Dive Brief:
- Applegreen has completed its $450 million travel center remodel program in New York, spokespeople from the Irish convenience retailer and the New York State Thruway Authority confirmed to C-Store Dive.
- The initiative officially concluded this week at a travel plaza in Modena, according to a Tuesday LinkedIn post from Applegreen Project Manager Mike Campanelli that has since been taken down. A ribbon cutting ceremony is scheduled for Nov. 19, a spokesperson from the Thruway Authority said in a statement.
- This marks the end of a five-year journey for Dublin-based Applegreen, which committed to remodeling 27 travel plazas across the Empire State back in 2020.
Dive Insight:
In May 2020, the Thruway Authority and Applegreen, which today has roughly 150 travel plazas across the U.S., revealed plans to redevelop and modernize the 27 travel plazas, which were built in the 1950s and hadn’t been significantly updated since the 1990s. Applegreen was tasked with adding electric vehicle charging stations, dog walking areas, playgrounds and QSRs such as Shake Shake, Starbucks and Panera to the sites.
The $450 million was entirely funded by Empire State Thruway Partners, a division of the retailer’s parent company, Applegreen Limited.
The project called for 23 complete rebuilds and refurbishing four existing sites. The size of these travel plazas ranged from about 3,900 square feet to 20,000 square feet. No two consecutive service areas were closed at the same time and gas continued to be available at all service areas during construction, an Applegreen spokesperson told C-Store Dive last year.
The first remodel was completed in August 2022. Less than two years later, Applegreen and the Thruway Authority revealed that they were about two-thirds of the way done with the project and that the rest would be complete by the first quarter of 2025.
Despite the slight delay, the project is officially done, cementing Applegreen’s presence along one of the busiest toll roads in the U.S.
This also marks a much-needed win for Applegreen, which surprised the c-store industry earlier this year when it abruptly terminated its $750 deal with the Massachusetts Department of Transportation to redevelop and operate 18 highway service plazas in the state. MassDOT awarded those rights to Applegreen over the summer, but the Irish retailer axed the deal in September amid accusations that MassDOT acted in bad faith during the original bidding process. MassDOT announced last month that it’s re-opening the bidding process for the rights to run and renovate these sites.
