Ring the dinner bell!
Consumers in search of an evening meal to grab on the way home have been finding the answer at their local convenience store.
In the past year especially, more c-stores are offering quality cuisine for their guests’ evening meal and as an alternative to fast-casual and quick-service restaurant (QSR) meals. Family favorites include pizza and fried chicken. A main dish and a few grocery items to complete the meal at home are also successful for some retailers. After languishing in the shadows of robust breakfast and lunch traffic, the dinner and late-night dayparts appear to be a growing opportunity for c-store foodservice sales and profits.
C-stores have been slowly but steadily building a reputation for offering healthy and tasty foods, with breakfast leading the way. But the COVID pandemic changed customer habits and time-of-day visits, shifting to later in the day. It’s essential now to tell consumers your store offers dinner solutions.
“It’s been a very interesting trend to watch, the dinner daypart pre-pandemic vs. today,” said R.J. Hottovy, head of analytical research for Placer.ai. “Evening is up in c-stores. It’s the opposite for restaurants, which see breakfast and lunch up and dinner down.”
Hottovy said chains seeing the most success are those that offer more prepared meals and are making their food platforms more accessible, often through order ahead for pickup options. He said c-stores are using lessons they’ve learned from QSRs and making changes, including adding drive-thrus, curbside pickup and delivery.
While Hottovy noted prepared meals are key, some retailers—especially Lacrosse, Wisconsin-based Kwik Trip—also satisfy a desire for grocery items, such as fresh meat, potatoes, bread, milk and other dairy, fresh fruits and vegetables to take home and prepare a meal.
Despite that, Paul Servais, foodservice director, said Kwik Trip has not seen a shift in daypart food sales, with breakfast and lunch still strong. “The dinner daypart is very hard to conquer in our industry,” he said.
- Kwik Trip is No. 11 on CSP’s 2023 Top 202 ranking of convenience store chains by store count. Wawa is No. 9, Campbell Oil Co.’s Minuteman Food Mart stores is No. 115 and High's is No. 118.
Kwik Trip has more traction selling ingredients than prepared meals.
“It could be that we have been at this piece longer than take-home meals,” he said. “Our bakery and dairy are a big advantage for us because we produce milk, bread and buns that go from production to the store in 24 to 36 hours. Not many can do that.”
Kay Segal, founding partner of the Business Accelerator Team, works with c-store operators to enhance their success in all categories.
“I think when you talk about the dinner daypart, you have to ask, ‘Who is the competition?’ It is not other c-stores,” she said. Segal said retailers should ponder who and what consumers think of first. “Then we can structure how to compete.”
For the dinner daypart, in particular, “everything is your competition,” according to Servais. All categories of restaurants and even grocery stores are fighting for hungry consumers. To grow sales at dinner time, he said, “We are throwing everything at this.” Kwik Trip menu options include fresh foods to take home and prepare, as well as take-and-bake pizza, whole baked pizzas, fresh fried chicken, roasted chickens and take-home meals, including pasta dishes.
“We’re figuring out dinner solutions for people when they’re on their way home.”
Researchers say marketing and digital tools like app-based order-ahead options help drive success in the dinner daypart. And don’t overlook opportunities inside the store to drive customers to the dinner offerings, including signage and menu boards.
Bounteous, a digital experience consultancy, conducted research in 2022 on the dinner daypart in convenience stores. Results highlighted the importance of understanding how consumers want to interact.
“C-stores have been making the investment in food, and now the challenge is to think like a QSR and how to market to consumers,” said Gary Weyel, senior director of marketing. That means “being on a consumer’s screen.”
Weyel said the biggest challenge for convenience stores and dinner is determining what’s most appropriate for the brand. He cited the summer introduction of a pizza program at Wawa. “The chain spent years perfecting it before bringing it to market,” he said. For its part, Wawa said in a press release that its pies are built to order and available from 4 p.m. to 3 a.m. in stores open 24 hours. The pizza program followed a 2022 launch of an enhanced dinner platform with the Wawa burger and fries and has since expanded with dinner salads, crispy chicken, dinner sides and more.
It’s one thing to offer dinner foods, but it’s critical to tell customers about it, Weyel said.
“Good marketing will bring bounce-back from existing customers, and it’s also a way to reach new customers who might not know the store offers dinner items.” Understanding when a consumer thinks about what to have for dinner helps. The Bounteous survey of 887 consumers found that 52% thought about dinner on the way home from work. C-stores are well-positioned to be the choice for an easy pickup, Weyel said.
