Blog written by Jon Brucato
Convenience retail is changing, and the center of gravity has moved inside the store. Foodservice is no longer an add-on category or a nice complement to fuel. It is increasingly the profit engine. Industry data from NACS show that foodservice accounted for 28.5% of in-store sales and 38.9% of in-store gross profit in 2025, up from 11.9% of in-store sales two decades ago. Prepared food now represents nearly three-quarters of foodservice sales. That is not a side business. That is the business model evolving in plain sight.
Shoppers are responding to that shift. Most have now tried made-to-order food at a convenience store, hot-meal purchases are rising, and c-stores are increasingly viewed as real alternatives to quick-service restaurants. At the same time, customers are telling the industry exactly what they want more of: fresher food, better-for-you options, stronger variety, and a meal offer that works beyond a quick snack run. In other words, convenience is becoming an experience business, and food is at the center of that experience.
Managing the Invoice Stream with Added Categories
But there is a less glamorous side to that growth. As stores add sandwiches, pizza, bakery, dispensed beverages, and other fresh items, the invoice stream becomes harder to manage. Fresh food and prepared food do not behave like legacy packaged goods. Some items involve catch-weight receiving. Many use direct-store-delivery models. Some require store-level proof of delivery and immediate discrepancy handling. Others bring tighter traceability expectations. The more foodservice grows, the more stores inherit the operational complexity of a restaurant and a fresh-food retailer, not just a convenience merchant.
That is where many back offices start to feel the strain. Public sources do not yet appear to publish a universal benchmark for foodservice invoice-error rates in c-stores, but they do make the friction points obvious: cost and pack differences, shortages, damages, unauthorized deliveries, missing invoice fields, variable-weight receiving, and traceability records. Those issues all end up in the same place: store operations, vendor disputes, and AP review. When the invoice process is still too manual, foodservice growth can create administrative drag just as the category becomes more strategically important.
C-Stores Can Modernize to Adapt with EDI Invoicing
That is why the real lesson is not to slow down foodservice. It is to modernize the operating model around it. Better EDI adoption, more structured receiving, clearer vendor requirements, and stronger exception workflows are no longer back-office nice-to-haves. They are part of making foodservice scale.
Benchmarking shows the cost gap between strong and weak AP functions is material, and EDI guidance continues to show why electronic document exchange matters: faster cycle times, better data integrity, and less manual work across ordering, delivery, invoicing, and payment.
Food may be the new differentiator in convenience, but the retailers that truly win will be those that ensure their invoice process is ready for the food business they are becoming.
Fintech’s PaymentSource is built to scale with c-stores as they grow. C-stores can now process invoices for all vendors, including those in foodservice, in addition to their alcohol invoices. Fill out a form to speak with a Fintech expert on using PaymentSource across c-store categories for better invoice management.
