2019 Parker's Kitchen SE ROY

2019 Southeast Retailer of the Year:

Savannah, Georgia-based Parker’s Kitchen is in the midst of a campaign to “strategically redefine America’s convenience store industry.”

What is Parker’s doing?

As Founder and CEO Greg Parker describes the strategy, it involves Parker’s transforming from a convenience store company that sells foodservice into a foodservice company that sells convenience.

While Parker’s operates 64 stores in Georgia and South Carolina, 42 of them are Parker’s Kitchen locations, meaning they feature cafés. The Kitchen stores are known for their homemade, Southern-inspired food, including Southern Fried Chicken Tenders, made-from-scratch mac n’ cheese, potato logs, full breakfast bar and daily specials. These are complemented by a selection of beverages, including Parker’s Coffee, a bean-to-cup product made with high-quality coffee beans. And that Chewy Ice in the fountain drink area? Parker was the person who thought there was a way to make ice easier on people’s teeth and challenged his team to come up with a solution.

USA Today has recognized Parker’s for its impressive food selection, and the company has earned raves as a top-rated restaurant on TripAdvisor, in addition to being named one of America’s Best Convenience Stores by Food and Wine magazine in December 2019.

The company also has been recognized for its new Parker’s Rewards loyalty program, award-winning Fueling the Community charitable initiative, innovative mobile app and acclaimed PumpPal program, which has saved customers more than $10 million since its inception.

Parker’s Kitchen also gives back to every community where it operates a store through its “Fueling the Community” program, which donates a portion of the profit of every gallon of gas sold on the first Wednesday of the month to area schools. In addition, the company endows the Parker’s Emergency and Trauma Center at Memorial Hospital in Savannah and spearheads an anti-litter campaign in Savannah. It also was one of the first convenience store retailers to enter into a partnership with auto maker Tesla to offer electric car charging stations.

Parker’s Kitchen employs nearly 1,200 people throughout the region and completes more than 125,000 transactions daily.

The Shelby Report is proud to name Parker’s as our 2019 Southeast Retailer of the Year. Learn more about this progressive foodservice/convenience retailer that at the same time keeps its eye on the basics—customer service, excellent product and giving back to its communities.

Greg Parker

Greg Parker Leads with Passion, Energy and Ideas

Greg Parker is a dynamo. He was when he started his career in the convenience store business more than 40 years ago and he’s still going strong. He’s always thinking about how to improve the operations of stores, whether how to make them more beautiful inside and out, how to utilize data and technology to make everything run more smoothly and efficiently or how to meet the needs of today’s—and tomorrow’s—customers.

What Parker’s is doing is working. It has grown 20-24 percent per year, every year, for the last 20 and is on pace to become a billion-dollar company. It added 10 new stores in 2019 and has plans for many more.

Parker has lunch with his executive team once a month to make sure he keeps his finger on the pulse of the enterprise (“I’m a really smart CEO because I’ve surrounded myself with incredible people”), attends store openings (recently, seven stores opened in 123 days) and still finds time to work out, play tennis and be father to three young adults.

While Parker’s stores are well known in the area for their charitable giving—primarily to area schools in line with Parker’s belief in the myriad personal and communal benefits of education—Parker himself is known to a wider audience for his philanthropic endeavors. He endowed the Parker College of Business at nearby Georgia Southern University and the Parker’s Emergency and Trauma Center at Memorial Hospital in Savannah, which is the only Level I trauma center in the area.

Baptism by fire

In an interview at his company’s offices in downtown Savannah in December with Shelby’s Lorrie Griffith, publisher and editor-in-chief, and Tom Bachmann, VP-Southeast, Parker talked about his crash course in the c-store business.

do deposits, learn how to sell product and price it, inventory it. Hire people and figure out how to pay people, do payroll.”

He stuck with it, and by the time younger brother Patrick graduated from college, Parker had three stores of his own, operating as Express Foods.

Greg and Patrick built three stores as partners. After the first couple of stores they opened together, Patrick decided he wanted to change the store name to Parker’s. Greg said he didn’t want his name on the stores, but Patrick insisted. Greg told him he could put his name on the stores that he was operating.

Greg one day realized that maybe it wasn’t so bad to have the family name on the stores.

