Swiss Farms planning to expand

For more than four decades, Swiss Farms drive-through convenience stores have been providing a quick and easy way for Delaware County residents to grab a gallon of milk or a loaf of bread on the way home from work.

Now, the retailer has plans to branch out through franchising. The first franchise location is scheduled to open its lanes to traffic next spring across the Delaware River in Somerdale, Camden County.

"It's been a Delaware County staple of a long time, done very well. There's no reason it can't be everywhere," said chief executive officer Paul Friel, who joined the Broomall company two years ago after 20 years at the Wawa and Sunoco A-plus convenience-store chains.

That Swiss Farms is not already in New Jersey came as a surprise to Maureen Fries, a Prospect Park resident and a regular customer at the Swiss Farms location on Route 420 near MacDade Boulevard. It's almost as if she pitied anyone who had to live without the store.

"This is really convenient," she said, as an employee loaded lemonade, teacooler - ice tea with a bit of lemonade - and a Halloween-themed box of Herr's potato chips into her red Lincoln town car.

"One of the reasons Swiss Farms is so successful is that the employees here are some of the most polite employees I've ever met," Fries said. She also said she liked that Swiss Farms had added some produce, such as potatoes and onions to its lineup.

Rick George, a professor of food marketing at St. Joseph's University, has long been a fan of Swiss Farms, which he called a scaled-down version of a convenience store. "That has some real, real opportunity to it," particularly if Swiss Farms can find a way to sell more take-home meals in a future where people cook less and less, he said.

A new store design, scheduled to debut next month on MacDade Boulevard in Folsom, will allow the retailer, which was founded in 1968 as a retail outlet for Wengert's Dairy in Lebanon, Pa., to move in that direction.

The new design is twice as big as some of the older stores and will offer substantially more items, including rotisserie chicken, which is one of the top items sold through the express lane in supermarkets, said Rob Coldwell, Swiss Farms' franchise development director.

About 10 construction workers were busy yesterday installing equipment and putting final touches on the bright red paint at the new store, which has floor-to-ceiling windows to make it easier for drivers to see what the store has to offer.

Friel said Swiss Farms planned to expand throughout the Philadelphia region, with both franchised and company-owned locations. Its goal is 100 stores in five years.

The first franchisee is John Betz, a Delaware County native who grew up with Swiss Farms and is a veteran franchisee of Auntie Anne's pretzels and Starbucks Coffee. Betz's first store will be the one in Somerdale.

Unlike Wawa, its cross-county rival, Swiss Farms has stayed small and close to its roots, with 11 of its 13 stores in Delaware County. Two are in Chester County.

The stores each average $1.6 million in sales a year, Friel said, giving the chain about $20 million in revenue.

Edmond D. Costantini Jr., who had opened a Swiss Farms knock-off, Alpine Farm, in Bensalem in 2002, spearheaded the 2003 purchase of Swiss Farms by a group of investors, including himself and MVP Capital Partners in Radnor.

Costantini closed Alpine Farm after the purchase of Swiss Farms, because it was too hard to educate consumers about what Alpine Farm was, according to news articles. From July 2003 through September 2007, Costantini was CEO of Swiss Farms. He remains an investor.

That challenge of educating would-be customers remains for Swiss Farms in new areas, such as New Jersey, Coldwell acknowledged. The company is tackling the problem in part by replacing its tag line "Faster, Fresher, Friendlier" with "America's Drive-through Grocer," Coldwell said.

"We feel that that is really going to help us," he said.