WEST DES MOINES, Iowa -- Supermarket and gasoline retailer Hy-Vee Inc. is scouting sites in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn., for building larger-format convenience stores with fuel, said a report by the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal.
Hy-Vee’s expansion into the Twin Cities could shake up the convenience-store market there, the report said.
The West Des Moines, Iowa-based grocer is searching for locations in which to build small grocery stores with gas pumps, said the newspaper, citing sources who declined to be named to protect business relationships.
The stores would be about 10,000 to 15,000 square feet, and one source called them “convenience stores on steroids” because they will have more groceries and prepared food than that of a typical gas station, the Business Journal said.
The Twin Cities have long been dominated by Holiday Stationstores and SuperAmerica, with Kwik Trip recently adding more stores.
The grocer has a loyalty program that gives its shoppers discounts on Hy-Vee gasoline.
Hy-Vee is an employee-owned corporation operating 240 supermarkets across eight Midwest states with sales of $9.3 billion annually.
The chain operates more than 125 Hy-Vee Gas c-stores with fuel in the parking lots of its grocery stores. The strategy is to meet more customer needs at a single location and capture more market share. Sites are selected based on available real estate, locations on streets with significant traffic and proximity to other gas station/c-store competitors. The company said Hy-Vee Gas will be a standard offering at all future Hy-Vee Supermarkets, space permitting, according to the CSPedia convenience-store database. Hy-Vee has built c-stores with gasoline in nearly every state it serves.
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