“My tennis partner, who is one of my best friends, said, ‘I was in Ludowici and saw your store there.’ I said, ‘Jim, how the hell do you not know that I have a store in Ludowici?’ I don’t have that many stores; how would you not know that?’ He said, ‘I don’t know but it used to be generic Express Foods and now it’s Parkers, and Parker’s pops.’ My brother was on to something.”

Eventually they decided to just be brothers and not business partners. Patrick still owns about 10 or 11 stores under the Parker’s name that are not affiliated with Greg’s stores, which are either Parker’s or Parker’s Kitchen.

Who to please?

More than two decades ago, Greg Parker enlisted the services of a branding expert to help the company answer questions like, Who are we? Who do we represent? What does our brand represent?

“One of the things I learned is it’s important to have a brand focus based on a certain consumer,” he said.

While the No. 1 convenience store customer probably is the typical “Bubba” of rural America, that’s not who Parker’s has in mind when it’s making plans and decisions.

“The filter through which we look at everything in our company is based on one consumer and that consumer is not our No. 1 consumer,” Parker said. “That consumer is the working mother because the working mother is more demanding, more discriminating, more time-starved than any other consumer. Because they do more, they demand safety, they demand good lighting, they want good architecture, they want good landscaping and they want seamless experiences with fair pricing and good products. If you please the working mother, you’re pleasing everyone else.”

Parker said from the beginning he has always wanted to present customers with an “elevated experience.”

because I couldn’t teach it if I didn’t know it,” he said. He learned all about different fryer setups, pressurecooking vs. non-pressure cooking, how to marinate chicken, how to bread it and how best to layer the chicken in the basket for it to cook evenly.

Today, the company’s chicken tenders are a signature item that Parker’s builds entire advertising campaigns around. There are several reasons Parker’s has embraced foodservice, according to Parker.

One is that the traditional profit silos in the convenience store industry—fuel, cigarettes and carbonated beverages— are diminishing and need to be replaced. Another is that stores are having to pay higher wages and benefits because the unemployment rate is low, so they need to boost sales and profits.

A Georgia native, Parker had gone to the University of Georgia in Athens on scholarship, majoring in political science and taking some law school classes. He graduated with honors—and then started pumping gas, he jokes.

He got into the c-store business alongside his father, an Amoco jobber. His father’s territory had one touchpoint with I-95, which at that time was a new route for people traveling up and down the Eastern Seaboard. His father was building a store at that touchpoint in Midway, Georgia, near an interchange, and Parker returned to his hometown to help complete the construction of the store, called Express Foods, and get it open. After it opened, he ran the store by himself in the early days, making $75 a week. He said he worked for three and a half years without a day off.

“I would work from early in the morning, before the sun came up, until after the sun went down. I’d go home, go to sleep and get up the next morning and be there first thing,” Parker said. “It was hard, and I didn’t know anything. I didn’t have a business background, so I had to learn how to keep books, I had to learn how to set up checking accounts and

“My very first store was carpeted, paneled, with beautiful bathrooms,” he said. “In 1976, we had red, white and blue carpeted floors that my mother picked out to celebrate the bicentennial and gray paneled walls.”

Adding the Kitchen

Parker’s Kitchen is the latest format for the company and its blueprint for future development. Forty-two of the current 64 stores are Kitchen locations. Some existing stores are being remodeled to become Parker’s Kitchen stores; the company’s new stores, including the 40 it plans to open in the Charleston, South Carolina market, all will be Parker’s Kitchen, described as “the food-centric brand underneath the Parker’s umbrella.”

While the Parker’s Kitchen stores are focused on foodservice, food has been part of Greg Parker’s stores since early on. And Parker was the one doing the cooking at first—fried chicken. That led him to seek out the best chicken-frying program. He got training from a few equipment companies.

“I went to these places and learned how to do it all,

“We started asking what can we do to differentiate ourselves as a company? We decided it was to become absolutely foodservice-centric because today less than 50 percent of meals are cooked at home, and that continues to diminish,” Parker said. “As unemployment goes down, as people have more disposable income and as people are more time-starved, they’re looking for alternative ways to take care of meals. The growth in foodservice is real. While we have a lot of things that are going down in the world of retail, food prepared outside the home is going up. So, we have decided to transform from a convenience store company that sells foodservice to become a foodservice company that sells convenience.”

