Seventy percent of consumers link store cleanliness to food freshness.
“You can’t go in the foodservice business if you’re not clean,” said Cameron Watt (pictured), president and CEO of Intouch Insight, speaking at CSP’s Outlook Leadership conference. “It’s not an option. It’s not cosmetic. It shapes perceptions.”
A clean and tidy store makes people believe retailers have food safety standards, said Watt, who covered this and other subjects during his presentation.
“It’s that simple, right?” he said. “If you want to be in foodservice and think you can have a dirty location, it’s not going to work, and we put a lot of focus on that and on a number of our things, including studies. In fact, we all know that consumers, particularly female consumers, may even choose whether they’ll buy gasoline somewhere based on if the washroom is clean. They’ll go across the street and pay a couple pennies more [for a clean washroom].”
The c-store industry has been getting significantly better over the years in this area, Watt added. “We got to keep focus on it,” he said at the event on Aug 20.
Tech and youth
Watt said he finds it interesting that in 2025, younger age groups, such as 18-24, 25-34 and 35-44, are using cashiers more, he said.
“The younger demographic, who are trying to avoid talking to people, actually are seeing cashiers more in the last year than they were before,” Watt said. “Now, based on the people who live with me in my house in this age group, I don’t think that age group has all of a sudden decided, ‘I would like to talk to people more.’ I think it’s because they also prioritize speed of service, and if they feel like the self-checkout’s not fast enough, they will prioritize speed and they will go see a cashier.”
This data shows Watt that, “potentially our self-checkout isn’t delivering on some of the promises for speed, and so people are going the other way.”
Loyalty
Loyalty is no longer giving away a discount or collecting points, Watt said.
“It is personalization, gamification, it is engagement,” he said. “It drives your traffic count, it drives your basket size, drives your brand, health and loyalty.”
He added that 72% of consumers are enrolled in a convenience loyalty program, “and 85% would be more likely to join if rewards were personalized.”
Yet, he said, “It’s interesting to me that barely over a third of the locations we went to did the cashier talk about it, mention it, make it a priority of the till.”
He added, “We can have all kinds of strategy, but if you don’t operationalize and execute on that strategy, it’s meaningless. And I think everybody agrees that loyalty is very important, that probably loyalty program somewhere is very important, that there’s value, that there’s return investment, and yet operationally, the industry is not acting like it at the store level. So that’s something to think about.”
Apps
In app utilization, Watt said that only 57% of mobile pickup customers saw an upsell offer compared with 64% in drive-thru and 75% on premise.
“We were upsold more in person in the store than we were in the app,” he said. “You could program an app, right?”
With modern technology, including AI, not only should a customer be upsold 100% of the time through an app, “but it should be upselling me based on what I’m currently buying and what my buying patterns have been in the past,” Watt said.
“We’ve got to look to our vendors and our technology and make sure that we’re using that to the best of our ability because there’s definitely some gaps,” he said.
Intouch Insight, Ottawa, Ontario, is a customer experience solutions provider. It also conducts CSP’s Mystery Shop audit.
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