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

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

“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.