A longstanding rivalry between two Pennsylvania convenience store chains could be coming to Smithfield.

A Sheetz convenience store and gas station could anchor a proposed 7-acre commercial development on the north side of Benns Church Boulevard, opposite the four-lane highway from the site of a proposed-but-stalled Wawa.

Altoona-based Sheetz, prominent in western Pennsylvania, and its competitor Wawa, which dominates its namesake Philadelphia suburb of Wawa, Pennsylvania, and much of the eastern portion of the state, are each in the process of expanding their Virginia footprints. Both are known for their made-to-order subs.

Sheetz operates more than 100 locations across northern, central and western Virginia, but the proposed Smithfield site would be its first in Hampton Roads. Wawa also has over 100 Virginia stores, including several dozen in Hampton Roads.

Smithfield’s Planning Commission took its first look on May 13 at a rezoning application filed by landowner SFD Properties LLC and the project’s Bristol, Tennessee-based applicant, Interstate Realty, which seeks highway retail commercial zoning for the site. The land is currently zoned as community conservation, among the town’s most restrictive zoning designations.

“We’ve done probably a dozen Sheetz convenience stores,” said J. Michael Nidiffer, a representative of Interstate Realty. 

The application proposes a 6,139-square-foot Sheetz store with indoor and outdoor seating and a drive-thru window,  a 4,170-square-foot canopy gas station with six double-sided self-serve pumps, and two adjacent 2-acre commercial parcels that would be developed at a later date.

“We want to start with Sheetz and be as selective as we can on what we do on the other two parcels,” Nidiffer said.

Todd Casado, senior real estate market manager for Sheetz, said there are no plans at the moment to offer charging for electric vehicles at the site.

“Typically what we’ve done with EV is when we open a site or once we get into permitting … we’ll start sharing the site with our EV partners, which are Tesla, EVgo, Electrify America and Ionna,” Casado said.

The store would offer made-to-order food, a coffee bar and smoothies and would operate 24 hours per day, seven days per week. Correspondence between the project’s developers and town officials indicates the store would have 30 to 40 employees, including 10 to 15 full-time staff, and would be a $9 million investment.

The plans propose two access points from Benns Church Boulevard. One is an existing road that straddles the town-county line and serves the Sherwin Williams paint store on the county side. The other would be right-turn-only access to and from Benns Church on the town side.

The application includes requests for two related special use permits. One would permit the drive-thru window. The other would waive parking and loading requirements to allow Sheetz to exceed the maximum 37 parking spaces by seven, for a total of 44 spaces.

A traffic impact analysis by the firm Kimley-Horn projects Sheetz alone would see 2,870 daily weekday trips, and the remaining undeveloped parcels, once built, would see an additional 736, for a total of 3,606 trips. Not all would be new vehicles added to the road, which saw 24,000 average daily trips in 2022 according to Virginia Department of Transportation data.

The Kimley-Horn study projects a “pass-by capture rate” of 63% at peak morning traffic and 54% at peak afternoon traffic. The terminology refers to the percentage of vehicles already on the road that would frequent Sheetz. The study projects 113 net new daily weekday peak hour morning trips and 153 net new peak hour afternoon trips.

The 7 acres, known as the former “Pomoco” site because it was once eyed by the now-shuttered Pomoco Ford dealership, is one of several proposed residential and commercial developments within a 1-mile radius of the Benns Church and Turner Drive intersection that factored into a cost-sharing plan the town’s and county’s governing bodies approved last year to fund a $7.6 million roundabout and related turn lanes on Turner.

Whether the proposed Sheetz or Wawa will come to fruition is up in the air.

Smithfield’s Planning Commission has yet to schedule a public hearing on Sheetz, a requirement before voting on a recommendation to the Town Council. The council will then hold its own hearing and take a final vote.

A 2021 application by Miami-based Frontier Development, which would build the Wawa store, was recommended by Isle of Wight’s Planning Commission in 2022 conditioned on an “alternative intersection design” for Turner Drive “such as a single-lane roundabout. The now-funded roundabout is expected to be built by 2029. The Wawa project has yet to come up for a vote by Isle of Wight County supervisors, who have the final say over whether Wawa gets its permit.