Parker said the Parker’s Kitchen menu is streamlined on purpose. “If you look at the really successful retailers, most of them have more limited menus,” he said, pointing to chicken restaurants like Raising Cane’s and Chick-fil-A. “So, we pared down our menu. Our macaroni and cheese is incredible, our chicken tenders are incredible, our egg casserole is incredible. Our potato logs are incredible.”

On the beverage side, Parker’s sells fountain drinks at a discount and premium coffee.

“It’s bean to cup—you push the button, it grinds it and makes it right there in the store,” Parker said. “We have very robust coffee, premium coffee, and it’s delicious. And we have all the whiteners and all the sweeteners, so you can customize it any way you want it.”

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From left: Greg Parker, founder and CEO of Parker’s Kitchen; Allison Hersh, president, Capricorn Communications; and Lorrie Griffith, publisher and editor in chief of The Shelby Report.

Greg Parker, Parker’s team members and dignitaries including Miss South Carolina attend the ribbon-cutting for Parker’s store in Summerville, South Carolina, in 2019.

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Data is king

Parker learned a long time ago that there’s a difference between perception and facts.

“We are a very metrics-centric company and we’ve looked to see what’s selling; you can’t take anecdotal data (as fact),” Parker added. “We’re letting our data lead us to success. Data is your score card, your report card. Bringing machine learning into it, we’re able to get the science behind it.”

Parker’s is beta testing a machine learning system that is helping it forecast, with 94 percent accuracy, “how many transactions we’re going to have, how many chicken tenders we are going to sell in the next 15 minutes or between 2:15 and 3:15 next Wednesday,” he said. “With machine learning, we are looking at what’s going on with the weather, if there is an accident on I-16 or I-95, if there is a holiday. All these disparate data sources are coming together.”

That information helps stores prepare menu items in smaller batches and, ideally, have them ready just in time for consumption.

To help Kitchen staff, touchpad screens prompt them to prepare certain items based on historic demand, then they respond on the screen when the task is completed. It also prompts them to remove food that is past its peak.

“We don’t ever want to serve a chicken tender that was cooked 31 minutes ago,” Parker said. “We wanted to take that responsibility out of the hands of the people and put it in the hands of machine learning using artificial intelligence with predictive analytics telling us how to be best in class.”

The longer the machine “learns,” the better it is at predicting demand, Parker noted.

Parker’s also uses a program called Recipe Builder in its Kitchens, which keeps track of what quantities of ingredients are being used to help with ordering supplies.

“Data is king; if you’re going to be really good at foodservice, you’ve got to get really good at metrics and measuring,” he said.

A frictionless future

In addition to the technology used at store level, Parker’s also is developing more digital products to make life easier for customers. Today, customers can turn on a gas pump from the app through GPS technology.

Through the Parker’s Rewards program on the app, the retailer soon should be able to send a text to customers pumping gas presenting food offers that align with what they’ve purchased in the past.

“We can send you an offer for chicken tenders, a side and a drink while you’re at the pump. If you want it, you can leave the nozzle in the car, come in and pick up your bag of food, take the nozzle out and put it in the pump and drive off,” Parker said.

Customers can pay through their Parker’s PumpPal debit card.

“Everybody talks about frictionless,” Parker said. “We’re looking at robotics, anything that can help us get there.”

More growth planned

Parker’s goal is to build a total of 40 stores in the greater Charleston, South Carolina area, over the next three years. Seven are open thus far. “We want to go up to Georgetown and Myrtle Beach,” Parker said.

“We want to grow in the path of growth, and Beaufort County is one of the fastest-growing counties in the United States, as are Charleston County and Berkeley County.”

But the company also will continue opening stores in rural areas, he said. “We love rural. We have three that we are going to be building in Savannah in the next year but in the rural areas in between we’re backfilling. We think it’s

PARKER’S KITCHEN BY THE NUMBERS

• Year founded: 1976

• Stores (as of January 2020): 64 (41 in Georgia, 23 in South Carolina)

• Total $ donated to local schools through the Parker’s Fueling the Community charitable giving initiative: $6 million

• Parker’s Rewards members: 150,000

• Dollars saved by Parker’s Rewards Members: $10 million+

• Transactions per year: 55 million

• Employees: nearly 1,200

• Chicken tenders sold annually: 3 million

• Fountain drinks sold annually: 6.5 million

• Gallons of gas sold annually: 120 million+

• Number of times Parker’s has been listed on Inc. 5000 list of the Fastest Growing Private Companies in America: 5

important to have at least seven stores in an area because a district manager can take care of seven stores. We try to do those in clusters and then fill in in the rural areas.”

