The last several years have seen a surge in technology and equipment enabling convenience stores to have fresher foodservice and quicker prep times—and consequently increase sales.
Some of this technology helps maximize sales by ensuring there are no lost sales. Some tools, for example, aid with production planning so teams understand when to do different tasks throughout the day to achieve higher sales and revenues overall, said Billy Colemire, who was vice president-marketing and brand, at Boise, Idaho-based Stinker Stores, when interviewed for this story. In March, he joined Majors Management, Lawrenceville, Georgia, as senior director of fresh food, dispensed beverage and loyalty.
“Imagine a customer walks up to a cold case or a hot case in a store or warmer, and it’s half empty,” Colemire said. “What kind of perception does that give to the consumer? If we’re leveraging AI tools, our store teams know to have that cold case or that warmer hot case full during the right periods with the right items.”
The c-store chain is working on a pilot program in about 20% of its stores with Atlanta-based UpDog, which offers an artificial-intelligence program that monitors roller grills with a camera.
Mike Abelson, director of sales at Inteladata, which owns UpDog, said, “Foodservice operations often lack the data and tools that consumer-packaged goods (CPG) operations rely on daily. UpDog bridges this gap by providing real-time insights into sales, waste and employee engagement with the grill, empowering operators to make data-informed decisions that enhance store level execution and drive sales.”
According to UpDog, the toolset:
- Analyzes sales patterns, time of day and traffic trends to create tailored strategies for each station, ensuring optimal product placement and preparation.
- Conducts real-time monitoring, ensuring grills are consistently stocked, clean and compliant.
- Drives accountability and motivates employees through engaging, gamified tools that enhance performance and boost job satisfaction.
The result of this analysis and monitoring includes the c-store receiving a roller-grill score (pictured above) showing how many dollars of extra sales could have been achieved over any number of days if the grill had been operated more efficiently, Colemire said.
‘You need your suppliers to have the technology to track the trends, throughput and items so they can help.’ - Steve Morris, Retail Management
Steve Morris, president, Retail Management Inc., said newer foodservice tech and equipment is removing labor and/or improving operational efficiency and reducing waste. Retail Management Inc. handles the operations, marketing and accounting functions for small-format retailers including convenience stores.
“It’s improving the ROI [return on investment], and I can prove that I’m using less, throwing less roller grill product and coffee away—and reducing labor because I don’t have to make coffee every 30 minutes,” he said.
During the labor shortage crisis of the pandemic, technology helped make more tasks automated or something a customer could do, he said. “Bean-to-cup is the perfect example,” he said. “Industrywide, think about that impact to labor.”
Another change Morris sees is the evolving palate of c-store consumers—and he wants to see technology help with that.
“How do retailers stay on top of those flavor trends and product profile trends?” he asks. “You need your suppliers to have the technology to track the trends, throughput and items so they can help.”
Morris said some of the smaller operators—10 stores or fewer—with whom he works didn’t hear about last year’s hot honey flavor craze because supplier partners weren’t sharing that data; he would like to see software that helps this group stay appraised of flavor and product-profile trends.
He added, “Anything that can assist operations in the execution of food—doing more with less and/or be more efficient with what I have—is going to be front and center for me.”
Another piece of equipment to help reduce labor, and product quality, is a self-brixing fountain machine, which “calibrates itself on your syrup ratio,” he said, adding that bad syrup ratio leads to a profitability problem and a customer service problem “because the product doesn’t taste right.”
Multi-Cook Oven
Back at Stinker Stores, Colemire said there’s another machine with which they are very happy: Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin-based Alto-Shaam’s H4H Multi-Cook Oven (pictured above left).
“It has four independent chambers, so it’s almost like four different ovens because each chamber has its own time, temperature and fan settings,” Colemire said. “It’s super easy to use.”
“My favorite part is it air fries better than any other piece of equipment I’ve used, and it’s given us the ability to remove fryers from our stores as we do remodels or scrape-and-rebuilds,” he said. “Fryers do great things, but there’s more risk that comes with using fryers and hot oil, especially when you think about the cleaning aspect.”
He added, “We anticipate having that oven in all of our stores in the near future.”
Time Saver
Another piece of software is the Foodservice Production Management Program from PDI Technologies, Alpharetta, Georgia. Sara Wilson, foodservice category manager at Jacksonville, Florida-based Gate Petroleum, said her company switched to this back-office software about four years ago—and about two years ago started using a foodservice module production plan.
“This gives us a data-driven build-to for our stores,” she said. Previously, Gate had to pull sales and waste data by store and by item and use an Excel program to organize the numbers. They then would give each store a manual hourly build-to order report—for all 72 stores and for all items sold.
“It was very time consuming,” Wilson said.
With the PDI program, Gate was able to get “a data-driven forecast broken down in half-hour increments for the store at the beginning of the morning,” Wilson said. Starting at 6 a.m., the program outlines what needs to be made for the entire day based on sales history from the past couple of weeks. “You can make it anywhere from a two-week history to about a 10-week history.”
It can be as detailed as, “Between 10 [a.m.] and 2 [p.m.] you historically have sold 25 of these, so make 25,” she said.
“Over the past year it has tremendously helped with our purchasing,” she said, adding waste has been greatly reduced as stores make items when actually needed. The program also has helped with scheduling employees.
‘This gives us a data-driven build-to for our stores.’--Sara Wilson, Gate Petroleum
Turning to equipment, Wilson said the food labeling system DateCodeGenie (pictured above right), from the National Checking Co. (NCCO) in St. Paul, Minnesota, has helped over the last couple of years with printing on-demand labels and creating labels for foodservice items, sanitation buckets and more.
While the printers were more expensive than their old ones, Gate is saving money in the long run because the labels with the old system had to be specially made. Now, the new company has the label size they need.
“We can put any graphics on there,” she said. “On top of that, it’s a tablet, so we’re able to put our web-based program on there. It’s all right there in the kitchen for them.
“This is a vast improvement from the one that we had before,” she said, adding they’ve had “95% less problems with breakage.”
In addition, Wilson said, there’s an iCloud service that enables looking at a printer from afar, allowing immediate changes such as to ingredients, price, weight—anything on a label—as well as training documentation.
“We used to have this big book which was called the Kitchen Bible,” she said. “It was a 4-inch binder. All of that now lives in our DateCodeGenie and our cloud. It has training videos, procedures, documentation, recipes. [Employees] can read through any instructions they need and can access it at any time.”