ALTOONA, Pa. -- Demonstrating that convenience retailers are making their presence felt in the foodservice arena, Sheetz Inc. recently launched a new advertising campaign promoting the theme that it is a restaurant chain, as well as a convenience store and gas station chain. With five new commercial created by Tattoo Projects, the brand aims to inform 16 to 24 year old guys that it's "the place to be," said Adrants.com.
And the campaign achieves this with whacky spots that feature oddities such as a beard growing contest, a dude becoming a bird, the Force ripping a girl's clothes off, a guy who becomes a super hero and other oddities. All of which support the tagline, "just because we don't look like a restaurant, doesn't mean we're not one."
Watch the commercial below, and click here to see all five commercials.
In late January, Sheetz shot new commercials at its new Wendell, N.C., location a few days before the store officially opened, the company said.
With more than $5 billion in annual revenue and more than 14,500 employees, Sheetz operates 412 locations throughout Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland, Virginia, Ohio and North Carolina. It provides a menu of Made-To-Order (MTO) subs, sandwiches and salads, which are ordered through touchscreen order point terminals. All Sheetz "convenience restaurants"--that's the phrase it has been using to describe its retail outlets for several years--are open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
C-stores have been upping their foodservice game and are increasingly giving restaurants a run for their money, according to recent reports (see Related Content below for previous CSP Daily News coverage).
Chicago-based industry consultancy Technomic found that average unit volumes for c-stores offering prepared food and dispensed beverages ("true foodservice") jumped to more than $136,000 in 2011, up from $123,000 in 2007. The better-than-10% growth rates were based on roughly the same number of stores offering foodservice, indicating that operators are becoming better at foodservice expansion and execution.
"Convenience store foodservice has made tremendous inroads in terms of experience, consumer choices and execution," said Tim Powell, director of c-store programs at Technomic.
Pennsylvania, where Sheetz is based, has an abundance of "progressive" convenience stores that are spearheading a national trend toward emphasizing foodservice over gasoline sales, Jeff Lenard, spokesperson for the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS), recently told the York Daily Record. As gasoline and cigarette profit margins have steadily dropped, c-stores have turned to foodservice sales to bring in revenue, he said.
Monica Jones, a spokesperson for Sheetz, told the newspaper, "Anybody who is in this arena is trying to become more broad based, more diverse. They want to be able to offer as many different things as they can.
York, Pa.-based Rutter's Farm Stores--which operates 56 c-stores throughout central Pennsylvania--already calls the foodservice areas in its more than 50 stores in the region "restaurants," Scott Hartman, Rutter's president and CEO, told the paper.
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