Convenience stores are becoming culinary destinations

This article is part of "Made to Order," a series highlighting the business strategies driving today's food industry.

Dash In in Chantilly, Virginia, doesn't look like a store at a gas station.

As I walk in, I woman named Esme flashes a smile and greets me. Straight ahead is a kitchen where I can order a burger developed by the Washington, DC, chef Spike Mendelsohn or watch as mini doughnuts roll out of a fryer on a conveyer belt. To the right is a wall with bar-style taps that dispense soft drinks such as Pepsi and a cucumber-flavored soda. Before long, I'm ordering several food items from a touchscreen.

None of this was here just a couple of years ago, says Mark Samuels, the executive vice president of convenience retailing at the Wills Group, which owns Dash In. The company designed the 5,600-square-foot store and built it from the ground up. It also developed the food and beverage offerings, like the Spike burger.

"We're a very food-forward concept," Samuels tells me on the floor of the chain's Chantilly location.

Convenience stores have been upping their food game for a while. But Dash In's transformation shows how many are making food — freshly prepared food, specifically — a draw for patrons.

For convenience stores, food draws in customers

Gas stations with attached convenience stores proliferated in the middle of the last century as more Americans bought cars, moved to suburbs, and hopped on the interstates. They were easy places to buy fuel and, perhaps, a pack of cigarettes when you walked inside the store to pay for your gas.

Starting in the 1980s, though, many gas stations started installing credit card readers at pumps, reducing the number of people who had to stop by the attached store to pay.

At the same time, the number of smokers in the US was falling. That took away a key source of profit for convenience stores, Samuels says. "You had to find other ways to drive sales and profitability," he tells me.

One solution has been to offer more food.

Many chains have been adding prepared foods for years. East Coast diners are likely to have a preference between Sheetz and Wawa, both of which offer food such as doughnuts and paninis. Southerners, especially Texans, are likely to preach the virtues of Buc-ee's, a chain as known for Beaver Nuggets and brisket as it is for its supermarket-sized stores.

"These chains have recognized that they can become a food service and restaurant destination more so than they had been in the past, and it's opening up a new revenue stream for them," Billy Roberts, a CoBank senior analyst for food and beverage, told me over the phone.

Offering better food usually leads customers to spend more time in convenience stores, said Elizabeth Lafontaine, the director of research at Placer.ai, which tracks foot traffic at retailers.

"Convenience stores are a highly impulsive environment," Lafontaine said in a phone interview. "If somebody's going in, they're likely to pick up something else while they're there."

One metric that Placer.ai measures is "dwell time" — how long people spend at a store.

At Buc-ee's, customers spent just over 21 minutes per visit on average when they stopped by one of the chain's stores in 2024, a Placer.ai data analysis found. Wawa was far behind at about 12 minutes, as was Sheetz at 11, though both were still ahead of Circle K, which averaged about nine minutes.

"All of the ones that have longer dwell times — and also all the ones that are doing the best right now — are the ones that have really focused on the prepared food offerings," Lafontaine said.

Sheetz and Wawa, both of which have built up their store networks in the mid-Atlantic, compete with Dash In, Samuels tells me. "Where can we differentiate?" he says.

Convenience stores and fast-food collide

As Samuels and I sit at one of the tables in the Chantilly Dash In's dining area, Esme brings the food I ordered to our table.

I try the Spike burger, which tastes rich because of the over-easy egg and pleasantly zesty thanks to the spicy Dash sauce. There's also the Stackadilla, a multilayered quesadilla. I ordered it with shaved steak. And the sweet potato waffle fries, while not necessarily a Dash In original, are crispier than any I've had elsewhere — quite a feat given how much harder sweet potatoes are to crisp up than their white counterparts.

Between the burger, fries, and souped-up quesadilla, it's hard not to think Dash In and other convenience stores are taking on fast-food chains.

According to Samuels, I'm not wrong. These days, fast-food restaurants and convenience stores "are really melding together," he tells me, adding: "People are actually thinking of convenience stores now as a place to go eat, which didn't happen 20 years ago."

That comes at a tough time for many fast-food chains, which are trying to keep diners after years of inflation and persistently high prices. One of the highest-profile examples was McDonald's $5 meal deal, which the company said got more people ordering despite some pushback from franchisees who said the meal cost them too much to serve.

Many diners, especially Gen Zers, don't view traditional fast-food chains as a good value, a survey from Morning Consult last year found.

The food operations at Dash In feel similar to fast-food restaurants, though Samuels points out some differences. The grill and other work areas in the kitchen, for instance, are more open and visible than at many fast-food joints, he says. And while some fast-food chains stick food in warmers until someone orders it, everything here is made to order, he adds.

By doing that, convenience stores are "creating this experience where their food feels fresh because it's being prepared in front of you," Placer.ai's Lafontaine said.

"People will look at the quality, they will see what we're delivering, and we're going to get them back again and again," Samuels says.