Hy-Vee Inc.

Hy-Vee Inc. is one of the largest privately owned supermarket chains in the United States and is concentrated in the Midwest. The company also operates Hy-Vee Gas convenience stores with fuel in the parking lots of its grocery stores in Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, South Dakota and Wisconsin. The adjacent c-stores and gas stations have been added as a strategy to meet more customer needs at a single location and capture more market share.

The company’s c-store growth is slow but consistent. In 2018, the company built seven c-stores. Also during the year, the chain experimented with several new store formats.

A Hy-Vee HealthMarket store opened in Des Moines, Iowa, on July 31, 2018. The 15,000-square-foot store emphasizes healthy living while still offering much of Hy-Vee’s original store format products, including a full lineup of fresh produce, meat and seafood, dairy, frozen food and meal kits. It carries about 11,000 items.

And in December, the company opened its first Fast & Fresh small-format grocery store in Davenport, Iowa. The 10,000-square-foot site is a deviation from its usual 85,000-square-foot format, but it still managed to pack in features such as multiple foodservice stations, a Starbucks and full beer, wine and spirits offerings.

Source: Convenience Digital Resource Library, Technomic. For benchmarking purposes, store counts are year-end 2018.