Consistent execution.
That’s the right way to win in convenience-store foodservice, according to Tina May, senior category manager at Allentown, Pennsylvania-based CrossAmerica Partners.
“It is really being consistent, having that food available seven days a week,” May said Aug. 4 at CSP and Informa Connect’s Outlook Leadership event, held in Rancho Palos Verdes, California. The session, Spicy Takes 4.0: What Retailers Really Think, was moderated by Jeffry Harrison, co-founder and president of St. Louis-based Rovertown. “It’s not a Monday through Friday, 6 to 2. You have to have it there when the customer is in your store, because everybody knows that if a customer comes in once and you don’t have something, they may come back again. The next time, they’re not going to.”
May said it is important to get one’s team involved—and the product must be consistent all the time. The menu should also be simplified, she said.
“We can’t make it complicated for our employees to have to execute, because if I can’t explain it to you, it’s going to be hard for them to explain it to the customer,” she said.
CrossAmerica Partners mostly has grab-and-go offerings, including a trilogy of “Joe” offerings, May said. There’s a breakfast croissant called Joe Daddy; the Joe Mama, which includes a jalapeno mango sauce; and a third offering that's yet to be announced, she said.
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Adam Sparks, chief operating officer at G&M Oil Co., Huntington Beach, California, said even though their foodservice program is probably more limited than those of most attending the session—there’s a lot of thaw and heat and into the warmer case—that doesn’t mean foodservice is easy.
“We still struggle with that, so we’re really focusing right now on limiting the menu to just bestsellers,” Sparks said. “We were trying to cook too many things, so we took the menu down, got a little bit more prescriptive with it.”
They scaled back to give employees “something they could execute easier, trying to give them some tools around production planning—and then just keeping it stocked for when the customers are in there,” he said.
Sparks said they have grab and go or some sort of foodservice program in about 175 in out of 222 locations. May said they have it in about 120 of their 352 stores.
Faheem Jamal, director of operations at New Paltz, New York-based Chestnut Market, said they have foodservice in about 20 of their 67 locations.
“We’re growing, and foodservice, admittedly that’s something that we’re looking to continue to grow, but what we’re learning as we do grow is being consistent and being able to execute what we do put out [is] effective, so that way the customer knows what they’re gonna get every time they go to Chestnut.”
Jamal said they’ve found that showcasing a complex item—something that “seems super fancy and is delicious”—helps drive sales.
One example is a hot honey chicken on a waffle sandwich, he said.
When they promote an item such as this with signage and sample it to customers, Jamal said, “They’re like, ‘Wow, if they can do this really well, their regular chicken sandwich has to be really good, too. Maybe I don’t want this, but that one, if they can pull that off, then that empanada's gotta be good.’ So, we’re about putting a showcase item out there, and then the consumer usually trades to something that they’re more comfortable with.”
Sampling is huge for Chestnut Market, Jamal continued, adding that it gives customers the opportunity to experience their food “where people don’t typically trust us with food just yet. It allows new consumers coming in to taste the sandwiches and say, ‘Wow, this is actually really good,’ and we’re hoping that it continues to translate to more and more sales—and we do see it because when we track the sample hours, we can see our foodservice sales go up.”
The sampling area is usually at the front door, he said.
“Somebody walks in, somebody's gonna greet you with a sample: ‘Here, try this,’” he said.
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