Commemorating its one-year anniversary in mid-June, Lafayette, Indiana-based Lucky Mart and its owners have learned several valuable lessons over the last 12 months.
Chief among those lessons is the need to be nimble, especially when it comes to fueling and foodservice operations. As the business embarks on its second year serving its northcentral Indiana market, its retailing vision has become more laser-focused.
On branded foodservice, Singh said when you thrive by offering pizzas and chicken wings with your own proprietary merchandising model, why mess with success and “go bigger.”
Real Estate to Retail
A first-time retailer with career roots in residential real estate, Lucky Mart co-owner Ripam Singh saw the lack of convenience and fuel options on the south side of Lafayette, located about 60 miles north of Indianapolis, and responded. In 2022, he and his father-in-law, Maninter Pal Singh, embarked on the acquisition of a retail property that had gone through multiple business iterations.
The community spoke out against having a gas station in their town due to various safety reasons, said Singh. Many said they don’t mind having to drive several miles to fuel up in other towns, he said.
The store debuted in June 2023, and since the start of 2024, month-over-month sales have increased between 5% to 7%, reflecting all items sold in-store—from foodservice, to impulse, grocery and general merchandise, said Singh.
Singh took a pass on foodservice franchising and opted to introduce a proprietary program at the 1,600-square-foot store. Lucky Mart currently sells about four to five pizzas a day and is looking to grow.
To help enable that goal, Singh established a relationship in May with third-party delivery service DoorDash—seeing it as a vehicle to ramp up pizza, chicken, grocery and beverage orders. At the outset, DoorDash had been only making, on average, two orders per day, but Singh sees opportunity in the platform.
The pizza program, executed as part of an arrangement with wholesale-distributor partner Core-Mark Holding/Eby-Brown (Performance Food Group), currently is unbranded.
Singh is looking to fortify the overall quality of his offer through a slightly revamped recipe along with more cohesive internal branding for a program that, from a daypart standpoint, sees volume strike a balance across both lunch and dinner sales.
Franchising with a national c-store foodservice program doesn’t work for everyone, Singh said.
“It wasn’t advantageous for us,” he said. “Per-pizza price points were twice as much as what we currently offer. A slice is $2.80, while the brand we thought about adopting had a price exceeding $5. Plus, franchisee fees would have exceeded $20,000.”
Singh adds: “The wholesale-distributor route to merchandise pizza is the route we chose for the long term. We’ve worked with Core-Mark from the start, and it’s about better prices and better output. They deliver flash frozen, and all we do is some light prep work and put pizzas in the convection oven.”
Power of One
South Lafayette, Indiana, has about 4,000 housing units in what Singh calls “a pretty dense area. The high school has about 1,500 students.”
While the community has a need for retail fueling, the venture wasn’t in the cards for Lucky Mart, Singh said. “As much as I saw it as a solid way to enhance our business and serve the local community, we opted not to pursue gasoline,” he said. “We had a lot of opposition. Local county meetings were held—and one individual scuttled the effort by riling up other neighbors. We went in front of the county at public hearings and faced a lot of resistance. In March, we opted not to do it. People saw it as a safety issue. The nearest stations [Marathon and Arco] are about three miles away.”
Ironically, Singh said there are rumors floating around that a larger fuel brand is seeking similar approvals to build a new fueling station, a block away from Lucky Mart.
Another lesson learned during the first year in business is that if you’re persistent, good things can happen. “People had been asking for propane tank service from the start, and we jumped through a lot of hoops to finally get it going in May,” he said. “We faced huge delays from the supplier we first engaged with. We eventually found a new propane distributor and have gone live.”
Now that propane tank service is available, Singh sees it as a way to spark inside impulse sales on various items, including foodservice. One way or another, he’s hoping that all his core profit centers can light the way for Lucky Mart during its second year in business and beyond.
Lucky Mart Facts
“Suggestion” merchandising: Everyone is familiar with suggestive selling. Singh flips the script by seeking advice from customers on a regular basis, establishing a running list of items to add to the planogram based on suggestions. The newest hot item to join the mix is Prime Energy. “The younger people in the town were clamoring for it, so we added it,” Singh said.
Many lives for former structure: Built in the 1960s, Lucky Mart had several past lives, including operating as a water-softener company, dog groomer, music studio, restaurant and pizza parlor—the later serving as a nice precursor for things to come.
Painstaking ramp-up: With the property acquired by Singh and his father-in-law in May 2022, the duo hired an architect to design the blueprint, believing it would be a two- to three-month process to get the ball rolling. Instead, they suffered multiple setbacks and delays, much back and forth with both the county and state on matters relating to zoning, easement right of way and more.
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