FGC Lion Place Escobar, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Entry profile – ‘Best Foodvenience Store in the World’ 2025

Built to be beautiful, designed to be profitable.

Lion Place Escobar -opened in October 2024- is strategically located at the junction of the main highway and the access road to new suburban developments in the northern area of Buenos Aires. These rapidly growing communities are home to upper-middle and high-income families.

The size of the forecourt and the convenience store is larger than the market standard, providing credibility to the impact of our offering.

By moving beyond the traditional service station model, FGC has created a destination that is more than a convenience store. It is a space designed to provide a sense of confidence, security, and comfort, transforming a routine stop into a meaningful, repeated engagement.

This holistic proposition begins with a meticulously crafted culinary experience, centered around a branded and leading local gourmet coffee, complemented by a robust food selection, refreshing beverages, and a touch of sweetness for indulgence. This integrated offering is strategically designed to elevate the customer’s visit, solidifying our reputation for delivering both unparalleled quality and seamless foodvenience.

The architectural design further enhances this journey, creating a welcoming atmosphere that is complemented by spacious, modern restrooms.  The offering is completed by a comfortable co-working area that caters to the diverse needs of modern customers, solidifying Lion Place’s unique value proposition

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Foodvenience Overview

Our customer proposition encompasses a wide range of options, from outstanding branded coffee and gourmet pastries to healthy options and even a FGC proprietary fast-casual restaurant. In this way, we cater to the needs of different socioeconomic segments and lifestyles.

Through a careful selection of brands and concepts, we operate:

• Havanna: A complete coffee, snack, and confectionery experience, ideal for any time of day, with a strong focus on seasonal products like chocolates.
• Subway: A quick and nutritious option for lunch and dinner, with a wide variety of sandwiches and combos at affordable prices.
• TanGrill: FGC has pioneered and created a gourmet fast-casual restaurant offering a distinctive culinary proposition and open kitchen, perfect for more elaborate lunches and dinners.

Our beverage offering stands out for its variety and quality. We have a wide range of non-alcoholic beverages and an exclusive selection of beers, all thanks to a special license that allows us to offer a premium experience to our customers

Menu and signature products

At Lion Place Escobar, our menu blends variety, quality, and innovation through three complementary brands.

• Havanna delivers an authentic Argentine coffeehouse experience with premium coffee, artisanal pastries, alfajores, chocolates, and seasonal specialties that inspire indulgence and tradition.
• Subway offers fresh, customizable, and nutritious sandwiches—ideal for quick, affordable lunches and dinners.
• TanGrill, our proprietary fast-casual brand, elevates dining with bold gourmet flavors: Rib Eye, Salmon, Pork, Chicken, signature Burgers, Philly Cheesesteak, plant-based options, and an open kitchen that showcases freshness and transparency.

Our signature products:

• Havanna alfajores and chocolates
• Subway’s made-to-order sandwiches, and
• TanGrill’s premium burgers and grilled specialties—are customer favorites.

Frequency and loyalty are driven by breadth and balance: coffee and snacks for mornings, healthy lunches, gourmet dinners, and even premium beers thanks to our exclusive beverage license.

Daypart specific offers

Our strategy is built around serving every key daypart, creating a destination that customers return to multiple times a day.

• Breakfast & Morning: Led by Havanna, we offer premium coffee, fresh pastries, alfajores, and healthy snacks, making mornings one of our strongest traffic drivers.
• Lunch: Subway and TanGrill deliver balance—Subway with quick, fresh, customizable, affordable sandwich options, and TanGrill with more elaborate options. Lunch is a high-performing daypart with steady repeat visits.
• Dinner & Evening: TanGrill leads with a relaxed, fast-casual dining experience. Dinner occasions often extend into social gatherings or co-working meetups, boosting dwell time and ticket size.
• By addressing all dayparts, we maximize customer frequency and loyalty. We’ve designed our proposition to maximize the utilization of our facilities and personnel. By offering a variety of food and beverage options available throughout the day, we minimize periods of low demand and optimize our business profitability.

