the areas near the branches. Master Shopper is SM Hypermarket’s way of giving back to the community by teaching the kids the value of proper nutrition in a fun and enjoyable way.
SM is certainly not kidding when it says they’ve got it all for you.
