Lowes Foods is celebrating 70 years in the grocery business this year. It began with a small grocery store in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, operated by Jim Lowe, who was part of the family that founded a separate business under the same name selling home improvement products.
The focus at Jim Lowe’s grocery store was on providing quality food to local shoppers, with extra care given to fresh produce and customer service.
The central goal has not changed over the decades – only the way Lowes Foods goes about achieving it.
More than a decade ago, Lowes Foods unveiled its first store bearing the company’s new logo and reimagined offerings, including even more local products and interactive experiences that are said to have made kids beg their parents to make a visit.
That pioneering spirit led The Shelby Report of the Southeast to celebrate Lowes Foods this month for 70 Years of Innovation.
Creative concepts continue to be added
That first reimagined store was in Clemmons, North Carolina, and since then, across the company’s footprint that now stretches from North Carolina to South Carolina and Georgia, there have been newly built or refreshed stores that feature unique departments known as Originals.
There’s The Chicken Kitchen with a talking chicken chandelier and chicken dance performances when fresh product is brought out; SausageWorks, offering an abundant selection of beef, pork and poultry variations overseen by the Sausage Professor; The Cakery, where cake wizards squarely do their magic; and The Community Table, where parties and other activities take place that are designed to make and strengthen connections. And those are just scratching the surface.
“It’s just this whole idea of having a little bit of fun and bringing some entertainment back into some great food experiences,” said Tim Lowe, president of Lowes Foods and head of retail for parent company Alex Lee Inc. “We’re on a journey to be an entertainment company that interfaces with people around great food experiences.”
It’s not innovation for innovation’s sake, though. According to Lowe, it must “be true to the spirit of what your brand is built on. Innovation has really been focused on going back to the fact that we have so many great stories to tell that we really want to make sure that we continue to lean into and have no best-kept secrets.”
Scattered throughout Lowes Foods stores are “Easter eggs” waiting to be discovered. In The Cheese Shop, the lights overhead cast a Swiss cheese shadow below and, more obviously, the supports for The Cheese Shop canopy look like wheels of cheese. In the bakery, L’Oven Cookies are sold in a box that looks like an oven.
Clever signage throughout the store is designed to add a touch of fun to what can be a mundane task, and limited time offers (LTOs) in the service departments encourage guests to try them while they’re available. It might be Nashville Hot Chicken in The Chicken Kitchen, Harvest Cookies or Sweet Potato Bread in the bakery, fruitcake-flavored sausage at SausageWorks or pumpkin-flavored drinks at Boxcar Coffee.
Lowes Foods also utilizes innovative practices around its team members, who are called hosts (customers, as indicated earlier, are guests). When hiring, interviews can be more like auditions, with the entertainment emphasis on the sales floor. When a host is hired, their first day is “Signing Day.”
“Signing Day is really about a celebration of the individual,” Lowe said. There may be a cake, a goodie bag or other surprise.
“Their first day of work in our stores, they can come in and get to know people around them, and they can feel great about the environment they’re going into.”
Technology often yields innovation, and Lowes Foods gauges its value by whether it removes friction for either hosts or guests. If it helps prospective hosts fill out employment forms more easily or allows a guest to clip a coupon electronically, the grocer is on board.
“We live in a right-now society, and we’ve got to make sure that we’re using innovation and technology to help us step up to that right-now expectation in everything from hiring to training to how we do price changes in the store or whatever else it may be,” Lowe said.
“We spend a whole lot of time and energy and effort around continuing to look at our internal mechanisms to say, how do we better deliver a quality experience, a more frictionless experience, without forcing things down their throat?”
[RELATED: Lowes Foods’ In-Store Atmosphere Offers Sense Of Community]
As a grocery store, food and beverage naturally form the basis of Lowes Foods’ interaction with its communities. Charitable giving is centered on helping the food insecure, and Lowes Foods favors “community activations” as opposed to sponsorships when it comes to supporting local sports teams and events.
With the Carolina Hurricanes ice hockey team, Lowes Foods takes its S’mores Wagon to the arena, setting up outside to offer free dessert to tailgaters. For Wake Forest football games or local brewfests, Lowes Foods has a branded barrel that uses the Beer Den name found in-store.
During the summer, Lowes Foods might take cut-up watermelon to a community swimming pool for all to enjoy. During the holidays, Lowes Foods team members might show up at a Christmas tree lot and hand out hot chocolate.
“Rather than just seeing a name on a sign, they’re actually interfacing with us, directly learning about us,” Lowe said.
Speaking of interfacing, when Lowes Foods opened its newest store in Concord, North Carolina, this summer, team members were dispatched into areas around the store, going door to door to hand out 1,000 “Lowes and Behold” boxes. The boxes were filled with a mix of free items, including some local products. A note from the store director inside invited them to visit the store.
“It wasn’t just a mailer they received, but they actually saw one of our folks in our Lowes’ shirt show up at their door and hand them a gift – basically saying, ‘We’re proud to be here and be a part of your community,’” Lowe said. “There’s a variety of different things we do to ‘activate,’ if you will, within the store as well as outside the store.”
[RELATED: Lowes Foods To Debut Concord Store, Reopens Renovated Mt. Airy Site]
Within the store, Lowes Foods wants to make sure customers have a multi-sensory experience, according to Kelly Dillon Davis, senior director of guest engagement and a 10-year company veteran who was one of Tim Lowe’s first hires when he took the helm.
“When you come in one of our stores, you’re going to smell things, hear things, see things, touch things, taste things. You’re going to use all your senses when you come in here… You need to experience it,” she said.
“We’re a produce stand, a deli, a bar, a restaurant, a brewery, a florist… We have things you can only get here, and we have people you’ll only see here.”
Lowes Originals continue to be dreamed up by staff members. Knock Knock Spirits is a liquor store inside a Lowes Foods; three currently are open inside South Carolina locations, selling local, standard and high-end spirits.
The Spice Bazaar is where guests can find the spices they need for most any dish, and if they are concerned about using them up before their freshness fades, smaller packets are available.
Divine Cut is where Lowes Foods guests can find dry-aged beef like they might find in a fine steakhouse. And there is also Poppy Go Lucky, a popcorn concept. It started as a mobile popcorn machine but is being tested in-store. Cheerwine-flavored popcorn, anyone?
“We’re constantly looking for new innovations and how we can continue to be able to take what we have up to the next level,” Lowe said. “We are continuing to look to grow. We’re a company that sees a very, very bright future. I think there’s some good growth ahead for us.”
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