Catering to the crowds

Convenience retailers can boost business by offering catered meals. By Pat Pape.

When Albert Smith purchased his Shortstop Deli in Ithaca, New York, 30 years ago, it was a traditional convenience store with beer and cigarettes. The store didn’t offer gasoline, so Smith and his wife, Cindy, searched for a product that would boost sales at the 24/7 location. They decided on fresh-made sandwiches, an item that has been so successful that they’ve since added “catering” to their store’s list of offerings.

Thanks to living in a two-college town, the Smiths have grown a huge business in “travel meals” — bag lunches featuring a sandwich, chips and a cookie or piece of fruit. The store can boast an Ivy League customer list after serving hungry people from Harvard, Dartmouth, Princeton and more.

Many of the clients are athletes, such as the Cornell football team, which dines on Shortstop lunches whenever players travel to out-of-town games; however, the store creates meals for businesses and club meetings, as well. “The majority of our orders are lunches for 20 people,” said Smith. “The most we’ve ever done at one time is 3,200.”

“We don’t do fancy, we only do fresh,” is the store’s original motto, and Smith lives by it. His 28 team members — all experienced sandwich makers — stick to making hot and cold sandwiches to avoid potential catering problems, such as weddings, where a single wilted lettuce leaf could result in severe bride angst.

“Unless you are a full-fledged caterer, you don’t want to do weddings,” Smith advised. Because of the busy sandwich business, Shortstop no longer sells age-restricted products, such as tobacco and beer, and the store was never in the lotto business. “If it doesn’t help us sell a sandwich, we don’t need it,” Smith said.

Convenience store sushi

The NexStore MarketPlace in Boca Raton, Florida, has 20 gas pumps and all the standard convenience store fare.

But it also offers customers more than 1,800 choices of fresh foods, meals-to-go, baked items and even sushi. Catering is available for parties as small as eight or as large as 800.

“We cater weddings, bar mitzvahs, graduation parties and boardroom lunches,” said Vivian Bushee, director of catering and events for NexStore.

“We have an Italian bakery, a hot grill, a salad bar, a brick oven for pizzas and a fantastic wine selection. Everything is cooked on premise.”

The convenience store is open from 6:00 a.m. until 11:00 p.m. seven days a week, but the foodservice area has slightly shorter hours and is closed on Sunday. NexStore has no waiting staff and no indoor seating, but a large outside patio accommodates more than 180 diners. Promotional events, including menu sampling and wine tastings, are held on the patio each month. Two smaller “express stores” are located nearby in Boca and Jupiter, Florida.

“People pull into the gas station and smell the food,” said Bushee. “Later they say, ‘I can’t believe I’m eating gas station food!’ But we’re not like any convenience store you’ve ever seen before.”

This old house

Pam DeFino spent years working as a chef in various restaurants before she and her daughter, Jackie Robarge, opened PJ’s Country Convenience Store in 1991 in Sheffield, Massachusetts, a picturesque New England village. Several schools and three ski resorts are nearby, but the local population is small. To boost sales, the women added catering to their list of services.

Nine years ago, the mother-daughter team purchased a two-story house that was more than 250 years old and had been damaged in a fire. They refurbished the structure, adding a large commercial kitchen, and moved their business to the new location.

Today, the store is open seven days a week from 6:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. DeFino works from 11:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m., while Robarge takes the earlier shift, from 6:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.

The two are responsible for all food preparation, ranging from baking cakes to making fresh sandwiches.

They don’t hire extra employees until the busy summer season. “In the summer, we have lots of help,” DeFino said. Since the building was previously a house, the store actually has two dining rooms, one that seats 12 diners and another that holds 14. “Most people order food and take it to a table,” she said. “But some customers sit down at a table, and then we take their order. We’re not fancy, but we’re nice.”

PJ’s Country Convenience Store offers both casual and formal catering, ranging from baby showers and school events to weddings and funerals. The store’s largest affair was a corporate picnic for 250 people. “We do a lot of catering for businesses,” said DeFino, who adds that she does not solicit catering assignments because in her small town “everybody knows us.”

This article first appeared in NACS Magazine. For more information or to subscribe please visit www.nacsmagazine.com.