Giving back systematically and generously

On the first Wednesday of every month, a portion of every gallon of gas sold at every Parker’s is donated to a charitable fund that is distributed to area schools, hospitals and other organizations. Customers who are Parker’s Rewards or PumpPal members designate the recipient of their particular funds.

Education is especially important to Greg Parker, who said his company thus far has donated more than $6 million to education, including the endowment of the Parker College of Business at Georgia Southern in nearby Statesboro.

“I believe in education; it’s the tide that lifts all ships,” Parker said. “As you increase the education of a town, economic development happens, wages go up, crime goes down, poverty goes down. The single most important thing you can do, wherever you are, is to educate the people. Through education, good things happen.”

Giving back is good for the community and good for business as well.

consumers support you, but the other thing is that people want to work with you—employees like supporting companies that are philanthropic.”

“We’re trying to create ‘stickiness’ with the consumer,” Parker said. “People, especially younger people, like supporting companies who give back, and we feel we have a profound responsibility to give back. We’ve been so successful—beyond anything we could have ever imagined.

“And you know what else?” Parker continued. “The unintended consequences of doing the right thing is that

The Parker Emergency and Trauma Center in Savannah brought the company media coverage, partly because it’s unusual for people to put their support behind that department in a hospital. Children and cancer are the two primary areas that get funding in the medical world, but ERs are vital, too, Parker said.

“Everybody uses an emergency room at some time in their life,” he said.

Expect Parker’s to keep up the pace of giving back. “We’re going to be doing a lot more because we can and because we think we should,” Parker said.

CREATOR OF CHEWY ICE

About 20 years ago, Parker was in a meeting with his leadership team—which largely is still intact, minus a couple of retirements—and announced, “I want to brand ice.”

Amy Lane, who is a member of the Parker’s leadership team, told him, “Greg, you can’t brand ice.”

He said, “Why not?

She said, “It’s frozen water.”

He said, “Just watch me.”

The man who sold Parker his ice machines told him it wasn’t going to work because the ice would require a longer process to make and thus the store would run out of ice frequently. Parker told him, “We’re going to figure it out.”

He said a lot of mistakes were made in trying to figure it out, but today, the stores can make twice as much Chewy Ice as regular ice in the same amount of time. That required bigger ice bins, which was part of the learning curve.

“We’re filtering the water that’s going into our fountain machines, filtering the water that’s going into the ice machines,” Parker said. “There is a lot of science that has gone into it.”

The Parker’s brand mascot, in fact, is Chewy (they also considered names like Crunchy and Pellet). People regularly post on social media about Chewy Ice, which has become a signature item for Parker’s, he said, noting that Chewy Ice has more air in it than regular ice. (He was drinking a Coke Zero over Chewy Ice during the interview.)

Parker’s didn’t trademark the phrase Chewy Ice, so now a lot of other c-stores use the name, but Parker’s had it first.

Greg Parker presents a “Fueling the Community” donation to Berkeley County, South Carolina, schools.

At the 2019 Parker’s “Fueling the Community” Golf Tournament, from left: Nathan Richardson, VP of real estate and development; Jeff Bush, president; and Greg Parker, founder and CEO.

Bush’s Path to Parker’s Presidency Started in a Classroom

Parker’s Kitchen President Jeff Bush had no way of knowing that inviting Greg Parker to speak to his economics class at Armstrong State University, now Georgia Southern University’s Armstrong Campus in Savannah, would lead to a new career.

An economics major with experience as an entrepreneur as well as a soldier in the Army, Bush was president of the Economics Association at Armstrong and was charged with finding a guest speaker for the semester. Bush knew of Greg Parker because of his businesses in the area—not only Parker’s convenience stores but a portfolio of area companies which, at the time, included laundromats, self-storage facilities and car washes. With all those businesses, Bush felt that Parker probably would have a lot of insights to share—if he would agree to come and speak, and Bush thought that was a long shot.