The current ticket distribution is as follows:

• Early morning: 9%
• Breakfast 16%
• Lunch: 25%
• Afternoon: 26%
• Dinner: 24%

Speed, consistency and quality

Our service model is designed to optimize speed, consistency, and quality within a convenience store environment. Each concept balances these priorities in a way that suits its category:

• We operate Havanna as a full-service café, where waitstaff provide a warm, premium experience, ensuring consistency in coffee preparation and pastry presentation.
• Subway follows its globally recognized quick-service model, enabling fast, made-to-order sandwiches with reliable freshness and accuracy.
• TanGrill uses a hybrid system: guests pre-order and pay at the counter, ensuring efficiency, while a runner delivers meals to the table, combining speed with a casual dine-in feel. This approach merges the speed of a fast-casual concept with the relaxed feel of a dine-in restaurant, ensuring food is served within a 15-minute timeframe.

A key differentiator for FGC’s model is its direct-management approach to the modern foodvenience. This centralized oversight of operations and staff training guarantees that all three brands deliver a consistent customer experience, transforming Lion Place into a true destination for both convenience and elevated dining.

Variety and innovation

We evolve our menu through a dynamic balance of innovation, seasonality, and customer relevance.

• Havanna drives excitement with seasonal specialties—notably limited-edition chocolates, alfajores, and holiday-inspired pastries—that create anticipation and repeat visits.
• Subway continuously introduces global limited-time sandwiches and sauces, ensuring variety while aligning with international food trends.
• TanGrill leads our culinary innovation, experimenting with gourmet burgers, premium cuts, and plant-based options to meet evolving preferences for healthier and more sustainable choices.

This mix allows us to remain fresh and engaging: customers know their favourite staples will always be available, but also look forward to new flavours, seasonal launches, and special promotions. By combining the strength of global brands with our own proprietary creativity, we keep our offer both consistent and surprising, driving loyalty and buzz in the market.

Coffee and beverage program

Our coffee and beverage program combines global partnerships with a carefully curated selection to deliver both variety and quality. We partner with Havanna, Argentina’s most recognized coffee brand, to offer a full-service café experience with expertly crafted espresso drinks, specialty coffees, and a complete selection of pastries, alfajores, and chocolates. This partnership ensures premium quality and strong brand recognition that resonates deeply with customers.

In a move that cements its dedication to coffee excellence, Havanna has opened Argentina’s first state-of-the-art coffee lab and education center. The company’s focus on quality is reflected in the success of its partners, with an FGC barista proudly winning the last National Barista Contest—a testament to the high standards of training and product expertise within our network.

Beyond coffee, we provide a broad non-alcoholic beverage range including soft drinks, juices, and functional beverages, ensuring options for every occasion. Lion Place also holds a special license to sell beers, allowing us to offer an exclusive premium beer selection that elevates our evening and social occasions.

By combining Havanna’s prestige with a diverse beverage portfolio, we transform a traditional convenience store into a destination for coffee lovers and beverage enthusiasts alike.

Digital presence

Loyalty

Our loyalty approach leverages strong partnerships rather than an in-house program. We participate in Shell Box, Shell’s digital loyalty platform, which rewards frequent customers with points and exclusive benefits.

Leading the charge in Argentina’s digital payment revolution, FGC has championed the use of QR code-linked digital wallets, creating a seamless and frictionless experience for consumers.

In addition, through our partnership with Havanna, we regularly feature monthly promotional actions in collaboration with leading banks, offering discounts and special deals that add extra value to every visit.

This strategy keeps our offer dynamic, relevant, and attractive, ensuring that customers enjoy tangible rewards and savings while experiencing the quality of our products—ultimately motivating them to return again and again.

Online Ordering and Delivery

FGC provides home delivery through “Pedidos Ya”, a leading third-party aggregator in our market. This partnership allows us to reach a wide customer base without the need to manage logistics in-house, ensuring efficient and reliable delivery service.

