According to president and CEO Alain Bouchard, the company is currently testing two assembly and delivery methods in separate divisions of the company while also seeking to hire a new foodservice manager.
"We have a mandate out there to hire a new senior manager for this position, although we haven't found the person we are looking for," Bouchard said during a quarterly earnings call this past week. "We [image-nocss] are actively pursuing this search."
Meanwhile, two initiatives are testing the best way to bring foodservice products to the chain's more than 3,500 stores in the United States. Bouchard said both are showing promise at this point.
"We have a commissary test going on in the Great Lakes Division," he said. "We have our own trucks and a commissary. We make our own pastries, muffins, sandwiches, fresh fruits, and we deliver these products to 125 stores. More to come on this test, but for the stores it looks very promising."
In its Arizona Division, the Canada-based company is trying a different tact.
"We have our own distribution center there. So we have hired multiple third-party producers to produce similar SKUs to those I mentioned in the Great Lakes test," he said. "So we are [looking to improve] our core [foodservice] offer in all the divisions. It's very promising."
"Recently, we have been adding considerably more strategic weight to making fresh foodservice a bigger, more viable and profitable core service across our network," Bouchard stated in the company's 2010 Annual report, which was filed yesterday. "[The] Arizona region is doing particularly well with new providers enabling daily delivery of fresh pastries, sandwiches, salads, fruit cups and other staples. The division sees this expanding rapidly into proprietary brand pizzas and home-meal-replacement items."
Alimentation Couche-Tard Inc., Laval, Quebec, operates a network of 5,883 convenience stores located in 11 large geographic markets, including eight in the United States covering 43 states and the District of Columbia, and three in Canada covering all 10 provinces.
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