Wegmans Food Markets is a major regional supermarket chain and one of the largest private companies in the US. It was ranked number one in the Fortune Magazine 2005 list of the ‘100 best companies to work for’. Wegmans employs some 35,000 people and operates 69 stores; these can vary from large stores employing over 600 staff to a smaller stores employing just over 200. Originally Wegmans operated in the North-East of the US (New York State, New
Jersey and Pennsylvania) but its success has led to an expansion southwards in Virginia and
Maryland.
The company’s branding is ‘making great meals easy’. It focuses on all aspects of a successful culinary experience – the serving and setting as well as the preparation and cooking. The emphasis is on the customer experience, and indeed customer education.
Wegmans produces and sends ‘Menu’ magazine four times a year to over a million recipients; this contains advice on products and preparation and cooking techniques.
The business proposition is based on knowledgeable and committed employees at the store who can interact easily with customers and give them advice and support. Product knowledge and the capacity to communicate and share this knowledge are essential. Employee learning is therefore critical to success. To quote Danny Wegman, the CEO in a recent interview:
“Knowledge drives interest and if you are interested in something you pay more attention to it and it becomes more important to you.” (Ref 1 p35)
Here Danny Wegman was talking of customer knowledge. However a desire to encourage staff to gain job and personal satisfaction by expanding their knowledge and skills lies at the heart of the Company’s approach to training and learning.
Yolanda Benitez, Wegmans Director of Training and Development, emphasises two related features of learning at Wegmans. First it must take place close to the workplace and secondly wherever possible be experiential in nature.
Formal classroom training is probably no more than 10 to 15% of the training effort. As
Yolanda Benitez puts it:
“The store itself is the preferred environment in which people learn. They learn from each other, they learn from the suppliers, indeed they learn from the customer. Learning comes from all sorts of different experiences: it happens all the time and in different ways. It is experiential learning that makes the difference.”
The emphasis on store-based learning means that Wegmans must adopt a highly decentralised approach. Learning at the store level is a collaborative effort. Each store has an employee representative (HR generalist) who shares in the responsibility along with the stores management team, under the leadership of the store manager, for ensuring that employee learning takes place. Since most of the learning experience is delivered on-site, the precise

mix of activities are determined at the store level. Many exciting initiatives, mainly relating to extending product knowledge, take place and are shared and communicated across the group. In-house cookery and food preparation demonstrations are held on a regular basis and visits to farms and suppliers are common. Such an approach can only work if there is a commitment to create a learning culture and appropriate structures are in place. The place of learning in the organisation is set by the company leadership and Danny Wegman expressed it in these terms:
“For years we believed in making sure that our employees kept on learning things even if it wasn’t in performance plans. We ask ‘what are you learning this year that will help you improve as a person and as a team member?’ We’ve been doing things like this for so long they’re just a way of life. Its education but you don’t always realise it.” (Ref 2, 35 – 36)
Learning takes place at the store and is managed locally. In addition, each of the Wegmans divisions has a full-time designated Training Co-ordinator. However the structures and templates for training and learning across Wegmans are designed by training & development team made up of Instructional designers, facilitators and leadership trainers. They are responsible for offering, mainly blended, solutions to improve product awareness and soft-skills capabilities – with an inevitable emphasis on customer relationship. Though, as
Yolanda Benitez puts it: “We prefer to talk of knowledge-based service, rather than selling.”
One important mechanism facilitates the progressive acquisition of individual knowledge and skills. This is known as the bubble chart: it is an accessible competencies map which indicates the learning opportunities available through the product ‘Universities’.
The competency levels are set out as a simplified matrix which maps the levels of staff progression (employee or team member, team leader, store manager etc) with product knowledge grouped in five job families (for example meat, seafood, cheese).
There is a core group of five courses required of each family with additional courses required of job families at each successive level. There is a group or common set of requirements that apply to all families: these concern health and safety, sanitation requirements and customer service. These are first dealt with at orientation but are reinforced at higher levels as the employee progresses through his or her career. An Example of an on-the-job recommended learning activity that supports the product knowledge learning is set out in the below:
Pick a product in your department and learn as much as you can about it. It may be a new product or one you are just not familiar with. Taste it or use it, if possible, so you will be able to speak from experience. If it is a food item, learn about how it can be served and what would go well with it. If it is a non-food item, learn about how it is used, or identify other products that are used with it.
The bubble chart is also used in guiding career choice and increasingly for recruitment and broader human resource management.
Yolanda Benitez must ensure that all training materials and tools are relevant and reflect the distinctive Wegmans’ learning culture. Her challenge is to understand the business and

deliver templates that add value to learning in a busy store environment. Her background in the business is of considerable assistance in this role. She must also strive to ensure that all employees have access to information particularly the ‘learnings’ set out in the bubble. The information should be clear to them and offer a gateway to real development opportunities.
At Wegmans, the intention is that learning is fully integrated with the day-to-day activity.
This in Yolanda Benitez’s words ‘is a model that works for us’. Each store reports on a regular basis against a series of indicators. People development is one of these and at present the Training and Development team are working to develop and refine an appropriate metric to capture learning rather than the far less significant course-based activity. However, the place of learning and training was best expressed by Danny Wegman, the CEO.
“We don’t have a formula for measuring that, but we ask ourselves ‘Are we being successful as a company?’ Are we getting good feedback from our people on the various courses that we’re offering? Do they feel they (the courses) are relevant to their success as individuals and as part of the company….Because everything is a learning event for our employees, it’s very hard to capture all that. It’s just part of doing business. It’s the right thing to do for our people so we don’t necessarily track it as an expense”.
REFERENCE
Adapted from Training and Development September 2005 by Bingham, T. and Galagan, P. with permission from the American Society for Training & Development.