(Radio Iowa) – The leaders of the Ankeny-based Casey’s convenience store chain laid out their three-year plan today (Wednesday) in an event for investors. C-E-O Darren Rebelez says their goal is to open 350 new stores in the next three years. He says they want to continue to their focus of putting stores in rural areas and smaller cities. “Roughly 50 percent of our stores were opened in towns of five-thousand people or less,” he says.

The company added 354 stores in the last three years, giving it more than 25-hundred stores. He says their three distribution centers in Ankeny, Missouri and Indiana make it easier for them to add stores. Rebelez says the ability to add more stores is important. “The industry is shifting from primarily selling fuel and tobacco to prioritizing freshly prepared foods and investing in technology to meet the everchanging needs of the consumer,” he says.”Due to this shifting environment, the longstanding fragmented convenience store industry is evolving, as those who are unable or unwilling to invest, are consolidating to those who are.”

Rebelez says Casey’s would like its new stores in the next three years to be a 50-50 mix of new and acquired stores, but is positioned to change that mix if there were favorable acquisitions available. The company has three stores that don’t sell gasoline, including one near Drake University in Des Moines, and Rebelez says they will consider more. “We’re still learning and assessing that. But the intent with with nonfuel stores all along was really to allow us to penetrate certain trade areas where putting a full, full blown convenience store with fuel just wasn’t practical,” Rebelez says.

The company has some 300 of its own line of branded products, and he says they will look at increasing those. “There’s still some some categories where we’re not necessarily convinced that we need a national brand, where we can actually replace the national brand and just have our own,” Rebelez says, “and those are very margin accurative when we do that. We can go into more premium items. So, we’ve kind of taken care of the baseline terms of national brands, but we can upscale some categories with more premium products.”

The company plans to make its thin crust pizza permanent and increase other prepared food offerings as well. Rebelez says Casey’s is the fifth largest pizza chain in the country.