For more than two decades, Marczyk Fine Foods has built its reputation in Denver, Colorado, on high-quality specialty food, hand-crafted market-made items and exceptional customer service. But behind the fresh baguettes, Niman Ranch beef and house-made guacamole is a technology infrastructure that’s every bit as curated and intentional as the products lining the shelves.
At the core of Marczyk Fine Foods’ operations is ECRS’ CATAPULT POS platform – a long-standing technology partnership that CFO Rob Jones calls one of the company’s most vital non-food relationships.
“We’ve been CATAPULT users since we opened in 2002, and never really looked back,” Jones said. “In a number of ways, we consider ECRS our largest non-food partner. We really rely on partnerships – customers and suppliers – and ECRS has always been a good fit for us over the years.”
Creating community through technology
Jones recently attended ECRS’ Ignite Retail Success Conference, an annual gathering for independent retailers with a focus on users of the CATAPULT platform.
“The Ignite conference was very good. They rolled out some really cool stuff that we were all excited about,” he said. “It’s a once-a-year thing that a lot of us look forward to. It’s our chance to see other stores like us, using the CATAPULT software in various different ways to solve different solutions … It really does foster this CATAPULT community.”
Jones said the conference is an opportunity for retailers to interact with the ECRS team and “ask them questions or, if we have issues, they’re there to help. They’re there to listen. A lot of them have their laptops at the ready and just start typing things in to follow up later.”
From one store to a multi-channel business
Founded in 2002 by Pete and Barbara Marczyk, with Pete’s brother Paul joining later, Marczyk Fine Foods filled a gap in Denver’s food landscape.
“Back then, there really wasn’t a specialty food market that catered to meat, seafood, great produce, great grocery items,” Jones said. “So we opened in 2002, one store near downtown Denver. And in 2011, we opened up our second location three miles east on Colfax and Fairfax.”
The company has since expanded with a food production facility and its main offices – Marczyk Culinary Center – in North Park Hill and a new storefront at Denver International Airport.
“We specialize in specialty foods,” Jones said. “Everything in our commissary, everything that we make – our breads, cookies, pies, brownies, prepared meals, lasagna, mac and cheese, enchiladas, guacamole, soup, salads, ice cream, ice cream base – everything is made from scratch, by hand; there is no factory.”
With a retail, wholesale and catering model, the business relies heavily on CATAPULT to keep operations streamlined.
Unlocking CATAPULT’s power
When Jones joined the company in 2003, he said it was just using CATAPULT to “ring up stuff.”
He recalled that Pete Marczyk told him that he thought there was more to the software and suggested Jones take a class at ECRS’ headquarters in Boone, North Carolina.
“So I go to Boone, I take one of their CATAPULT training classes and was blown away. I came back, and I said, ‘Pete, you bought a mansion, and we’re only using the broom closet in the kitchen.’
“I said, this thing can do so much. It does inventory management. It helps you manage your pricing and your gross margin. It does ordering. It does receiving. More than just beyond ringing items up at the POS.
“That’s how we started with these guys. We made the determination to use every aspect of this that makes sense for us.”
According to ECRS, CATAPULT is an end-to-end unified transaction platform that integrates point-of-sale, self-checkout, e-commerce, scales and more – all powered by what the company calls Unified Transaction Logic.
This unified logic means that everything from dynamic promotions and loyalty rewards to AI-powered reporting and analytics works seamlessly across every touchpoint.
Inventory accuracy, labor savings
One of the key pickups that Marczyk’s adopted through the guidance and consultation of ECRS is Perpetual Inventory, Jones said. The grocer has been using Perpetual Inventory on bar-coded items since 2017.
“When we adopted PI, we saw a five-point increase in gross margin right off the bat. You’re just more efficient. It gets you to the right product mix. You’re curating, and you’re optimizing your product mix, and our sales were for the better.”
Because of disciplined practices and technology, the company maintains a 99.8 percent inventory accuracy rate.
“That has been a huge pickup and a huge labor savings because, again, back in the old days, we would do inventory at the end of every quarter. Always on a Sunday … we would still be in the store until two in the morning, counting,” he said.
“The main aspect of CATAPULT is obviously Web Office. That’s just their overarching platform that handles, again, inventory management, auto reorder, Demand Fill 3.0, which is awesome, allows us to set up profiles, set up dynamic promotions.
“It’s just the central core that connects all the other platforms together. Configuring your point of sale is on Web Office, and that’s just something that has really been a huge pickup for us.”
Loyalty, promotions and profitability
The grocer also has adopted a range of customer-facing tools through ECRS.
“We use Basket Lift – we call it a no-brainer type program that they offer,” Jones said.
He said the LoyaltyBot campaign can measure the activity of frequent shoppers over a certain time period.
“If your average shopping experience is $35, we will send you an e-coupon via email that says, ‘Hey, if you buy $50 worth of something, we’ll give you $5 off.’ And that’s called lifting the basket. That has been huge.
