The operations and food engineering teams at one of the largest convenience store chains (“Client”) in North America were tasked with realizing the vision of introducing fresh food across all stores. This vision was a key part of their strategic shift towards a more food-focused convenience store (“C-Store”) experience. It was a response to evolving consumer demands for fresh, high-quality, and convenient food options, particularly among younger generations.Turning that vision into reality involved remodeling thousands of stores to make room for new cooking equipment and merchandizing equipment. Additionally, it required each store to invest significantly more labor to ensure that fresh food was available throughout the day.
MOSIMTEC was brought in by the Client to validate various operational decisions during the design phase, instead of after implementation, when the cost of changes would be extremely high. These decisions involved changes to the store layout, defining equipment requirements, staffing requirements, finalizing menu item decisions, and finalizing re-order point decisions.
To quantify the performance of the client’s C-store as a system, MOSIMTEC developed an AnyLogic simulation model that utilized the process modeling and pedestrian libraries. The simulation was configurable and runnable via an Excel front-end. By updating model inputs via an Excel front end interface, users could easily configure the virtual store to represent any store and run any customer demand scenario including past, present, or future business conditions. These store inputs included the floor plan, cooking equipment, customer arrivals, and number of staff. Although not intuitive, the simulation helped demonstrate that after the remodel is implemented, additional labor can lead to more profit. More labor did increase operating costs, but the labor to cook more food was offset by revenue from the additional food sold.