Organic and natural food stores have seen a significant boost in demand in recent years. Customers are increasingly health-conscious and seeking out high-quality, sustainably-sourced food options.
But with more demand comes more competition — and that means your store needs to provide a better customer experience to stand out.
To stay ahead, your natural food store needs to have efficient and effective systems in place to manage inventory, sales, and customer data. The best way to achieve this? Implement an industry-specific natural food store point of sale (POS) system.
More than just a cash register or system to process payments, a POS system helps you manage all aspects of your business, from inventory and reorders to customer loyalty and marketing.
In this blog, we’ll lay out how a modern POS system can help your natural food store run more efficiently, then explore our tip provider picks.
Top 6 Reasons To Upgrade Your Natural Food Store POS
Many natural food stores hesitate when it comes time to upgrade their technology. If things are (kind of) working already, why spend all that money and go through all that effort?
While we may be biased, the benefits of adopting a modern POS system far outweigh any temporary inconveniences.
Here are six compelling reasons to upgrade your natural food store's POS.
1. Baked-In Customer Loyalty Programs
What’s the best kind of customer? A return customer.
The numbers don’t lie:
- 65% of a small business’ revenue comes from repeat business.
- Existing customers are more likely to try new products and tend to spend more than new customers.
- Increasing customer retention by just 5% can lead to a 25% increase in profit.
The more incentives you give for customers to come back, the more your business will prosper. In addition to regularly updating your marketing and promotions, an easy way to keep customers coming back is to implement a customer loyalty program.
While managing a customer loyalty program used to require a third-party service or manual effort, today’s natural food store POS systems (likeMarkt POS) come with customer loyalty built in.
The simplest way to use your loyalty program is to let customers sign up and earn points the more they buy. Then, let customers redeem accumulated points for discounts or freebies.
But that’s just the basics. Customer loyalty programs can also be used more creatively — you can:
- Use the sales history of loyalty members to segment customers (e.g. people who regularly buy certain items together, people who spend over a certain amount) and then send out personalized offers and discounts.
- Provide member-exclusive deals that discount automatically at checkout or member-only freebies (e.g. Free Coffee Friday for loyalty members).
- Set up specific days or products that earn members double points.
- Send out a newsletter with discount codes and new product announcements exclusively to loyalty members.
Loyalty programs are an effective way to stay connected with customers and provide an incentive to come back.
2. Easier Reorders and Vendor Management
When you’re stuck using an old system or manual processes, you can spend hours or days invoicing, taking stock, and writing purchase orders. Natural food store POS systems come with several game-changing features to save you time and money. With them, you can:
- Store vendor information in your system and connect products to multiple vendors for easy reordering.
- Create purchase orders directly from your POS system and autofill key fields to speed up the process.
- Receive automatically against an invoice with the option to make adjustments if items are missing or damaged.
- Set low stock alerts based on supplier lead times and sales history to avoid stockouts and keep customer favorites on the shelves.
With more efficient ways to manage your stock and vendors, you can spend less time on paperwork and more time with your customers.
Related Read: How To Open an Organic Food Store in 7 Steps
3. Better Inventory Management and Visibility
Speaking of managing stock, have you ever found yourself blindsided by sudden surges in demand or having to constantly walk the floor to keep track of what’s low, what’s overstocked, or what’s about to expire?
If you have, you’re not alone. It’s estimated that almost 30% of food on grocery store shelves is thrown out without being sold. Not only is that bad for the environment, it’s bad for your store’s bottom line.
Effective inventory management can help you drastically reduce waste and cut costs by giving you better visibility. At its core, inventory management software keeps a running tab of your stock levels, updating every time you receive an invoice or make a sale.
It also allows you to add any number of items to your inventory with predefined or custom SKUs. That means you can create a single item for fresh carrots coming from multiple farms, or create your own embedded barcode to sell your homemade pasta salad by weight.
Custom barcodes also make it easier to track a diverse range of fruit and vegetables while simplifying the checkout process for staff and customers.
4. Improved Decision Making Using Reports and Analytics
With a consolidated source of information on your inventory, prices, sales, vendors, and every other aspect of your store operations, your POS system will quickly start gathering data points through regular use.
This data can then be contextualized through the reporting and analytics tools built into the system. Many POS systems, including Markt POS, have prebuilt visual reports to help you identify metrics like:
- Bestselling items
- Bestselling product categories
- Profit margin analysis (by item, by vendor, by department, etc.)
- Inventory turnover and spoilage rates
- Average sale volume
- Items frequently purchased together
- Shrinkage sources
Having an unbiased view of store performance helps you identify gaps in your processes, improve your product selection, and find areas to boost profits.
5. Support for E-Commerce and Online Sales
Whether you’re providing in-store pickup, partnering with a service like InstaCart, or offering deliveries, grocery e-commerce remains a popular and effective way to grow your business.
