Stocking the camper during race week at most tracks requires a trip to a local grocery store, but this week Dover officials will save fans that trouble by bringing a grocery store to the track.
An agreement between Giant Food, Dover International Speedway and NASCAR will allow Giant Food to erect a 5,000-square-foot pop-up grocery store at the track for this week’s race and set up NASCAR promotions in more than 200 mid-Atlantic stores.
Pop-up grocery stores have been constructed at racetracks in the past, but this represents the first time that a grocer has bought sponsorship rights to a pop-up store and simultaneously partnered with NASCAR on an in-store promotion.
Giant Food, which is a subsidiary of the Dutch company Ahold, signed a multiyear agreement with Dover to become a partner of the track. The deal, which sources valued in the low six figures, gives Giant Food the right to set up the pop-up store, and provides it with signs at the track, hospitality and activation rights.
A separate agreement with NASCAR makes Ahold and Giant Food a strategic retail partner and will result in a five-week in-store promotion at more than 200 mid-Atlantic stores. The “Chase for the Savings” promotion, as it will be known, will feature NASCAR official partner products from Coca-Cola, Kraft, Unilever, Mars and Procter & Gamble at front-of-store displays and in circulars. The promotion will include consumer offers for chances to win race tickets, NASCAR merchandise and trips to the NASCAR Champion’s Week in Las Vegas.
The deal is NASCAR’s second partnership with a grocer. It partnered with Brookshire’s last fall in Texas on a similar promotion that Coca-Cola officials credited with triggering triple-digit growth for the company’s marquee brands.
NASCAR, Dover and Bulldawg Marketing, a retail marketing agency based in North Carolina, negotiated the agreements with Ahold and Giant Food.
NASCAR is working on additional strategic retail partnerships and hopes to have as many as six retail partners next season. It is in conversations with two to three other large retailers now.
“It’s a complex process because we have to make sure it’s a strategic account with enough stores and also make sure that we’re able to build a program with [the retailer] on their calendar that’s successful,” said Matt Shulman, NASCAR’s director of business solutions.
