Food waste is the No. 1 subject that causes convenience-store retailers angst, said Dee Cleveland, director of marketing at Nashville-based Hunt Brothers Pizza.
The industry standard for waste averages about 11% to 12% of one’s overall food cost, Cleveland said. C-store operators can reduce food waste by fully understanding and following the recipes, a strategy that works well in restaurants, she said.
Combating food waste isn’t just following recipes, however, and requires a multifaceted approach. Other experts who spoke with CSP also emphasized the importance of leveraging data and investing in employee training.
One way Hunt Brothers makes following recipes easy for c-stores is by providing color-coded measuring cups and recipe cards, Cleveland said.
“It says, ‘Go to the red line when you’re doing sausage, go to the green line when you’re doing olives or what have you.’ So super, super easy,” she said.
Be sure to follow a recipe
It’s important to talk with employees and help them “understand the benefits of preparing their food product the way it’s written,” Cleveland said, adding that employees will sometimes think they’re being “a customer’s best friend” by adding extra toppings or slices of cheese. “They’ll pile it a little higher, thinking, ‘Oh, you’re going to be my friend, you’re getting a delicious product.’”
However, not following a recipe can backfire and diminish a product’s quality and taste, she said.
“There’s a lot of energy and momentum that goes into making the perfect sandwich or perfect pizza, and letting the dough rise and the cheese melt and the toppings cook, and so oftentimes those unintended consequences occur,” Cleveland said.
Part of managing food waste is balancing having a robust, appealing amount of food on a warmer versus having too little and causing a picked-over, unappealing presentation.
At Chicago-based InConvenience Inc., Erin Slater, category manager for food service and tobacco, said they pull data from their back-office system, Petrosoft, to manage what food to put in the warmers when. “We can look at item-level sales by store by hour,” she said. “This helps us create a store-specific schedule for the warmer.”
However, as of November 2025, none of the chain’s c-stores, which are under The Gas Spot and The Goods Spot banners in Arkansas, Iowa and Missouri, had been open a year, making analyzing data and seasonality a bit difficult, she said.
“We don’t have a baseline because we aren’t able to track data year over year at this point,” she said. “We do a lot of week over week or month over month comparisons. I also rely on industry data/articles to compare how we are doing versus others.”
Analyze why food is being tossed
Mendy Meriwether, vice president of foodservice practice at Des Moines, Iowa-based consulting firm NexChapter, said retailers should not simply track what’s being thrown away, which is reactive, they should instead analyze why it’s happening, which is strategic.
The “whys” could be offering a menu that’s too complex or having a labor shortage that might encourage producing extra items early rather than reproducing in time—leading to a loss of freshness and making too much product, she said.
“Who owns waste?” Meriwether asked, adding that there must be shared accountability across operations, category teams and store teams.
“It’s shifting from end-of-day reporting to a bit more proactive design, rightsizing the assortments, focusing on your production schedules and utilizing real-time data that’s available to act before you do, to understand what your situation is going to be for the day—and react accordingly,” Meriwether said.
InConvenience is still developing its menu and improving consistency, Slater said, and reminding employees that some waste is OK.
“I have some stores that try really hard to have no waste, and I’m trying to educate them that we are a convenience store, and so we need to have product in that warmer so when people come in, they can grab it, pay for it and go. They don’t want to wait,” Slater said.
She said some managers lean toward making an item after it’s ordered. “That’s not the program that we want to be on,” she said.
Reduce facings, heighten replenishment
Meriwether said other ways to balance a robust case versus having one looking picked over is by reducing facings and heightening replenishment. “You can make sure your cases are looking full without overstocking,” she said.
For example, if a retailer has a cold case that holds grab-and-go sandwiches and knows the weather is going to be poor the next day, they can make fewer sandwiches and fill out the case with complementary packaged beverages, Meriwether said. Doing this reduces the amount of facings of sandwiches so the retailer isn’t overordering and sustaining high levels of waste at the end of the week.
