Farm Stores: C-Store Opens “Better-for-You” Drive-Thru Besting Restaurants

Chain restaurants made the ‘Drive-Thru’ iconic but it took a convenience store to make a ‘better-for-you’ drive-thru exploiting another chain restaurant weakness, the inability to evolve as fast as the consumer according to Steven Johnson, Grocerant Guru® at Tacoma, WA based Foodservice Solutions®.

Meals, meal components, fresh foods and essentials are what convenience stores are leveraging to garner incremental customers and Farm Stores understands that. In May Farm Stores targeting more restaurant customers will open a new 640-square-foot drive-thru c-store made from repurposed shipping containers, according to CNN. The idea was inspired by owner and CEO Maurice Bared's experience in construction.

Farm Stores opened in Miami in 1957 with a 350-square-foot drive-thru that sold fresh food and dairy products while restaurants made the drive-thru iconic Farm Stores is making it a family three meal platform and fashionable according to Johnson.

Maurice Bared, Farm Stores owner and CEO recanted “In the 1950s, Americans were already going to drive-in theatres and drive-in diners”.  Farm Stores now has 65 locations in Florida. The company became a franchise in 2015 and has a plan for expanding Farm Stores nationwide.

The Louisiana store will be the first to debut the shipping container model, which Bared said is about 40% cheaper than building a store from the ground up. “Bared continued “I had this vision of a Farm Store in a container for two reasons”…. “First, the shoebox layout of a container is the same exact size as our stores. I also grew up in the construction industry with my father having his own business. It’s where I saw the foremen had converted shipping containers into their offices.”

The store is made with two containers, welded into place on a concrete foundation. It features tiled floors, sliding glass doors and a canopy over the roof. The inside includes a baking station and employee bathroom.

The company plans to build all new stores in repurposed shipping containers, and over the next seven years, they aim to have as many as 600 new Farm Stores under development. More than half of those are already underway.   The halo of better for you and family dinners there is nothing new about that; but building it for less while doing good in the minds-eye of the consumers that’s fashionable.

Looking for success clues of your own? Foodservice Solutions® specializes in outsourced food marketing and business development ideations. We can help you identify, quantify and qualify additional food retail segment opportunities, technology, or a new menu product segment.  Foodservice Solutions® of Tacoma WA is the global leader in the Grocerant niche visit Facebook.com/Steven Johnson, www.Linkedin.com/in/grocerant/  or www.twitter.com/grocerant