SunStop convenience stores is very cautious when rolling out good-for-you offerings.
“We’ve thrown away a lot of salads and wraps and kind of realized that, as you've seen the data and you talk about looking at the insights, you see that those sales are declining overall in the industry,” said Madison Malone (pictured), food and brand manager at Bainbridge, Georgia-based Southwest Georgia Oil. Co., which owns SunStop convenience stores. Malone spoke June 19 at CSP’s C-Store Foodservice Forum in Schaumburg, Illinois.
However, SunStop has tried to take advantage of some of the things it already sells, calling out the high-protein and good-for-you offerings, Malone said.
“We all sell beef jerky,” he said. “Those things are high protein and GLP-1 friendly.” He said
GLP-1 drugs initially used to treat diabetes—and now also used to help lose weight—are “having a profound impact on how consumers allocate their food and beverage and nonfood spending,” according to a report from Chicago-based market research firm Circana.
- Southwest Georgia Oil Co. is No. 88 on CSP’s 2025 Top 202 ranking of U.S. c-store chains by store count.
In response, SunStop has started carrying GLP-1-friendly offerings, Malone said, adding that they’re calling out these items to people.
“I think we should probably blast out on social media and say, ‘Hey, GLP-1 friendly. We have what you need here to help,’” he said.
SunStop is also leaning into bundling these items, he added.
“Instead of the traditional coffee with a biscuit, we’re doing a cheese stick with a bottle of water,” Malone said. “Aggressively pricing it, something simple, but that’s what people are looking for.”
Aside from GLP-1 products, Malone said, “We still have a fried chicken, that’s our main driver.”
SunStop also sells baked chicken daily.
“We’ve added to our hot case a protein sticker that says ‘Power up with protein,’ and it calls out how much protein is in our baked chicken, how much protein is in our fried egg, because that’s something that—we sell a lot of fried eggs—people might not be thinking this is a healthy product, but it is. It’s a fried egg.”
Malone added that it’s too soon to say if these callouts have made a difference.
“This is a relatively new thing for us for the past few months, but with the whole grab-and-go items, it’s a completely new rollout of items,” he said. “ So, we’re definitely going to see some improvement in sales."
In terms of an off-ramp with salad, Malone said they’ve removed salads from grab-and-go cases and have worked with their distributor to shrink the pack size of lettuce.
“Now we use lettuce for our subs only, and other sandwiches and stuff,” Malone said. “We don’t have a 5-pound case of lettuce, we have a 2-pound bag of lettuce.”
Malone added that they examine the balance of their healthy offerings, “because we’re a Southern comfort destination, but Bubba has a daughter, and Bubba has a wife, and they might want to eat something else.”
Looking forward
Malone said SunStop wants to be more of a food-forward destination.
“We really want to become a destination for food first and then gas and smokes and Cokes second,” he said. “We’ve trained all of our district managers as kitchen managers now, so we’re really hands-on from the top down. I’m really excited to see how that trickles down throughout the stores and shows itself on the bottom line.”
About 23% of regular sales currently come from foodservice at SunStop, a number they’d like to get above 30%,” Malone said, adding, “I’d like to shoot for 35.”
“It's going to be exciting to see how we can get there as a team,” he said. “Really fun, exciting times at SunStop to do that.”
Though there also are concerns, he said. “Obviously labor issues, we all worry about that, tensions overseas, supply issues, production and all that kind of stuff, but I think that as an industry as a whole, we’ll be OK,” he said. “Pressure makes diamonds. I think we’ll all come out OK, and I think we have some smart people in the industry on our side. So it will be all right.”
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