But Parker agreed to come and speak to the group of 150-200 students; he is a firm believer in education, as Bush would later learn. But before Parker started his remarks, he told the class that he wanted them to interrupt him if they had questions. “I’d rather answer questions than tell you about me.”

But no one was raising their hand, so Bush did. He asked questions and made comments for the rest of the talk.

Parker was intrigued by this student who asked good

questions and had intelligent things to say, so he found Bush after class and started asking him questions. He asked Bush to come to the Parker’s office and interview and, at the end of the interview that summer, Parker asked Bush if he would like an internship at Parker’s. Bush explained his situation, that he was fresh out of the Army and had a wife and two children and was trying to finish his degree quickly. Parker told him to let him know if things changed.

But Parker again reached out to Bush over winter break, via email. Bush and his family had been back home in Delaware to visit, so he had missed the email. There also were later emails from others, like the president of the university, who urged Bush to call Parker as soon as possible. It was 10 at night, but he went ahead and called Parker, who answered right away and asked Bush to come in at 6:30 the next morning.

He did, and they spent the day together. The day included meeting the mayor of Savannah, city councilmen, architects and others. It was, Bush later found out, his job interview.

Parker again offered him a job, and this time Bush told him he wanted to run it by one of his mentors before he made a decision.

The mentor told him, “Say yes. It’s Greg Parker and it’s Parker’s. Anybody and everybody wants to work at Parker’s.”

So, he said yes. He started as director of fuel management in December 2012 and about six years later became president, in January 2019.

“I am just beyond appreciative of everything Greg has done for me,” Bush said.

Knowledge shared freely

While the convenience store business is very complex, with a lot to learn in every area, Bush said colleagues at Parker’s have been his greatest teachers. And there is a lot of knowledge there because many of them have been with Parker’s for decades.

“It’s unbelievable how many people say, ‘This was my first job,’” Bush said. Talking to people who have been there 20, 30, 40 years is not unusual.

And it’s not just corporate employees; there are storelevel employees who also have been with Parker’s for decades. Bush told of a Parker’s Kitchen manager who has been with the company for more than 20 years and has been instrumental in the development of several of the retailer’s signature recipes.

“That’s another one of our pieces of magic,” Bush said. “When we are trying to solve a problem, nine times out of 10, we know the solution’s internal. We know that our employees are out there doing things in a way that we believe is the right way and we’ve just got to go find it.

“This is a company that rewards you for raising your hand and asking for a chance,” added Bush, who is 33 years old. He took on the president title from Greg Parker, who remains CEO.

Bush has always been an achiever. The oldest of seven boys, he started his first business when he was 14 years old and went on to start two more as a teen in Delaware. His

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Jeff Bush

“serial entrepreneur” lifestyle was interrupted, however, by 9/11. He comes from a military family, and he felt “this internal calling that I’ve got to go join the military.”

He sold everything and joined the Army. The military was a good fit for him, Bush said, as there was a set path for moving up the ranks. He applied himself to that process, “pushing the boundaries of how fast you could get promoted,” he said.

He served two tours in Iraq; the first was 16 months, during which he was injured in the line of duty; the second was cut short by a couple of months as he was accepted into the ROTC program at Armstrong and needed to be back in Savannah. He was stationed at nearby Fort Stewart, so he already had a house in the Savannah area. (Incidentally, his last promotion before he left the Army came from General David Petraeus, commander of the U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

At Parker’s, Bush took on the challenge of learning the business from the ground up.

“I was trying to wrap my mind around all this stuff, and people were saying words that I had no idea what they meant,” he said. But he asked a lot of questions of Greg Parker and other colleagues, which helped him “slowly but surely chip away at things.”

Bush would take on the challenge of figuring out solutions to problems, even while learning the business. Parker, he said, “will empower you beyond belief and give you an opportunity to tackle something. So, that’s how it all started for me; I was just consistently raising my hand.”

When an opportunity came for him to move into operations from fuel, he said yes, even though people cautioned him it was the most difficult part of the business.

He learned operations by working in a store.

“Over about an eight-month period, I worked in a store,

went through our management program, went through our district manager program to understand what takes place in the store, how it works,” Bush said. His fearlessness to take on any challenge was rewarded when Parker named him president.