However, more than half of those surveyed questioned the quality of convenience-store offerings, with healthy choices a key concern. Yet 87% responded positively to the prospect of c-stores offering more QSR-style meals. Many c-store chains take the healthy challenge seriously and have joined Partnership for a Healthier America (PHA), which has a goal of ensuring healthy foods at affordable prices in all communities. PHA recently featured Sheetz, Kwik Trip, Enmarket and Loop Neighborhood in an article about healthy foods for the evening/dinner daypart, with a focus on fresh-made foods low in calories and fat.
32.3% of 7-Eleven store traffic visited in the evening hours (5–11 p.m.) in the second quarter of 2023, compared to 30.7% in second-quarter 2019, according to Placer.ai.
Kwik Trip’s ready-to-eat top sellers in the evening are pizza and fried chicken, Servais said. Other retailers echo the success of pizza and chicken at dinner time and later.
Chris Postlewaite, senior director of retail at Campbell Oil Co.’s Minuteman Food Mart stores, said same-store year-over-year growth in the dinner daypart is considerably up. While he wouldn’t reveal an exact number, he said growth is double digits. The chain based in Elizabethtown, North Carolina, operates seven Little Caesars Express sites that offer a limited menu of pizza that’s hot, ready to eat, grab and go. “We’ve had such success with the Little Caesars brand recognition that we’ve signed an agreement for 12 more,” he said. Not all the 62 Minuteman Food Mart stores across the Carolinas have space to accommodate a Little Caesars.
Postlewaite credited a proprietary offer of a 14-inch pizza, 10 wings and a 2-liter bottle of soda for $16.99. “We pulse it in and out,” he said, eight weeks at a time.
Fresh-made chicken and pizzas are popular dinner items at High’s Dairy Stores, a mid-Atlantic chain of 60 stores in and around Baltimore and a few in Pennsylvania. Never-frozen chicken that’s breaded by hand is served as a meal with hush puppies and a side, or in eight- or 12-piece buckets.
“We have a chicken happy hour promotion from 3 to 9 p.m. that’s been very successful for us,” said Sherryn Diamond, High’s director of foodservice. “We offer an eight-piece bucket of chicken for a super price, and we advertise at the street to bring people in,” she said. Besides banner signs, the special is promoted on radio, digital ads and in High’s loyalty app. High’s added a 14-inch pizza with the bucket of chicken that’s also been selling well. “We’re figuring out dinner solutions for people when they’re on their way home, and it’s gaining traction,” Diamond said.
She said High’s doesn’t offer premade meals for customers to take and heat. “We haven’t cracked the code on that, but I think there’s a huge opportunity there, so we continue to research and test different options.”
Brad Chivington, senior vice president for High’s, said the company’s premium hand-packaged ice cream is a popular option to add to a take-home meal. High’s also wins customers with its expanded fountain beverages, he said, with proprietary flavors like mango habanero lemonade and blueberry lemonade vitaminwater.
C-stores are well-positioned to be the choice for an easy pickup.
Suppliers also see opportunities in the dinner daypart for c-store partners, and it isn’t just about ready-to-eat foods. “Operators should be prepared not only in foodservice, but in grocery and center store,” said Jon Cox, vice president of retail foodservice for distributor McLane Co. and former merchandising and marketing manager for GetGo Cafe + Market, the c-store arm of Giant Eagle Grocers. “You need to have larger bags of chips, something to go with a meal, and make it convenient to pick up,” he said. “I believe it’s about convenience and having the right products available.”
Variety of products also gives convenience stores a competitive advantage over QSRs, Cox said. “Make sure you’re doing things throughout the store to tie it all together,” he said, including making sure the restroom is clean. “People will associate the cleanliness of your restrooms with the quality of your food.”
As distributor McLane works to bring more fresh food options to its partners, it launched McLane Fresh at its annual trade show in August. It also recently hired Farley Kaiser as senior director of culinary innovation. Kaiser is a classically trained chef with experience at GetGo Cafe + Market, Wawa and QSRs such as Buffalo Wild Wings. “She’ll help us plan innovation as we add more options in the pipeline for McLane Fresh,” said Alicia Downard, director of communications and public relations.
Temple, Texas-based McLane serves convenience stores, mass merchants and chain restaurants with more than 80 distribution centers across the country.
Dee Cleveland, director of marketing for Hunt Brothers Pizza, said the dinner daypart is prime for whole pizza sales. “While our store partners offer both made-to-order and grab-and-go pizza options during all dayparts, the customizability of our made-to-order whole pizzas offer a perfect option for consumers who simply are not in the mood to make dinner themselves,” she said.