Using a “very intense data approach to business,” convenience-store chain OXXO replaced 400 SKUs being sold at the DK c-stores it acquired a year ago early in the rebranding process, Hal Adams, managing director of OXXO USA, told CSP on an exclusive store tour Oct. 1 in Lubbock, Texas.
“Using data to make merchandising decisions is part of the capabilities we have adopted from Mexico,” added Adams.
Assortment segmentation and store segmentation are “all very data heavy with processes that have been developed in Mexico that are proprietary to them,” he said.
Monterrey, Mexico-based FEMSA, which owns OXXO c-stores, purchased 249 stores from Brentwood, Tennessee-based Delek US Holdings in October 2024, marking its entrance into the United States. It started rebranding c-stores in February, focusing on the Midland-Odessa and Lubbock metro areas in West Texas.
OXXO has its own proprietary software to analyze sales data, Adams said. It shows what products are trending and which aren’t. It also analyzes pricing and how competitive OXXO is with other stores.
Adams said OXXO “can use the data that we have on our stores saying what sells, what doesn’t, what sells in this neighborhood, what sells in that neighborhood,” Adams said. “So, right away we were able to delist 400 items and bring in 400 other items.”
Hispanic products
“Our customers, because we’re OXXO and because they know we’re from south of the border, one of the things they love about us is the Hispanic products that we can bring into the marketplace,” Adams said. “The easy hits were, for example, beloved brands from Mexico of candy, and these are candies that you would typically find in an OXXO store down in Mexico. So, bringing those in and making them available is a big deal to a lot of the customers who were looking forward to OXXO coming into their neighborhood.”
Adams said they have been “very surprised and pleasantly surprised with how familiar our brand is, even in places like Midland, Odessa and Lubbock, Texas.
“What we found is there’s a lot of people that come from Mexico up to Midland, Odessa, to work in the oil fields,” Adams said. “And, so, OXXO is a familiar brand to them.”
But, Adams said, OXXO is also familiar to people like him, “who have traveled a lot to Mexico and to South America on vacations and to the beaches. And we see OXXO while we’re there. It’s interesting how many people know what OXXO is. Maybe we have different relationships to the brand. Maybe we’re not so endeared to the brand or we understand what it is, but maybe not totally familiar. But when OXXO comes to town, it’s not a totally unfamiliar brand.”
‘Quiet approach’
Adams said that OXXO has “taken somewhat of a quiet approach to our entrance so far because, first of all, we’re just figuring out what the brand is going to look like. We’re just cementing what the brand is going to mean in the U.S., so before we had that all figured out, there was no reason to really shout that we’re here.”
OXXO has 249 stores in the U.S., but only 50 have been rebranded, “So, we’re kind of in that tipping point of waiting to where we have some mass to begin talking to people about OXXO and who we are.”
When OXXO is ready, it will be using social media, billboards and other forms of promotion, Adams said.
“It’ll all be market specific,” he said. “We’ll have a whole integrated campaign when we’re ready to talk. Currently, we have a really popular loyalty program called the Easy Coins that we adopted from DK.
“We have over 400,000 regular users,” he said, adding that OXXO has been making changes to the program, which OXXO eventually will rebrand “to something that fits OXXO’s personality better, but to date this is a great way for us to talk to individual customers.”
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