“That it’s only been just over seven years is mind-bending,” Bush said in December. “But it’s a testament to Greg and the culture of this company. There’s not a person here who doesn’t have a fascinating story not only of how they got hired but how they arrived at the position where they are now.”

Employees have a voice

While the easy way to run a company is to make rules in the corporate office that are set in stone, that’s not the Parker’s way, Bush said.

“When an employee feels like they are impacting the company, it’s easy for you as a company to continue to elevate yourself,” he said.

Because Parker’s is open to their feedback, employees “are constantly giving us ideas and feedback and they are driving results. Our job is to continue to ensure that our employee voice is strong. We do that by getting feedback from the employees and then we implement that feedback,” Bush said. “We don’t just hear it. If the employees want to change something, let’s change it because they are running the show; we’re just here to support them.

“Whether it’s a new shirt or new shoes or the way we operate our POS system, whatever it is, we know that that person who is using it at the end of the day or wearing it at the end of the day has to be the one that is pleased. We trust in our employees and we know that it’s definitely not the easy way. The easy way is you sit in the ivory castle and you say this is what we are doing—go do it.”

A byproduct of employees having a voice is that they also

have passion for Parker’s.

“No matter what position you are in this company, every single person here is a 24/7 employee. I know people often say that, but I’ll tell you, everyone here really is. It just speaks to just the passion they have for Parker’s,” Bush said. “Greg has built this culture that it evokes passion. We live it. We breathe it. And we love everything we do. The employees treat it just like it’s their business because Greg has allowed us to do that.”

When Parker’s opened seven stores in 132 days in 2019, Bush said that he and the operations team were working hand in hand, “literally minute by minute,” making sure everything was on track, from the actual construction to training new employees.

He said Parker’s has a great employee training program already, but he has challenged that department to make sure

Parker’s Market, also known as “Fancy Parker’s,” is located in downtown Savannah on the ground floor of a building that formerly housed Parker’s offices. The offices have since moved to an historic house a few blocks away, but it’s still close enough for Parker’s staff to grab lunch, dinner, a snack, beverage or treat.

Parker’s President Jeff Bush offered a tour of the compact but packed store, which offers gourmet prepared foods—hot foods as well as sandwiches, salads and more—plus coffee, soft drinks, wines, beers, bottled water and a wide variety of other beverages. It also features local merchandise, gifts, greeting cards and select packaged foods. It even sells fuel, which is a bit unusual in a downtown location.

Jeff Bush with Gabriela and Jairo, team members at the upscale Parker’s Market in downtown Savannah (see story below).

‘Fancy Parker’s’ serves downtown Savannah customers with a little bit of everything

it’s the best program anywhere. That means easy-to-follow training guides for all pieces of equipment in the store, for instance.

As president, Bush’s day can involve any number of tasks, from fuel pricing to personnel to marketing, operations, loss prevention, IT and technology, real estate, etc.

With the company’s data capabilities, Bush is able to look at reports at any time and drill down as far as a single store transaction that is going on in real time.

He also makes a point to get out to Parker’s stores two full days a week, as the stores and their staff members form the core of Parker’s.

“I tell everybody it’s employees first, customer always. Anything we do needs to be with that mentality,” Bush said.

The Parker’s management team stays in touch through group texts, building “social capital,” as they call it.

“It’s so important for us to have internal social capital with each other and to make sure that we are bonded because if I have an interest in you personally, you have an interest in me, then if we are working on a project together I know where I can support you and you know where you can support me,” Bush said. “It’s important for us to understand each other and our strengths and weaknesses.

“Working at Parker’s is really working with a family.”

METTER, GEORGIA, PARKER’S OFFERS CHARGING FOR TESLAS, OTHER ELECTRIC CARS

Parker’s announced in early December that it had installed the first V3 Tesla charging site in Georgia, between Atlanta and Savannah in the town of Metter. The store, just off I-16 Exit 104 at 1118 S. Lewis Street, has eight Tesla Superchargers.

Several other Parker’s locations reportedly are in line to get chargers as well.

Parkers’s founder and CEO Greg Parker, himself a Tesla owner, noted that the Metter store offers the fastest Tesla charging station in America. The Tesla chargers complement two existing electric vehicle charging stations installed on-site by Georgia Power.

“We think we can charge any electric vehicle at our Metter store,” he said. “The new Tesla Superchargers offer a tremendous benefit for Parker’s customers and for anyone traveling along the I-16 corridor in a Tesla vehicle.”

