Community Outreach at Wegmans

Responses to Wegmans as a company have been overwhelmingly positive. The company has achieved cult status and appears to be viewed as an alternative to other high quality grocery chains, such as Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s and Dean & Deluca. Multiple Buzzfeed articles have been written about how wonderful Wegmans is, including “Why Wegmans is the Greatest Supermarket the World Will Ever Know.”

            Wegmans has a website called ‘Wegmans’ community giving’, which has four main tabs: giving priorities, which lists the areas Wegmans is most concerned with in a community, donation requests, food bank requests, and community giving stories.

            Since opening, Wegmans has donated 16 million pounds of food. Wegmans regularly sponsors school breakfasts for children in need. Wegmans is also concerned with children’s health in other ways: they regularly sponsor fitness events in their communities. When Hurricane Sandy hit, Wegmans donated thousands of dollars and rounded up volunteers to help rebuild areas that had been damaged. The company has also funded autism research and built science labs for schools in the surrounding areas of each store. Wegmans has a lot of scholarship opportunities for local children looking to attend university. They also regularly fund culinary school for interested students.

How Wegmans Uses Social Media to Make Me Hungry (and Jealous of People Who Have Wegmans)

Chocolate covered strawberries? PUT THEM IN MY MOUTH.

The first picture that popped up on Wegmans' Twitter account, which has almost 89,000 followers, was these chocolate covered strawberries, fresh and bursting and covered in sweet, sweet chocolate. Reviewing Wegmans' feed (pun intended) literally left my stomach grumbling, and I'm no foodie or connoisseur.

Wegmans doesn't need much advertising: food sells itself. All they need is a good platform for some pictures of, oh, I don't know, say...

 OM NOM NOM.

a Thanksgiving feast, and they have a million people not only on Twitter, but also on Pinterest, Youtube, and Facebook liking and sharing their posts. Their Youtube also shows some pretty tantalizing dishes. Wegmans does a good job of presenting their products in a way that attracts customers -- their food just looks good, and that's going to sell.

Check out Wegmans' blog, Twitter, Pinterest (extra yum on this one), and Youtube, and make yourself extremely hungry.

You know you want to. Wegmans does food porn the best.

First Post!

Hi! My name is Tom Adams. I'm a PR student studying Wegmans, Inc. I chose Wegmans because I grew up in Rochester, New York, and my mom is a chef who swears by their store (in fact, she's written several letters lamenting the fact that they haven't made the move to Connecticut, where she currently resides.)

Wegmans is an interesting company with a great reputation for being a good place to work and for having solid business practices. As such it's an exemplary model of good PR.

I think that growing up with the store will give me a unique vantage point in studying its PR and marketing tactics.