The clock is ticking. Convenience stores with 20 or more locations have 11 months to provide nutritional information for any restaurant-style food they serve.
By December, chains must include calorie counts on menus and menu boards, as well as other nutritional data for their foods upon request.
The foods covered by the legislation are “restaurant-type foods.” This includes “something that’s eaten on premise or soon after leaving, and prepared at the establishment,” says Claudine Kavanaugh, nutrition scientist with the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA), the body charged with creating the regulations. It encompasses takeout food, food from menu boards or a hot or salad bar, frozen yogurts, pastries and beverages including coffee.
C-stores must comply if they have 20 or more stores doing business under the same name and offering substantially the same menu items. The rules may sound simple, but this simplicity includes a lot of work, expense and lingering questions for c-store operators.
Under the new law—first enacted as part of the 2010 Affordable Care Act and finally receiving enforceable regulations in November—caloric information must be listed on menus/menu boards or, if no menu or menu board exists, on/near foods. The additional written nutrition may be provided on a counter card, sign, handout or electronic device.
For many retailers, this year will be spent understanding the gray areas of the law.
Determining exactly which foods are included is the challenge for Casey’s General Stores, Ankeny, Iowa. It’s unsure how to handle customizable food, which is a large part of business for this chain of almost 1,900 c-stores, specifically its pizzas and subs.
The chain has provided nutritional information online for about five years. “But one of the challenges we’ll have is how to display the calorie counts not knowing what customers will put on our pizzas or subs,” says Bill Walljasper, senior vice president and CFO.
One option is to have a base food—a cheese pizza, for example—and the toppings with their separate calorie counts (or grouped together if they are the same), so customers can add it up as they go, Kavanaugh says.
Another of Walljasper’s questions is whether the calories must be posted on menu boards, or whether a pamphlet will suffice. It’s the former, says Kavanaugh, though if a store doesn’t have menu boards, it doesn’t have to put them up to comply.
The first step in providing nutritional information is to actually calculate it, and the FDA doesn’t mandate how food is analyzed. In fact, the USDA has a free database (ndb.nal.usda.gov/) that can help, says Kavanaugh.
Convenience stores can also buy software to help them analyze the food, which typically costs less than $200; c-stores are not required to send out their food to have it analyzed, says Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy, Center for Science in the Public Interest.
Though many restaurants opt to have each menu item tested by a third party, c-store operators are largely relying upon suppliers for this. Robinson Oil is expecting to tap its vendors for information, says Kris Kingsbury, marketing and merchandise manager for the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company’s 34 Rotten Robbie stores. She plans to put out a mass request with a deadline “and do it in a format so you don’t have it coming in 15 different ways,” she says.
Others, such as Rutter’s Farm Stores, York, Pa., do it in-house. Jerry Weiner, vice president of foodservice, took on this task several years ago, and it was a lot of work. He gathered nutritional info from manufacturers and compiled it via software. But now, “when we have a new item, I just push it into the template and it’s easy. Now [that] it’s done, the system flows very, very smoothly.”
QuickChek, Whitehouse Station, N.J., added nutritional information into its touch screens about two years ago and on its website about five years ago. It compiled it using a software program that allowed employees to input the nutritional data and portion sizes. “It was a long process,” and it’s ongoing because recipes and the menu change, says director of foodservice Jennifer Vespole.
The good news is this process is far less arduous for c-stores than it is for restaurants, which have significantly larger menus.
Raleigh, N.C.-based Golden Corral hired a full-time nutritional specialist who analyze the menu for two years, says senior vice president of franchising Bob McDevitt. All told, the project totaled nearly $200,000.
Coeur D’Alene, Idaho-based quick-service restaurant Pita Pit outsources its nutritional analysis completely. It pays $10,000annually to the National Restaurant Association’s Healthy Dining Finder, for which its full menu is analyzed, including the identification of allergens. It also receives marketing through the Healthy Dining Finder site (healthydiningfinder.com).
Does nutritional labeling matter? For customers, probably. But how it actually affects their purchase habits is a more nuanced answer.
“Consumers really rely on information to make decisions,” says Kavanaugh. “We’re not expecting this to fix the obesity problem but … it provides consumers with education so they can make more informed choices.”
CONTINUED: The Case Against Labeling
Kingsbury of Rotten Robbie is not convinced.
“With the amount of time consumers have in the c-store, are they going to read it? Our core customers come in and are hungry and food looks good or they’ve had it before,” she says. “I think we’re supposed to be about convenience, and taking time to read about ingredients isn’t part of our world.”
Neil Stern, senior partner with McMillan Doolittle, a retail consulting firm in Chicago, is of the same mind: “In the c-store channel, [consumers are] time-constrained and focused during their trips, so [they are] less likely to be concerned about nutrition information.”
He points to a 2011 study by the University of Minnesota that shows only about a third of supermarket shoppers look at nutritional information; he imagines that figure will be lower in a convenience store due to demographics.
But for convenience stores, it’s important to be on top of such things. Wootan is disappointed that the c-store industry has opposed providing caloric information.
“They’ve been lobbying pretty aggressively to get out of labeling, but at the same time they’ve been working more to compete with restaurants and serve as an alternative to fast food. It seems convenience stores want to have it both ways,” she says.
Ed Burcher, president of Burcher Consulting, Oakville, Ontario, sees this as an opportunity. “It means the c-store industry can make the most of this from a marketing standpoint,” he says.
Deborah Holand, owner and president of Food Sense and a consultant for b2b Solutions, Lake Forest, Ill., believes c-stores should already provide nutritional info, “so when the time comes you’re not caught with your skirt down and finding out everything on your menu is 600 or 800 calories.”
C-stores, she says, “face such a challenge with positive perception that this is a way they can bring customers into the store and compete with supermarkets and quick-service restaurants. This helps them differentiate and gain consumer confidence.”
She also believes this will lead to new customers—especially women—and create new traffic patterns.
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