Interestingly, stores don’t actually make money from offering the vehicle charging service; they pay for it. For every Tesla charged, Parker’s pays Tesla $1.

The question is, do in-store sales make up for what is paid out? Parker, who likes to make his decisions based on real data, said there’s no way to know what Tesla charger users are buying, if anything, in store. But one thing he does know is that “the electrification of the transportation of America is happening. It’s going to happen, so we have to be smart and we have to know how to prepare for the future.”

That’s yet another reason Parker’s is focusing on foodservice, he added—to cover fuel sales that are going to go away as more people purchase electric cars.

Parker’s President Jeff Bush said, “We recognize the shifting fuel demands of our customers and always strive to meet those demands. As a larger percentage of our customers begin driving electric vehicles, we want to provide them with a state-of-the-art charging infrastructure at strategic Parker’s locations.”

Tesla drivers who stop at Parker’s for a charge will spend 28 minutes there if they want a full charge, giving them enough time to enjoy a meal, snack and/ or beverage. But it remains to be seen whether they will do so or not, as wealthier customers are less likely to spend money in convenience stores than other consumers.

Jones Oversees Technology Solutions with the Customer Always in Mind

Eric Jones, chief innovation officer, was handpicked by Greg Parker to join the Parker’s team.

He graduated from Auburn University in 2005 and initially worked as a CPA at Ernst & Young in Atlanta. After that, he worked as a consultant in the healthcare field for a large national firm, helping physicians manage their medical practices.

“While I was there, we started to develop technologies with data and analytics to help run these medical practices better, to help run hospitals better,” Jones said. “We were doing things to try to drive efficiencies with the patient experience.”

Eventually he took the opportunity to start his own business—a data analytics-based company that sold solutions to medical practices and hospitals. It was during that time that he met Parker through his CFO.

Parker told Jones, “Man, you guys are doing amazing things…I think what you are doing in healthcare could be completely applicable to the convenience store business.”

Jones’ company considered developing a product for the c-store space, based on Parker’s theory that both healthcare and c-stores have “customers,” but it never came to fruition.

But when Jones exited his company, Parker asked him to come on board and bring his data analytics expertise.

It was about two years ago that Jones became chief innovation officer at Parker’s, with the task to “basically build a technology company based on data analytics inside of Parker’s to help it become a company that can pivot and adjust with changing customer expectations,” Jones said.

Jones now sees that the similarities between the two industries are “amazing.”

“They are both in the business of providing a convenient, very remarkable experience, to whoever they are serving,” he said.

His job was to look at ways Parker’s could innovate to make sure it would continue to be a “next-level convenience store that is meeting consumer expectations in a new way. We at Parker’s have some unique opportunities to really transform ourselves into a technology company that’s in the business of convenience in order to meet these changing customer demands.”

Jones is responsible for all of Parker’s technology needs. That includes store support, such as computer networking, but that is not where he spends the majority of his time. It’s the innovation side, which includes advanced analytics, business intelligence, data science and product development, that is his primary focus.

The overarching goal of any and all technology is creating a customer experience that is truly remarkable, Jones said.

“If you go into any one of our stores—whether we have 65 stores or 75 stores or 150 stores—you expect a remarkable experience when it comes to your experience there, whether it’s your fueling process, the food experience, our Chewy Ice in our drinks. My job is to make sure we are solving any problems in those areas. We start there and work our way back to the technology.”

IoT

Parker’s is working to integrate internet of things (IoT) solutions into its operations.

“We want smart equipment, not ‘dumb’ equipment,” like ovens, fryers, icemakers and drink dispensers, Jones said. “If it’s sitting in there and I can’t tell anything about it, then I

can’t ensure that it’s performing the way that it needs to perform to provide the experience that we want.”

Parker’s utilizes a cloud-based platform to consolidate the information from inside each of its stores. That allows Jones to run analytics as well as to trouble-shoot.

“I can tell that potentially the ice machine is going to fail in a certain period of time because the motor’s vibrating at a rate that it shouldn’t be, so therefore we have the potential for the ice to go out,” he said. “When ice goes out in our store, that’s a major customer experience hit.”

Same with the fountain drink dispenser. If someone comes in for a specific beverage, Parker’s needs to have it available at all times.

