Startup Curby’s Aims to Be a ‘New Category Store’

LUBBOCK, Texas – Startup Curby’s Express Market is a new c-store blending the best of many concepts while focusing on craveable food and beverages offered fast and conveniently.

The first location, which opened in Lubbock, Texas, on Feb. 1 with two more stores coming soon, incorporates the double drive-thru and outside order takers of Chick-fil-A, for instance, and the extensive drink menu of a Starbucks while not selling fuel and offering limited indoor seating.

• Listen to a podcast with Jessica Williams discussing Curby’s.

“Curby’s Express Market is a new category store, a place where consumers don’t have to make a choice between convenience and quality,” said Jessica Williams, founder and CEO of Louisville, Ky.-based consultancy Food Forward Thinking, who worked with Curby’s to “bring the menu to life.”

The menu at Curby’s is as eye-catching as its branding, which playfully touts its curbside service with a tongue-wagging dog riding in a car.

Click through to read more about the new store …

Curby’s conducted research and had a general idea what it wanted in terms of branding and foodservicebefore Williams joined the venture about 18 months ago, she said. “I stepped in to take a few ideas and offer creative recipes, source every product, every ingredient,” she said. “We figured out the best way to make it work with multiple equipment suppliers to source equipment, design the layout and create all the job aids and train employees. It's pretty much from start to finish to bring a whole menu to life.”

That menu includes kolaches, burritos, muffins and melts for breakfast, pizza, salads, melts and sandwiches for lunch and later. Williams’ work included creating projections on volume and “every single thing it takes to create a menu, from an idea in your head to selling on day one.”

Williams made several visits to Lubbock to assemble the store’s team, meet with the food distributor and dive into the nitty-gritty details of the “type of ingredients we wanted to offer and make the recipes together in real life. We had three different cook-and-taste validation days. We used Turbo Chef equipment, so their team allowed us to visit and make use of their kitchen chef.”

Williams also worked on the layout of the food area and the food categories, such as morning melts, roller dogs and flatbread pizzas, and determining what would constitute “a complete offer for breakfast as far as a convenient stop for the morning commute,” she said. Although Curby’s had an idea of what they wanted before Williams came aboard, “the menu evolved as we started to work on it.” That work included researching the competition and trends, she said, and the menu evolved over about a year.

Williams said Curby’s has all the basic c-store staples, such as aspirin, and includes a self-checkout option, a traditional checkout option with a clerk, as well as drive-thru or curbside service.

In developing the Curby’s concept, Tony Sparks, who holds the fun title of ‘head of customer wow,’ said he was hired about three years ago by real estate developers Grant Gafford and Brady Collier to run Curby’s. That concept was to create an enhanced customer experience without coming across as upscale, “because that’s not what we want,” he said. “We want to be right down the center as far as the demographic.

“We’re not tethered to fuel, which has a halo effect on foodservice,” Sparks added. “Half of the store is QSR. Anything Dutch Bros. or Panera can do, we can do.”

Curby’s decision to offer limited seating was to make it clear that it’s a “superfast” experience on the inside and outside,” he said. “All our production methods, the equipment we purchased and our process are designed for speed without limiting the quality.”

In addition to hiring Williams, Curby’s hired former Starbucks people to develop the beverage program, Sparks said. “That's why we got with Johnsonville and their culinary team to create our kolaches for us. And that's why we partner with [food distributor] Ben E. Keith's culinary team to help us with all the development process.”

Curby’s has two more stores coming, aiming for eight in the Lubbock market, Sparks said. “But we'll build outside of the local market before we finish the local market.”

In what he acknowledges is “a very ambitious statement,” Sparks said they want to make Curby’s the Shake Shack of convenience in term of disrupting convenience retailing the way Shake Shack disrupted fast casual.

“We want to be a new breed of convenience within the c-store industry,” he said, pointing out four key features with the Curby’s concept: An enhanced customer experience to convenience retailing, which begins “with not being tethered with fuel. Second is the drive-through experience. Third is the enhanced beverage program, which includes a self-serve tea bar with 35 tea dispensers. “And I would challenge anyone in the U.S. to show me a chain that has a better tea program than we do,” he said.

Fourth is the food. “Our primary line of food is our line of melts,” he said. “We decided we wanted to be on the indulgent side, not necessarily on the healthy side. And we wanted to find something that has broad appeal, so that’s where we landed on melts.”

“There are other chains out there doing melts, but nobody in a meaningful way in the c-store space,” Sparks said. “And then the best part about melts is that your product runway as far as development is only limited to your imagination. You can do anything with melts.”

In emphasizing Curby’s not being tethered to fuel, Sparks, who has been in the industry nearly 27 years including time at 7-Eleven and Yesway, said, “I don’t care how good your food is, if you have gas pumps in front of your store, the customer will always think of it as gas station food. Now with that said, chains like QuikTrip and Wawa have elevated the experience, but it does still doesn't matter. It’s not at the same par as QSR or fast casual.”

“People already perceive us as more of a restaurant destination than they do a gas station destination.”

Curby’s, Sparks said, isn’t necessarily reinventing anything but is assembling the various components trending right now in a more meaningful way that gives customers a different shopping experience.

“Foodservice is a category that a lot of smart people are trying to figure out,” Sparks said. “It's a tough math problem to solve.”