This article is brought to you by Krispy Krunchy Chicken.
According to NACS Convenience Voices, 25.7% of customers said they planned to buy quick service or fast food somewhere else within 30 minutes of visiting a c-store. To cut down on food leakage and capture those customers, c-stores need to offer a competitive foodservice program.
Krispy Krunchy Chicken has served the industry for decades and is undergoing a major evolution. Today, the brand has nearly 3,000 locations and plans to open over 700 stores by the end of 2024, and is making moves to attract even more c-stores. “For example, we revamped our offerings and built a premium sandwich with quality ingredients that is competitive. So instead of losing those chicken sandwich sales to the fast-food place across the street, c-store operators are able to be much more relevant and competitive,” said Joe Gordon, chief execution officer.
Krispy Krunchy has conducted extensive market research to build a best-in-class foodservice offering. In response to the same trends that retailers know too well—a contracting labor pool, supply chain woes, food spoilage and more—the foodservice solution provider has narrowed down its menu to the most-efficient, best-selling items and streamlined its logistics and supply chain processes.
“The biggest key to success is really being able to understand the c-store industry, especially its challenges, and then attack those with solutions,” said Jim Norberg, CEO of Krispy Krunchy Chicken. “For example, one of the things we heard from operators a few years ago was that our operating model just had to be simpler and be easy for one person running the counter to do if they’re in the store by themselves.”
Krispy Krunchy took that feedback and implemented it at every level of its business, from the menu to the supply chain. Here’s how.
On This Menu, Less is More
Krispy Krunchy cut the menu down to fewer—but more carefully curated—items. It’s counterintuitive, but with less options, profits went up. But it wasn’t as simple as just taking things that didn’t sell off the menu.
“When conducting menu optimization, a lot of brands will just look at how much they sell,” said Alice Crowder, chief marketing officer. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. “What if I have two menu items that both sell, say, five items a day? If I cut one of them out, will everyone just order something else and not care, or will I lose five customers?”
That’s a question that can be answered by a TURF analysis, which stands for total unduplicated reach and frequency, a study that determines the impact of product choices on consumer purchasing decisions.
“TURF tells us the unique value of every item on the menu. And it helps us craft an offering that attracts the most people, the most frequently, with the least items,” said Crowder.
What Krispy Krunchy found was that its menu had a lot of redundancy. “We came down to a smaller group of products, but that reached the same amount of people and generated the same frequency.”
Continue reading this article in the June issue of NACS Magazine.