The Joy of C-Store Cooking

You don’t have to be Julia Child or even Gordon Ramsey to put together a good meal, but it might help to have a c-store around.

We featured many posts in recent years about how the c-store industry has upped its Foodservice game, a trend which continues to this day.

However, if you’re a budding chef that would rather put together a meal on your own than be served one by a c-store in the United States, Korea, or anywhere else, there’s good news on that front, too: you can find more grocery items than ever at a c-store, perfect for everything from a school lunch to a dinner for esteemed guests. [1]

The development illustrates how retail food channels are blurring. C-stores lead the way: mingling with prepared food and fast casual dining channel on one side; mingling with the grocery channel on the other, which is where our focus is today. Here are a few examples of how recipes can be created by juggling c-store ingredients together.

• Besides providing web content that spotlights unique c-stores serving interesting food, the Gas Station Gourmet features a page of recipes made from—you guessed it!—c-store ingredients.
• Moms get creative with their kids for school lunches using only c-store ingredients.
• If you lived in Japan you could go home and make Family Mart chicken buns into gourmet sandwiches.
• Yes, there is a cookbook for that.
• Fill yourself up with this recipe for gas station biscuits, inspired by the industry in Eastern North Carolina.
• Let’s go big for a closer: any of these Manhattan c-stores—one owned by Gwyneth Paltrow—take the concept of high-end ingredients about as far as it can go. The mind reels at what one might make from them.

Being a do-it-yourselfer when it comes to preparing food at home is a good and healthy thing, but it’s harder to go it alone when you’re dealing with technology for your c-store. Putting together a software solution usually goes better when you have an informed and helpful partner to guide you along, at least that’s the way we approach it at SSCS. Please give us a call at 800-972-7727 and see what we mean, including how we can handle your expanding, evolving grocery business.

[1] If you do happen to be a c-store chef that works inside the store, this Cstore Decisions article has you covered.