“Every single one of the dispensers should have product that you want, but that’s a problem with the volume that we do inside of our stores,” he said. “We have to ensure that the product is always coming out as intended to be.”

An alert that the soft drink syrup is nearly empty means store staff can catch it before it’s too late.

Parker’s also is using predictive analytics to predict demand for its hot food program.

“We are predicting demand inside of our stores in 15-minute increments,” Jones said. “At any 15-minute interval I know within a certain degree of accuracy what demand will be. Then we go back and test ourselves to see how well we got it—what’s going to be bought and in what quantities.”

The information allows Parker’s to operate “smart kitchens” that tell staff what they should be preparing at any minute of the day to meet the demand, he said.

While it’s not possible to plan for a tour bus that might stop, “for the most part we can predict demand,” Jones said. “And it should be completely seamless to the customer. The customer should just come in and say, ‘I am having a great food experience. It’s hot. It’s fresh. I think they just cooked that.’

“Those are the innovations that we are starting to do inside of our stores.”

Predictive analytics also help with ordering food and other supplies for the stores.

Parker’s also is getting into robotic process automation. These “bots,” which Jones’ team is responsible for building, implement company procedures across the enterprise through software.

“What this allows us to do is to grow the company as fast as we are growing it and maintain our standards and consistency and processes,” he said. “It helps our staff absorb all these new stores that we are building. It runs behind the scenes but it helps us provide a good customer experience.”

Customer-facing technology

In each Parker’s Kitchen, there are ordering kiosks for customers that present a digitized version of the menu. The kiosks feature professional food photography and can communicate in multiple languages.

“The kiosks allow us to walk you through a menu and allow us to present certain types of offerings—maybe would you like a roll with that?” Jones explained. “We get to curate that experience each time, plus we get to take orders at a magnitude of three and four times what we were doing.”

Kitchen associates are preparing the orders, but if a customer needs help, they’ll walk around the counter and help them with the ordering kiosks, Jones said.

The goal with the kiosks is shorter wait times and a better experience for the customer, he added.

In any foodservice operation, the biggest key is consistency, he said.

“Whether someone visits a store in Savannah or in

Charleston, you want to make sure they are getting a consistent product,” Jones said.

Digital diligence

Jones said that consumers these days expect every app to work at a high level.

“When we roll out a mobile app, it doesn’t compete with other convenience stores’ mobile apps; it competes with the best mobile app that you have on your phone,” he said. “It had better be as good as Starbucks and Panera and all the loyalty platforms that you are a member of because that’s what you compare it to.”

The Parker’s app features the company’s loyalty program, Parker’s Rewards. Members get 10 cents in rewards for every $25 they spend in the store that can be used at the fuel pump.

The app also has a debit function for the member to pay for purchases, shows what items are on special and what the fuel prices are at the pump.

“We made sure that we laid a technology foundation to be able to what we call ‘systematize’ innovation, not necessarily predict it,” Jones said. “I don’t know what the business looks like in three years. We have pretty good sense of the headwinds, but we want to make sure that whatever it is that we have a foundation that we can pivot in order to meet the demand.”

A mobile ordering function for the Parker’s app is in development and should be rolled out soon. And while Parker’s currently offers food delivery with partners like GrubHub and Uber Eats, autonomous delivery is probably not too far off.

The goal is to make doing business with Parker’s frictionless, he said, which leads to customer satisfaction and loyalty.

The company envisions, in the future, a Parker’s Rewards member pulling up to the gas pump and the beacon technology around the pump knows the member, knows what type fuel he or she chose the last time and asks, via the app, if they want the same type fuel. They also will be able to order food inside the store and pick it up during the fueling process. Both the fuel and food purchases will be processed through the debit card.

“That’s a much more seamless experience, and that’s our vision,” he said.

BEHIND PARKER’S COLORS AND LOGO

Parker’s was the first major c-store company to use the blue and green color scheme that today is fairly common.

Greg Parker chose those colors to be “unique and different and fresh.”

Today, the Parker’s brand mark is a moving, smiling sun.

“You can see the rays of the logo are moving. It’s supposed to connote our tagline, which is fast, fresh and friendly,” said Parker, adding that Parker’s stores are open not just when the sun is up but 24 hours a day.

Eric Jones