New Technology Help C-Stores Compete with Restaurants

 

Retail foodservice technology continues to evolve in every sector of retail foodservice.  Convenience Stores today are selling more and more fresh prepared Ready-2-Eat and Heat-N-Eat grocerant niche meal and meal components blurring the lines between restaurants, grocery stores, and C-store even more.

According to Steven Johnson, Grocerant Guru® at Tacoma, WA based Foodservice Solutions® Digital ordering and delivery has grown 300% faster than dine-in traffic since 2014

  

1.       Recent Grocerant ScoreCards found 82.3% of consumers don’t know what’s for dinner at Noon, and 61.1 don’t know what’ s for dinner at 4PM %.

2.       Roughly 66% of consumers purchase prepared food items from a retail location at least three times a month.

3.       83.1% all dinners have at least 1 grocerant niche Ready-2-Eat and Heat-N-Eat meal component and 68.4% have two meal components.

4.       When asked if they wanted to cook dinner from scratch or assemble dinner from fresh meal components 90.4 % of Gen Z chose assemble from Fresh Prepared Meal Components and Millennials 82.7% chose meal components.

5.       Seventy-three percent of retail prepared food purchases are taken to go

6.       Prepared food purchases are frequently a planned purchase among 59% of shoppers, while 41% of shoppers said they buy prepared foods on impulse. Dinner has the highest amount of prepared food buys with 79% of respondents making purchases for that meal, while lunch comes in at 77% and breakfast at 62%.

7.       55% of consumers would like to try autonomous EV delivery

Today, more and more delivery aggregators and online-only platforms are moving quickly into the convenience store market, recently, Paytronix Systems announced that Paytronix Handoff is ready for c-store retailers to manage digital ordering information across all channels.

Get this, Handoff is designed to make it easy for retailers and restaurants to publish a menu of items out to the various delivery aggregators and then manage inbound orders through a single tablet or point of sale (POS) system. Burring the line for customers as everyone can easily be on one platform great for the consumers, challenging for some food retailers.

So, Handoff provides c-stores with complete control over how items are viewed, described and priced, regardless of through which channel those items appear, including on DoorDash, Uber Eats, Postmates and GrubHub. This helps c-stores add incremental sales to each location while streamlining operations, ensuring order integrity and increasing customer satisfaction.

According to data from Edison Trends, convenience store online spending grew by 346% in 2020, outpacing growth in both grocery and restaurant categories. The same report notes that DoorDash is a big player in the market.

Paytronix Handoff works with the most popular POS systems and leading third-party digital delivery platforms to:

·         Eliminate the need to continually check multiple tablets for information;

·         Digitally connect third-party aggregators with internal POS systems and store operations;

·         Provide a single point of entry for all online orders as they come in; and

·         Enable store-level employees to more easily manage stock digitally, thereby increasing customer satisfaction.

Paytronix CEO Andrew Robbins, stated, “The c-store market is changing rapidly with third-party delivery platforms and online-only companies focusing on 15-minute delivery of center-store items,” ... “Traditional c-stores, with great locations on major transportation routes, have an opportunity to truly own this new order-ahead and delivery ecosystem, but they need the right systems in place to make it happen. Paytronix Handoff, and the full Order & Delivery offering, gives c-stores what they need to grab incremental sales and successfully compete against delivery-only brands.”

Paytronix enables rapid processing of digital orders. It has an easy-to-use ordering interface, digital ordering management tools, more than a dozen POS integrations and great loyalty integration. In addition, Paytronix has established partnerships with premier third-party aggregators.

This is no one trick pony, through one-to-one engagement with more than 285 million guests via Order & Delivery, Loyalty, CRM and Stored Value, Paytronix delivers artificial intelligence features that motivate increased visits and spending throughout the customer journey.

Are you looking for a new partnership to drive sales? It’s just might be time to consider Paytronix.  Are you ready for some fresh ideations? Do your food marketing tactics look more like yesterday that tomorrow?  Visit GrocerantGuru.com for more information or contact: Steve@FoodserviceSolutions.us Remember success does leave clues and we just may have the clue you need to propel your continued success.