Modern POS systems are pivotal to taking your store online. They connect your in-store and online inventory, sync customer data across sales channels, and integrate with third-party services.
More sophisticated systems help you manage the extra business that comes from online sales, with ways to schedule delivery windows so you can more effectively manage your staff and stock.
6. Customer Experiences That Rival Big Chains
The reason people choose to shop at a natural grocery store isn’t because you offer the lowest prices, it’s because of your high-quality products and great customer service.
But customer expectations are evolving, and people expect the same convenience at a mom-and-pop shop that they do from a big chain.
Maybe the most important reason to adopt a natural food store POS system is because it allows small businesses with fewer resources to provide the same convenient shopping experiences as their bigger rivals.
In addition to benefits like customer loyalty and online shopping, a POS system also improves the shopping experience through things like:
- Flexible payments via credit card, debit card, or EBT
- Integrations with scales for simplified sales of weight-based items
- Barcode scanners and printers for better inventory tracking and easy checkout
- Quick-service restaurant and grocerant features for order management and kitchen printing
- Multilocation management to maintain consistency as your business grows
- Customizable interfaces so staff can easily access common functions
Better yet, some POS systems support a wide range of hardware, meaning you can modernize the customer experience without a huge investment.
Best Natural Food Store POS Providers: 4 Options
Many natural food stores know they need to upgrade their POS system, but aren’t sure where to start. There are tons of POS systems out there, all with different strengths and weaknesses. We’re here to help.
While we’d love to say our solution is the best fit for every food market, it may not be. Here are some different options to consider based on factors like business size, hardware needs, and unique industry features.
4. Square
Best for: New businesses or beginners
Square is a big name in the POS industry and is used across a wide variety of retail and online businesses. Square has budget-friendly options for businesses with low transaction volumes and user-friendly hardware*, making it a solid choice for new businesses.
Standout features:
- Scan IDs with a 2D barcode scanner for simplified age verification.
- Monitor inventory levels in real time and set automatic low stock alerts.
- Ensure employees only have access to the systems they need with customizable employee access features.
- Simplify online sales with robust e-commerce support.
*Note: Square mostly requires the use of its own hardware — so if you have existing scales, terminals, or scanners, be sure to check for compatibility.
Pricing:
Square’s most popular option for growing businesses starts at $89/month + processing fees.
3. Toast
Best for: Natural food stores that primarily offer sit down meals and other quick-service food options
Toast is a robust POS system that supports retailers and restaurants. That said, Toast built its reputation on creating features for restaurants and has the most in-depth features for table and order management on this list.
Standout features:
- Ring customers up from the register or at the table with Toast’s restaurant-grade hardware.
- Scan barcodes and update inventory directly from your phone for simplified inventory counts.
- Consolidate your various tasks with optional add-ons for payroll, online ordering, and integrations.
- Customize menus, add table layouts, and support online orders with robust quick-service restaurant features.
Pricing
Toast’s most popular plan starts at $90/month or $69/month if you bundle it together with Toast Payroll.
2. Lightspeed
Best for: Rapidly growing or larger natural food store chains
Based in Canada, Lightspeed supports thousands of businesses around the world with powerful retail POS solutions. While their solutions are pricier, Lightspeed offers powerful tools for managing large franchises — allowing you to fine-tune operations at individual locations or optimize the business as a whole.
Standout features:
- Leverage Lightspeed’s wide range of hardware support so you can use your existing systems.
- Manage inventory, employees, and view store performance for any number of locations with franchise-level tools.
- Get the best deal using Lightspeed’s B2B supplier catalog — compare prices, lead times, and optimize your vendor management.
- Take full control of your operations with visibility into individual store performance and your whole brand.
Pricing:
Lightspeed’s popular Core Plan starts at $149/month (billed annually) per register.
1. Markt POS
Markt POS is our industry-specific solution built for small and independent natural grocers, food markets, and butchers. In building our software, we tried to cut the fat out of typical generalized systems to give natural food stores the features they need at an affordable price.
Standout features:
- Serve fresh food and sell groceries using consolidated market and grocerant features.
- Save money by using your existing equipment — Markt POS supports many popular barcode scanners and scales.
- Batch print shelf and item labels so you can easily manage and ring up a diverse range of produce and homemade items.
- Keep track of inventory in real time, set low stock alerts, receive against invoices, and create purchase orders all from the same system.
Pricing:
We offer flexible pricing tiers based on the size of your business and hardware needs. Use our transparent build and price tool to get a custom quote.
Point of Sale Systems and Your Natural Food Store
Here’s the bottom line: A point of sale system made for organic and natural food stores allows you to sustain, scale, and optimize your business operations.
Grocery-specific point of sale systems like Markt POS offer smart inventory reports, e-commerce solutions, employee tracking, and much more, to make sure your natural food store is performing at its highest level.
Ready to give our POS system a go? Schedule a free demo with our team today to distance yourself from the competition and become your community’s go-to natural food store.
by Luke
by Joel