With millennials maturing and the Gen Z crowd becoming young adults, convenience retailers find customers’ shifting dispositions both a challenge and an opportunity. The question: How to stay relevant?

Retailers addressing change head on often find solutions coming from trusted business partners, many of whom have invested time and resources to support these retailers.

“Our customers are consumers, and expectations of all consumers have changed in recent years,” said Sean Luce, vice president of sales for convenience, travel and military for McLane, Temple, Texas. “When our customers win, we win and serving as a strategic partner enables us to make the most of our partnership.”

McLane has developed a series of programs designed to meet retailers where they are in their journey, whether they are feeling price pressures, wanting to stock new and innovative products in their store, or need to expand their foodservice offering in order to combat the declining tobacco sales, Luce said.

Here is a rundown of these programs:

• Emerging Brands. A digital item discovery tool at McLaneMarketplace.com that allows retailers to test new up-and-coming brands and products.
• Private Label. An opportunity for retailers to increase margin and provide consumer value on a host of packaged goods through a private-label strategy.
• McLane Fresh. A three-part program involving labor-saving equipment and a variety of menu options from food to cold coffee.

Luce said that as a distributor it is vital to communicate—to become a strategic partner with retailers by having intimate, thoughtful conversations.

“Our customers tell us, ‘I want to grow past where I am now,’” Luce said. “We can help them do that.”

Retailers may find the notion of keeping up with changing consumer trends hard to grasp. A clearer vision of the issue may be where an interesting product just seen on an episode of TV’s “Shark Tank” suddenly appears on a c-store shelf.

Describing McLane’s new Emerging Brands platform, Michelle Patterson, vice president, marketing and communications for McLane, said retailers wanting new products—for instance, items from a new-to-market brand—can have samples shipped to stores or category managers without hassle.

Continue reading about McLane’s program in the September 2024 issue of NACS Magazine.