Iowa grocer Hy-Vee announced plans Monday to enter the Twin Cities market, now that it has successfully opened supermarkets across southern Minnesota.

Hy-Vee said that each year it intends to add a handful of its sprawling 90,000-square-foot stores in both in the east and west metro, with the goal of becoming a sizable player in the region.

“We plan to build several stores a year over the next several years,” Chris Friesleben, Hy-Vee’s assistant vice president of communications, said Monday.

“Eventually with your population base, you have the potential to be one of our largest markets, if not our largest market.”

Hy-Vee already has 16 stores in the southern third of Minnesota, including in Faribault, Rochester and Mankato.

The Des Moines-based grocer was long rumored to be interested in expanding into the Twin Cities, which is one of the nation’s most intensely competitive grocery markets.

Already, hometown giants Cub Foods and Target are competing with strong regional players, including Lunds/Byerly’s and Rainbow Foods, as well as national powers Walmart, Aldi, Costco and Whole Foods.

“I think competition makes everyone (raise) up their game,” Friesleben said. “We’re certainly not afraid of competition. I think the people of Minneapolis and St. Paul are going to like what they see inside our stores.”

Hy-Vee is an employee-owned company with 236 stores in eight Midwestern states and $8 billion in annual sales. Many of its newer stores contain Market Grill restaurants, offer dry cleaning services and sell wine and liquor where allowed.

Friesleben said Hy-Vee puts an emphasis on customer service, including in-store dietitians who can help shoppers find healthier options or deal with dietary restrictions.

“They’re very focused on customer service, and they do a very nice job with that,” said Twin Cities grocery analyst John Dean.

“It varies a little from store to store, but the level is high, regardless. With the employee ownership, maybe that’s just ingrained in everyone from day one.

“They have convenient stores, with gas stations in the parking lots generally. … They run somewhat aggressive ads; they have natural food departments, pharmacies, large produce departments, service meat departments.”

Hy-Vee didn’t announce store locations or opening dates. One likely location is the Minneapolis suburb of New Hope, where the city council was scheduled to discuss Hy-Vee on Monday night. A second site is under contract, but the company wouldn’t disclose where.

Hy-Vee said each Twin Cities store will involve an investment of about $14 million to $16 million, and create 400 to 550 jobs.

Given the large size of Hy-Vee’s stores, Dean suspects “they’d have to be suburban stores, they can’t wedge those into the cities.”

The Twin Cities region already is in the midst of a fierce grocery war that has saturated many suburbs with new stores and reshuffled the longtime lineup.

Walmart is making a strong push into the Twin Cities, on the heels of Target’s expansion into the grocery business. National players such as Aldi, Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods have all expanded significantly in the market, as have home-delivery entrants, including Coborn’s and Amazon.

None of those new entrants has a unionized workforce, nor does Hy-Vee. That has put pressure on legacy grocers with unionized workers, including Cub and Rainbow, which once dominated the market, but have been losing market share to the newcomers. Rainbow, which is owned by Wisconsin-based Roundy’s, has closed five Twin Cities stores in the past 16 months.

Dean said industry observers “expected them (Hy-Vee) to come to the Twin Cities for a long time, but for whatever reason, they chose not to.”

“One of the issues was, it’s a non-union shop, and they didn’t want the (labor) issues,” he said. “But Walmart, Target, Trader Joe’s, Aldi, Whole Foods — none of those is a union shop, so it removed that stumbling block.”

Many Hy-Vee supermarkets are in smaller communities, where competition is not as intense. But Hy-Vee also has successfully grown beyond Des Moines into urban markets in Omaha, Neb.; Sioux Falls, S.D.; and Kansas City, Mo.

“When you go into a new market, it takes a while for people to know who you are,” Friesleben said. “We are bringing something that we think people will want.

“It’s not going to happen overnight, but we have every expectation we will be successful in Minneapolis and St. Paul, and it will be as large of a market for us as our Des Moines market is.”

Hy-Vee has about 20 stores in the Des Moines metro area.

Tom Webb can be reached at 651-228-5428. Follow him at twitter.com/TomWebbMN.