At Atlanta-based RaceTrac, Tony DeSerto, director of hot foods and dispensed, said he wants to encourage and build a culture of employees being comfortable recording waste without fear of getting into trouble, such as if they accidentally dropped a case of eggs, because it’s better to know than it is to not know.
“That is how we will continue to establish and leverage technology to build better planograms, offers, production planning, automated ordering—all the other levers that can give our operators all of the resources they need to be well merchandised in the times and dayparts that are needed,” he said.
When mistakes do happen, it’s the data points and understanding of what happened, why it happened and when it happened that will give the support side and the category management side insights, he said.
For example, DeSerto said, they might see that purchases by a specific c-store are very high. “And we can go in and identify that, and there are ways to better leverage how you record the waste. Was it overproduction? Underproduction? Was it damaged?”
‘You can’t manage what you can’t measure.’
DeSerto said if they see elevated purchases but decreased sales, it will have them asking what happened. “And if you don’t have ways to offset that, there’s a problem,” he said.
To keep foodservice areas looking well stocked and not picked over—while been cognizant of food waste, DeSerto said this balance “is really about following the presentation standards and the guidelines” that are provided to all RaceTrac stores.
“We have presentation minimums set based on store volume,” he said. “Once a store hits their minimum presentation standard, this triggers a cook, and all items we have across our planograms have hold times that we set based on quality sensory audits,” he said, adding that once a pizza hits the hold time, it is removed and recorded electronically as waste. “These data points help us understand how to best forecast production, purchasing and item-level success.”
He added, “We never sacrifice guest experience and ensure we base all our hold times on sensory/quality thresholds.”
Keeping a record gives the support team data to know how many are sold per hour at different times of the day, peak and non-peak times—and how many should be produced, he said.
“During our peak and during our busy times of our high volume, that is when we will have a more robust set,” he said. “But otherwise, we got to be Goldilocks. You’ve got to be just right at all the times. Nobody wants to grab that last slice.”
Reward stores that hit waste goals
Meriwether suggested rewarding stores that meet their waste targets. She also suggested repurposing some near-expired products into limited-time offers “to bundle meals and get that business.”
When measuring food waste, Meriwether said, be relentless and report it across the organization to provide awareness and learnings.
“You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” she said. “If you’re tracking it by category, you’re reviewing it weekly, you’re having collaborative calls with ops teams to see what the problem is and how you improve. It creates visibility, accountability and improvement.”
Adhering to time and temperatures in recipes also is important to control food waste, Cleveland said, and not ensuring a product gets ample thaw time can lead to problems.
“It’s basically reading what needs to be done and following it,” she said. “It sounds simple, but it’s so much harder because it’s one of many of their jobs.”
‘We never sacrifice guest experience and ensure we base all our hold times on sensory/quality thresholds.’
If an employee doesn’t thaw a product accordingly, it might come out undercooked—or it might come out undercooked on the inside and overcooked on the outside, she said.
Cleveland said if a retailer told her they never waste product and always have just enough in their warmer, she would tell them, “You’re missing out on sales, because there’s no way they’re going to get that perfectly at zero each and every day. As a c-store owner, you have to know that you’re going to assume some waste, which is why we go in and we build our numbers at 7% and tell a c-store owner 7% waste is a very healthy number.”
This 7% number, lower than the industry standard of 11% or 12%, is because Hunt Brothers Pizza comes topped with cheese, the most expensive ingredient, and sauce, eliminating a c-store employee adding too much cheese and creating waste, Cleveland said.
She said they tell c-store retailers that if they want to sell pizza and build credibility with their customers, customers need to know they can trust that the c-store is going to have pizza in their warmer at the time the customer wants it.
“That c-store owner should be looking at areas in their business that they get most traffic: breakfast, the 10 o’clock snack hour, the lunch hour, the 3 o’clock after-school hour,” Cleveland said. “Really watch that and monitor it, and then you can start building what we call cook-to charts, so that at 3 o’clock you typically get a rush of traffic and are going to go through 20 Hunks of pizza. Let’s get it ready so when consumers come in, you’re ready for that—and so really understanding your store traffic is key to know how to fill your warmer.”
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