“We’ve gotten great feedback and great traction and great response results from the Basket Lift program. It’s just amazing how you listen to [shoppers] just walk around the store saying, ‘Oh, I have to get one more thing to get to 50 bucks.’ We love to hear that.”
He said dynamic promotions – such as “Welcome to Marczyk” or “We Miss You” offering a $10 coupon off the next purchase – keep customers engaged and returning.
CATAPULT WebCart evolves from presales to catering
Initially used for specialty item presales, WebCart became a vital tool for Marczyk Fine Foods during the COIVD-19 pandemic and continues to support multiple areas of the business.
“We also use their Made to Order feature where you can order sandwiches online and customize it any way you’d like,” Jones said. “We also offer e-gift cards … and then catering is the last thing that we started using ECRS for on WebCart.”
Each online service is customizable by timing. “Made to Order sandwiches is 10 minutes. Personal shopping might be a little bit longer. Catering is definitely a 24-hour minimum window.”
reciProfity: Margin clarity for scratch-made goods
The catering side of the business is one the company is continuing to develop and grow, Jones said. ECRS’ integration of reciProfity, a recipe management and food costing tool, is another area where Marczyk’s is finding value in both its deli department and catering business.
“This platform, like all recipe management platforms, costs out your recipes to portion costing,” Jones said. “It’s going to help us understand changes in ingredient costs a lot faster.
“The ingredient cost flows into the recipe calculation algorithms, which then changes the unit cost of the serving size, which then communicates over into CATAPULT, which allows us to understand that vis-a-vis retail pricing, again, analyzing gross margin and things of that nature. So that’s a huge pickup.”
The ultimate goal? Real-time inventory and pricing visibility across every department – from kitchen to shelf.
“It all goes to that efficiency factor. It hits the efficiency leg that we’re looking at; it also hits the profitability leg, because we’re now more fine-tuned into our cost reviews and making sure that our margin targets are being maintained.
“And then by just being more efficient, we can make more and we can have it on the shelf in an efficient way. And that tackles the sales leg of what we we’re trying to maintain and enhance.”
[RELATED: ECRS Debuts Integration Between ReciProfity, CATAPULT]
Text marketing: ‘Call to action’ that converts
Marczyk’s also was a beta tester for ECRS’ new text marketing feature.
He said the company decided to use text marketing as a “call to action.” An example is a message sent reminding customers to attend Marczyk’s Burger Night, held on Fridays during the summer. He said these were done using SMS and it was a challenge to try to measure engagement and conversion.
At the Ignite conference last year, he mentioned to ECRS staff that if they could integrate CATAPULT into text marketing “it could be a lot easier to get customer data, phone number, data and messaging all in one, rather than going from this platform to that platform and whatever to pull it all together.”
At this year’s conference, Jones said ECRS announced it was partnering with a text marketing platform, Text-Em-All, for which Marczyk’s had participated in preliminary testing.
The grocer did its first MMS call to action text message Memorial Day weekend for its lobster roll promotion.
“Every Memorial Day, we always offer lobster rolls. A lot of us are from the East Coast,” Jones said. Comparing this year’s sales to 2024, it was a “30 percent increase in dollar sales. It was crazy.”
[RELATED: ECRS Adds Text-Em-All Capabilities To CATAPULT Software]
CATAPULT Cognition and smart e-circulars
Through ECRS’ Cognition platform, the Marczyk team is using data to guide growth, particularly in its expanding catering business.
“We use Cognition to look at our catering sales. We’re able to slice it and dice it by store level, by month, by week, however we want to look at it,” Jones said.
Smart e-circulars offer another data-driven innovation.
“What Cognition will do … it’ll look at what we have on sale, look at what you shop, and it’ll pick six items that you have a history with and just make sure you know they’re on special,” Jones said. “We tested this out … We all got different items in our Smart e-circulars.”
Jones said the plan is to “get more of our teeth into Cognition and get into that data, use AI more to help us enhance how we’re doing things and make sure we hit the sales, the efficiencies and the profitability targets we want to get.”
[RELATED: ECRS Achieves New Milestone With CATAPULT Cognition]
Long-term trust and support
Jones also shared how ECRS’ partnership stood strong during a 2020 ransomware attack. It happened overnight on a Friday and was discovered Saturday morning.
According to Jones, when Pete Marczyk walked in, all the computer screens were blue “with some kind of a nasty note.”
“Pete Marczyk called Pete Catoe (ECRS founder, CEO and then president) … and the only thing that Catoe said was, ‘What do you need? We’ll do whatever you need. Do we need to send people on a plane to head over to you guys?’ They’re in North Carolina. We’re in Denver. We were super impressed by that.”
Jones noted that none of the CATAPULT equipment was affected during the attack.
“We never had to close our stores. It really affected our back office, Windows machines and things of that nature.”
In the end, Jones said, it all comes down to alignment on key goals.
“A lot of the things that we do with ECRS … we just want to make sure – does this new feature, is it going to help us increase sales? Is it going to contribute and improve our bottom line? Is it going to improve efficiency and labor? And in every one of these cases, these things have touched on one, if not all of those three things.”