Grocerant niche Ready-2-Eat and Heat-N-Eat fresh prepared food
along with mix and match grocery offerings will drive continued customer loyalty,
customer visits, top-line sales and bottom-line profits at Casey’s General Stores.
Regular readers of this blog know that Casey’s has excelled
within the grocerant niche and has a understanding of the value of mix and
match meal component bunding that continues to drive customer adoption
according to Steven Johnson Grocerant
Guru® at Tacoma, WA based Foodservice Solutions®.
In case you did not know, Casey's General Stores is the
third-largest convenience store chain in the United States. It is also a
well-known fact the convenience retailer is famous across the Midwest for its
pizza. But what may not be as widely known is the fact that Casey's is the
fifth-largest pizza chain in the U.S. Yes, the consumers are blurring the
traditional ‘channels of distribution’ lines faster than more ‘industry channel
experts’ are willing to admit.
So, Casey’s President and CEO
Darren Rebelez often refers to the pizza program as Casey's "crown
jewel." So, it should not be surprising that the retailer is giving pizza
— and the food category overall — a starring role in its new three-year
strategic plan for growth.
There are three primary strategies for this next stretch of
Casey's journey are: accelerating the food business, including prepared foods,
dispensed beverages and grocery; growing its store count; and enhancing
operational efficiencies.
Rebelez continued, "We're going to accelerate our food
business. As I mentioned before, pizza is the crown jewel of our business, but
as strong as our food business is, we have a lot of opportunity to expand and
to grow that. "We're leaning heavier into that in this next three-year
plan."
Grocery Acceleration
Of late Casey's has
seen "a tremendous amount of success over the past few years driving both
top and bottom lines with grocery and general merchandise,"
noted Brad Haga, senior vice president of prepared foods and dispensed
beverages for Casey’s.
Haga went on to say, Three years ago, with the launch of
its initial three-year strategic plan, Casey's priority was to get its assets
and space allocation right across the network to enable the chain to scale
programs. "Back in October of 2020, we reset over 2,000 stores in just 45
days with new extended gondolas enabling space for 200 additional SKUs, many of
which are private brands.”
With a clear food focus, Casey's reset category locations
with more appropriate adjacencies. For example, the retailer moved packaged
bakery items close to the coffee station.
Next up was getting the right products into the stores.
"Our approach with grocery was to strive for differentiation. Much like
Casey's pizza, we have differentiated on many fronts and partnered with many
great suppliers like Pepsi to bring exclusive products to market like Casey's
own Mtn Dew Overdrive, which quickly rose to being a top-selling SKU in our
beverage assortment," Haga said.
Casey's private label brands have been a differentiator as
well for the retailer. Private label now has more than 300 SKUs and 10 percent
share penetration of units and dollars.
Grocerant Niche Prepared
Food Acceleration
Casey's prepared food business sits on a strong foundation,
according to Haga.
Over the past year, the retailer stood up a product
development stage process that is rooted in design, ensuring that it is focused
on the guests and building scalable solutions that deliver incremental growth
to the business. As a result of this process, Casey's found success with
products such as its BBQ Brisket Pizza,
the Ultimate Beer Cheese Breakfast Pizza and its latest introduction, Casey's Thin Crust Pizza.
In the effort to further accelerate its food program,
Casey's will work in three distinct verticals:
1.
Blocking and tackling the business,
which will include managing the product assortment, managing price and
promotion, and managing placement.
2.
Building a new muscle and new
capability.
3.
Optimizing the guest experience
and driving breakthrough awareness of key initiatives via the omnichannel
market.
"To do more in the future with food, we must start
with simplifying and streamlining what is asked of our kitchen. This starts
with understanding what tasks need to get done in stores and those tasks that
don't add value," Haga explained. "If there's something that can be
done upstream from a store that optimizes quality and cost, we will evaluate
and work to remove that task from a store. Things that are true differentiators
that a guest values like making original Casey's pizza crust from scratch every
day, we will keep doing in stores."
New items are also top of mind. "There's a lot of data
that suggests we have some big opportunities to develop new sales layers that
really complement our core pizza business. Some of those include apps, sides,
shareable desserts," he said.
"We'll also put a major focus against optimizing our
dispensed beverage business and we will strive to be 'Casey's good' in all of
these areas," Haga continued. "[At] the end of the day, whatever we
do, we must work to prove out the incrementality of our efforts before scaling.
That we know."
Are you ready for some fresh ideations? Do your food
marketing ideas look more like yesterday than tomorrow? Interested in learning
how our Grocerant Guru® can edify your retail food brand while creating a platform
for consumer convenient meal participation, differentiation,
and individualization? Email us
at: Steve@FoodserviceSolutions.us or visit: us on our social media sites by
clicking one of the following links: Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter
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