Gen Z hits c-stores several times a week and buys prepared food on half its trips, Datassential finds

The customers who show up most often at your store are the ones just now old enough to drive, and they treat the place as a food stop, not a gas stop. Datassential's 2026 C-Store Keynote Report puts 47% of Gen Z shoppers in a convenience store at least several times a week. For boomers the figure is 18%. If you run stores, the frequent visitor is young and hungry.

The food gap

53% of Gen Z shoppers bought a prepared food item on their most recent visit. For boomers it was 35%. That is an 18-point spread on the single category that carries a c-store's margin, and it lines up with who walks in the door most.

Prepared food is not a side bet anymore. Impulse buys of prepared food are up nine points since 2023, and 45% of shoppers say they are buying more of it. The read for operators is plain: the hot case, the roller grill, the made-to-order counter are pulling the traffic that fuel margin used to.

The report flags a second cohort behind Gen Z, kids still in middle school who arrive with sharper opinions about food than any group before them. That is a planning problem, not a today problem, but it points the same direction. The younger the customer, the more they expect the store to feed them well.

What operators do with this

Foodservice is where the frequency and the spend both concentrate, so the labor, the equipment, and the menu work belong there. A store built around tobacco and lottery sales is aimed at the shopper who comes in least. Menu variety and quality are what the growth cohort is buying on.

Worth a caution: these are survey figures on visit frequency and self-reported purchases, not scanned basket data. Directionally useful, and consistent across a few years now, but calibrate before you rebuild a store around one report.

Greene robbery

A Maine man is accused of robbing a convenience store in Greene, per WGME. No injuries or dollar figure reported. It is a local police item, not an industry trend, but overnight staffing and drop-safe discipline stay on the list for any single-clerk store.

What to watch

Whether the prepared-food frequency gap holds when Gen Z ages into higher incomes, or whether it is a life-stage habit that fades. Watch how many chains move the middle-school cohort's tastes into menu planning now versus waiting. And watch whether the nine-point jump in prepared-food impulse buys keeps climbing or levels off, since that is the number that justifies the foodservice spend.