Convenience Retail Needs a Third Wave of Food, Columnist Says

Frank Beard, a convenience retail analyst and columnist, says the industry's food conversation has stalled — and he challenges retailers to eat their own food for two weeks.

Beard, who writes the "The Road Ahead" column and works with retail technology companies on marketing and communications, made the case following this year's NACS Show. He has attended the event since 2016, when he joined a panel about his stunt of eating at gas stations for a month.

"I can't shake the sense that the conversation on food has gotten stuck," Beard wrote.

How far has c-store food come?

At the show, Beard watched a booth staffer cook hamburgers on a flat-top griddle, seasoning patties while the buns toasted. He likened it to a now-retired foodservice leader who once directed staff to cook on gigantic stainless steel woks to signal a store was serious about food.

He frames the industry's progress through coffee's three waves. The first wave of c-store food was traditional gas station food customers bought out of necessity. The second wave, where much of the industry sits today, is food customers genuinely crave.

The third wave, Beard argues, must be food programs customers can rely on as often as retailers want them to visit. If retailers want three or four visits per week, customers should be able to eat the food three or four times per week.

What can retailers learn from Japan?

Beard organized a c-store tour for international retailers last year. Two and a half days in, one attendee said he was tired of fried chicken — a complaint Beard shared, since nearly every retailer on the tour had made fried chicken the centerpiece of its food program.

He points to Japan and Northern Ireland as global outliers in foodservice. The late Anthony Bourdain raved about the egg sandwich at Lawson, calling it "unnatural, inexplicable deliciousness." By contrast, Beard recently bought an egg salad sandwich at an American c-store and threw it away after two bites, finding the egg and mayonnaise off-tasting and the onion-and-cucumber relish disgusting. He left wondering if anyone at the company had even eaten it.

7-Eleven Japan has operated a Rice Master program since 2015, applying extraordinary attention to something as ordinary as onigiri. Even FamilyMart sells fried chicken, Beard notes, but its total program offers the variety that supports everyday life.

Beard also ate a caprese salad made with 40-year-aged balsamic vinegar at a gas station, paired with a horizontal tasting of Tenuta San Guido's 2017 wines.

Why is QSR the wrong benchmark?

Quick-service restaurants are the wrong north star, Beard argues. Their food quality is typically mediocre, and copying their menus risks recreating the "gas station food" perception all over again. At the airport after the show, he overheard someone saying he desperately needed to "eat something green."

He draws on Howard Schultz, who found inspiration for Starbucks not in Maxwell House but in Milan's espresso bars. Many people thought Schultz was crazy in the 1980s for treating coffee as anything other than a cheap commodity, yet Starbucks raised the floor for coffee quality in America and influenced the culture.

Convenience retailers serve half of America every day, across all socioeconomic backgrounds, and sit closer to customers than perhaps any other retail channel, Beard writes. That makes the opportunity for any company that cracks the foodservice code enormous.

Beard's challenge to retailers is direct: eat breakfast, lunch, snacks and dinner at their own stores for two weeks. Two weeks forces two questions — is the food good enough, and can I eat here regularly?

If a Lawson existed near his home in West Des Moines, Beard says he could easily eat there for two weeks. His closing test for the industry: in 10 years, global retailers should be visiting the United States and asking why the food here is so good.