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Accelerate America Awards
PERSON OF THE YEAR: PAUL ANDERSON, TARGET
Leading the way
P
aul Anderson, senior director of engineering for Minneapolis, Minn.-based Target, has a penchant for taking a leadership role with natural refrigerants. That started in 2014, when Anderson announced at the ATMOsphere America conference in San Francisco that Target, the iconic U.S. discount retailer operating more than 1,800 stores, would use a hybrid CO 2 cascade system as its prototype refrigeration system in new PFresh outlets. Target thus became the first U.S. retailer – and the second in North America after Sobeys in Canada – to make a public commitment to running a system in new stores and major remodels based in large part on an environmentally friendly natural refrigerant. (See “Why Target Opted For CO 2 As its Prototype,” Accelerate America, February 2015). Since then, Target has installed the cascade system, which uses CO 2 DX as the sole cooling agent for low-temperature cases and R134a DX for medium-temperature cases, in 11 stores scattered across the U.S. Moreover, over the past year, the chain has gone beyond the prototype, installing an all-CO 2 transcritical systems in a store in Marin City, Calif., with plans to install one in a Minneapolis store in August. Anderson has also taken the lead with another natural refrigerant – propane (R290). In September 2015, he and Keilly Witman (KW Refrigerant Management Strategy) gave a presentation at the Food Marketing Institute’s Energy & Store Development (E&SD) Conference on the potential for hydrocarbons in supermarket display cases. (See “Hydrocarbons: The Refrigerant of the Future for Supermarkets?” Accelerate America, October 2015.) The following month, representing Target at a White House-hosted meeting in Washington, D.C., he announced that all new stand-alone coolers in its stores with a compressor capacity below 2,200 BTU/hr. would be HFC-free starting in January 2016. That month, he sent a letter to all of Target’s
Paul Anderson, Target
display case suppliers stating that the chain would require propane to be used in those coolers. “Our vendors have done a fantastic job supporting our journey to hydrocarbons,” he said at last month at ATMOsphere America 2017 in San Diego, during the food retail panel discussion (see page 30). Last year, at the ATMOsphere America conference in Chicago, Witman said that Target (and by extension Anderson) had spoken to contractors that might be working on propane equipment about the chain’s expectations. “Target said, “Here’s where we’re going; we need you to be able to handle that,” she noted. Today, nearly half of Target’s more than 1,800 stores have some kind of R290 case in it, from small checkout coolers to medium-sized wellness coolers to full-sized display cases, with plans to Accelerate America
June-July 2017