Our home delivery offering includes lunch and evening treats. While on-premise dining remains our core business, delivery plays an important role in providing convenience to customers who prefer enjoying our products at home or the office, extending our reach and accessibility beyond the immediate walk-in traffic, given our suburban location.

Social Media Engagement

We actively use Instagram to engage with our community through two dedicated accounts: Lion Place and TanGrill.

The Lion Place account serves as the “House of all our brands”, sharing content from Havanna and Subway—mostly developed by the franchisors and reposted to maintain brand consistency—while also featuring TanGrill highlights.

The TanGrill account is where we create original content, showcasing our dishes, promotions, and behind-the-scenes stories. This mix of curated and self-generated content allows us to stay authentic, strengthen customer loyalty, and build a dynamic online presence that reflects both our global brand partnerships and our local identity.

Operational Excellence

Our operational model is built for scalable excellence, harmonizing three distinct food service concepts under one roof. The back-of-house workflow is meticulously designed for each brand—a dedicated, open-kitchen setup for TanGrill’s unique culinary proposition, alongside streamlined layouts for the high-volume efficiency of Subway and the precise preparation of Havanna’s products.

This strategic segmentation enhances kitchen flow, prevents cross-contamination, and supports specialized equipment tailored to each menu, from TanGrill’s precision grills and state-of-the-art fryers to Subway’s fresh ingredient stations, ensuring swift and accurate order fulfillment.

Front-of-house success is driven by a unified service culture focused on customer delight, where every team member is empowered to provide a premium experience.

TanGrill staff undergo continuous learning via our proprietary online platform, complementing the rigorous training provided by our world-class franchisor partners. Our key initiative is a powerful, data-driven feedback loop.

We analyze point-of-sale data, leveraging machine learning to gain granular insights into consumer patterns, day-parts, and market basket analysis. This intelligence informs everything from real-time inventory adjustments and waste reduction to menu optimization and targeted promotions.

This holistic, data-driven approach ensures peak operational efficiency and empowers our team to deliver exceptional quality consistently, creating a model that is both highly effective and adaptive to market demands.

Performance

Operating as an independent private company with limited access to traditional funding, our Lion Place Escobar project was made possible through a non-traditional funding model (“Friends & Family”). This reality has made profitability a fundamental driver in the development of every project we undertake.

In a period of less than 18 months, our strategic focus has yielded impressive results.

• On the forecourt with fuel sales reaching 700,000 liters per month, or 2.5 times the market average. This success is directly tied to the synergy of our offerings: fuel volume saw a notable 30% jump upon the opening of our new convenience store.
• This foodvenience model has become a powerful force multiplier, with the C-store delivering $240,000 in monthly sales, an impressive four times the industry average, and contributing a robust 40% to gross profit.
• From an investment standpoint, efficiency has been a key achievement, generating a 42% return on investment ($2.0M net) with a repayment period of under three years.

Crucially, these financial outcomes not only validate our performance but also underscore a scalable and replicable framework for future growth.

Beyond operational metrics, the project’s long-term viability is further underscored by the appreciation of its underlying asset. The land’s value has doubled since the start of operations, providing a powerful validation of the project’s strategic strength and its value as a piece of real estate.

Built to be beautiful, designed to be profitable.

Company Overview

Founded in 2014 by three downstream executives, FGC Fuels Marketing was established with a clear mission: to innovate and transform Argentina’s retail fuel industry. The company began its operations with a single service station, adapting global best practices from international companies and pioneering a business model centered on the customer and a new mobility concept.

That strategy has fueled significant growth. FGC currently operates 16 service stations, including four flagship Lion Place locations. Notably, two of these sites have received global recognition for their design and operational excellence, a powerful testament to the company’s customer-centric approach.

FGC’s unique value proposition is built on a model that combines strategic partnerships—operating franchises like Havanna, Subway, and Mostaza—with the development of its own successful culinary concepts, including TanGrill and De Taco.

This agile approach is supported by a professional, flat organization of approximately 550 employees, led by an experienced management team. The company projects to grow its workforce to 630 employees by the end of 2025, underscoring its commitment to disciplined expansion and its position as a key force in the market’s evolution.