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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

convenience store

Alltown Fresh is Revamping the Convenience Store with Kombucha and Avocado Toast

Pull into any gas station to fill up and grab a snack, and chances are your options will be potato chips, sugary sodas, and one of those hot dogs shriveling under a heat lamp.

Unless, that is, you’re near Plymouth, MA. Around there, you can swing by Alltown Fresh, a fancified convenience store which opened in January of this year and offers high-quality coffee, kombucha on tap, house-made healthy food and smoothies, WiFi, and even a small selection of groceries.

Oh yeah, and you can fill up your car, too. Alltown Fresh’s parent company is Global Partners, a fuel company that owns and supplies roughly 1,000 gas stations throughout the Northeastern U.S. But Alltown Fresh doesn’t position itself as a gas station that happens to have pretty good food. “We want to flip that paradigm,” Alltown Fresh’s SVP of Retail Operations Ryan Riggs told me over the phone. They want their store to be a place you seek out for its food and beverage options first, and to fill up on gas second (or not at all).

Yes, there are already gas station convenience stores with QSR’s like Subways or Dairy Queen’s attached, but Alltown Fresh’s offerings — with greens-filled smoothies, Moroccan chickpea bowls, and quinoa porridge — are next-level healthy. But for those who are loyal to their road trip junk food, don’t fear. “You can still get your Snicker’s,” Riggs told me. The unhealthy food just won’t be the only option.

Choice and customization are key to Alltown Fresh’s business plan. Customers order fresh food on a kiosk touchscreen inside the convenience store, and can even customize toppings and sizes. The store also has a limited selection of groceries like dry pasta and tomato sauce, as well as a bulk section where people can stock up on nuts and grains. In future, it would be a smart play to add meal kits to the mix so commuters could stop by and swipe a kit for dinner along with their cold brew or smoothie. Alltown Fresh also has grab-and-go options like bowls and sandwiches ready for quick purchases.

The prices are higher than typical gas station fare, but for what you’re getting, they’re actually pretty good. The Green Smash (avocado, chia and pumpkin seeds on toast) is $6, and a Chili Chicken grain bowl is $13, and a small latté is $2. Considering that a latté from Starbuck’s can set you back about five bucks at this point, that’s a steal.

The company is also prioritizing plastic-free packaging, and uses chiefly recyclable, biodegradable options for the prepared food section. Obviously it’s a lot harder to get rid of plastic when it comes to the brands on Alltown Fresh’s shelves, especially when a lot of them are packaged snacks and bottled beverages, but Riggs said that they were trying to offer as many plastic-free options as possible.

As someone who has been on her fair share of road trips and often ends up subsisting off of diet soda and Cheez-Itz, I think Alltown Fresh has hit on a great concept. The store combines a few trends we’re seeing in consumer dining preferences: personalization, healthy food, and, above all, convenience, in a way I haven’t seen before. The closest comparison I can make is The Goods Mart in L.A., which is also trying to redefine convenience stores as sustainable and healthy — but they’re more bodega than gas station stop.

Riggs told me that they’re hoping to open more Alltown Fresh locations in 2019 and 2020, all of which will be in New England. Now if they could just make it to Seattle so I can fuel up on more than just a bag of sour cream & onion chips on my next road trip, it would be much appreciated.

Dirty Lemon’s New “Drug Store” is Part of a Convenience Store Revolution

Dirty Lemon, a startup that sells fancy water infused with ingredients like charcoal, CBD and collagen for more than $10 a pop, made The New York Times today with its new pop-up store in New York that puts you on the honor system when you pay. While this is probably a gimmick to get attention (it worked!), it does illustrate how the traditional notions of convenience stores are being upended left and right.

Located in Manhattan and dubbed Drug Store, Dirty Lemon’s small retail shop has no cashier or checkout. For Spoon readers, this will immediately bring to mind Amazon Go, which uses an array of advanced computer vision and sensors to monitor what people put in their bags and then charge their account automatically as they leave the store.

There is no such high-tech gadgetry at Drug Store. As the Times reports, customers walk in, grab their Vitality Booster (+matcha) beverage and walk out:

In the store, customers are expected to text Dirty Lemon to say they have grabbed something. A representative will then text back with a link to enter their credit card information, adding, “Let us know if you need anything else.”

This pay-by-text is actually already a big hook for Dirty Lemon, which has customers use SMS to re-order product. According to the NYT Article, Dirty Lemon has 100,000 customers, and half of them order at least one case (6 bottles) a month. With cases starting at $45, that’s at least $2.25 million in sales each month.

Pay by text for Dirty Lemon water

Dirty Lemon CEO Zak Normandin told the Times that he wasn’t worried about theft at his pop-up store and had plans to use its $4 million digital ad budget to open up more cashierless brick and mortar locations.

This idea of focusing on real world spaces in our digital age actually sits at the crossroads of two trends we’re seeing in food-related related retail:

First, there is a reinvention of the traditional convenience store going on. You could say that Amazon is driving a lot of this change with its aforementioned Go stores. Amazon has opened three Go stores in Seattle with plans on the books to expand to San Francisco, Chicago and New York.

As we’ve experienced firsthand, Amazon Go puts the convenience back in convenience stores. The grab-and-go technology is seamless and makes shopping for everyday quick items or even fresh-made sandwiches and meal kits fast and easy. Other technologies from places like Trigo Vision and Aipoly are popping up to enable similar store experiences.

Elsewhere along the west coast, we recently visited The Goods Mart, which is trying to create a healthier version of 7-11. Featuring kombucha slushies, organic treats and imperfect (ugly) fruit, The Goods Mart also gives back to its community by donating tips and holding community dinners.

Doing away with the store space altogether is Stockwell, the startup which started life as the much-reviled Bodega. Stockwell’s idea is to outfit high-traffic buildings (like apartments) with high-tech cabinets filled with sundries and snacks. Like Amazon Go, you grab what you want and go back upstairs, presumably still in your jammies.

The other trend Drug Store is capitalizing on is the retail-as-experience renaissance. Kitchen tech startups Fellow, Brava and Anova have all built, or are building, brick and mortar locations where people can come in, see products in real world settings, and learn how to use them properly.

Who knows if Dirty Lemon will have staff on hand to explain the benefits of drinking collagen water, but what Drug Store will do is establish a direct connection/relationship with any of the consumers that choose to stick to the honor system and make a purchase. Dirty Lemon will have a marketing channel directly to a customer’s phone, where impulse orders can be made with a simple text.

For Dirty Lemon, opening up more physical locations in high-traffic areas could be pretty sweet.