The C-Store Shift: From Smokes and Cokes to Food, Mood, and Execution
For a long time, the convenience store model was straightforward. Fuel brought people to the site. Cigarettes, fountain drinks, coffee, snacks, and promotions brought them inside.
C-store operators already know that model has changed.
People don’t shop the way they used to, and they don’t smoke the way they used to, either. At the same time, they have more food options, more delivery options, and higher expectations for what a convenience store should deliver. Meanwhile, operators are dealing with tighter margins, labor pressure, rising costs, and a level of store complexity the industry has never seen before.
So the question becomes: What brings customers inside stores now?
Increasingly, the answer is food.
Foodservice is no longer a side offer. According to NACS, it accounted for 27.7% of in-store sales and 38.6% of in-store gross margin dollars at U.S. convenience stores in 2024, with prepared food making up 72.6% of those sales. It has also more than doubled as a share of in-store sales since 2004, which shows just how far the channel has moved away from the old model.
But that growth brings pressure. It’s one thing to decide to invest in food. It’s another thing entirely to deliver a food experience customers trust, store after store, day after day, under real-world operating conditions.
That’s where a lot of operators feel challenged. The food program might look great on paper, but something breaks down between the concept and the customer. Sometimes it’s the layout. Sometimes it’s the signage. Sometimes it’s just that the store doesn’t clearly signal that the food is worth stopping for.
Meanwhile, the benchmark keeps rising — which is why today’s leading operators have stopped comparing themselves only to other c-stores. Now, they’re looking at QSRs, fast casuals, and strong regional food players. They want the advantage great real estate provides, but they need the customer to believe in the food offer before they ever place an order.
The operators getting this right aren’t waiting. They’re changing how their stores work to make foodservice perform.
In practice, the operators who are getting this right tend to do a few things differently — and those patterns are increasingly becoming a blueprint for the rest of the industry.
They make food feel like a reason to visit.
If a customer is going to choose a store for breakfast, lunch, coffee, or a made-to-order item, the food has to feel like it belongs there. That comes down to how the signage, layout, flow, equipment, and overall environment work together.
If the food program feels like a bolted-on afterthought, it won’t change customer behavior.
That’s where execution really starts to matter. When the exterior, interior, and food area feel disconnected, customers often don’t even register that the offer has changed. But when the whole environment signals something different, it creates a reason to come inside and reconsider the store.
That’s why food and store remodel are increasingly tied together. For many small and mid-sized chains, foodservice is the next step in growth — but the store has to support that investment. If the environment doesn’t evolve with the offer, it takes longer for the return to show up.
They design for speed, flow, and real-world traffic.
Speed still matters in convenience retail — a lot. In food environments, it directly impacts throughput and revenue. At the same time, though, dwell times are increasing, driven by made-to-order food, specialty coffee, and even EV charging.
Those two dynamics don’t always work naturally together. One pushes toward quick-in, quick-out. The other encourages customers to stay longer.
The challenge is designing a store that can handle both without creating friction. Leading operators are rethinking their layouts to reduce congestion, support natural customer movement, and make sure the store performs under peak pressure just as well as it does during slower periods.
7-Eleven Laredo Taco | Meijer Lansing Coffee
They protect consistency when it’s hardest to do.
Food is the most operationally sensitive part of the store. It requires labor, training, speed, cleanliness, accuracy, and smart use of space. Under real conditions — busy hours, short staffing, delivery windows — consistency is often the first thing to break.
Operators who do this well design around that reality. They align layout, equipment, and workflow so quality, availability, and presentation hold up across locations without slowing everything else down.
Technology plays a role, but only when it solves practical problems. Operators aren’t looking for something abstract — they’re looking for tools that reduce friction at the store level, which often includes exploring potential applications for AI. Fewer logins, fewer manual steps, fewer interruptions, and more time for employees to focus on customers and food.
That can be as simple as knowing what signage should be in place, what needs to come down, how to reorder materials, and how to keep store profiles accurate so the next rollout is right.
These sound like small issues until you look at them from a store manager’s point of view. Every unnecessary step pulls time away from the floor.
They use the store layout to drive incremental spend.
Food creates the opportunity to increase dwell time, basket size, and overall spend. But only when the environment supports it.
Operators are using the physical space more intentionally to guide behavior. A customer might walk in for a drink offer, but the right placement, visibility, and messaging can move them toward a food item or bakery product.
That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when the store is designed as a connected experience.
Data is helping make that possible. Operators have a better understanding of what customers buy, when they buy it, and what offers make sense by day. They’re working more closely with vendors, tying promotions into loyalty, and using the store environment to reinforce those decisions.
Making food-led growth actually work
At a certain point, the conversation has to shift from strategy to execution.
Food-led growth depends on how well operators can integrate brand, layout, operations, signage, and rollout into something that actually works in-store.
The goal isn’t just to create a good-looking food area. It’s to create an environment that performs under real labor models, real cost pressure, and real customer behavior.
That’s where The Imagine Group comes in. We help operators turn food concepts into integrated, scalable systems — designing environments that support speed and flow, deliver consistent QSR-level experiences, and ultimately drive both dwell and spend.
Convenience stores have always been about convenience. That hasn’t changed, and it won’t. What has changed is what convenience needs to include:
- easy ordering
- clean stores
- credible food
- good coffee
- relevant promotions
- consistent execution
- and a clear reason to come back.
The old model was smokes and Cokes. The next model is food, flow, and store-level execution.
About Imagine
A trusted partner to the world’s most successful brands, Imagine designs, produces, and delivers beautifully crafted print and digital solutions that inspire action and get results. From concept to consumer, our end-to-end solutions include agency-level creative, pre-media, commercial print, store signage, specialty packaging, permanent fixtures, retail environments, out-of-home, fulfillment, and kitting. Imagine combines the customer technology of Dotti—a versatile platform powered to handle even the most complex in-store marketing programs—with Imagine Studio's award-winning design expertise, powered by top-tier print and digital production capabilities. Learn more at theimaginegroup.com or moagency.com.
