By Geoff Smith @smithco on Twitter

Locally-based car wash expanding to U.S.

Jan 22, 2017 | 6:34 AM

LETHBRIDGE – A little more than a year after it began, a Lethbridge-based car wash chain is about to go international.

Mint Smartwash, which opened its first location in late 2015, has a second in the works, in the United States. General manager and Lethbridge owner Taylor Nelson said in an interview that the car wash in Billings, Mont. is scheduled to open in early June. Nelson added other potential locations are being scouted in central and northern Alberta.

“This is the first of hopefully many,” Nelson said. “We are branching out to other cities, and the challenge is land. Finding land is always a challenge in the car wash world. You want to be on a main road. The size of our facility, you need a decent size of land to put it on.”

Nelson said for now the company is building its own locations, but is also setting up the infrastructure to support franchising. He explained the Billings location came about through one of the company’s original partners, who proposed building one there.

Nelson said it’s been an 11-year journey for him, and one of the partners brings more than 50 years experience in the car wash industry. That’s led to technology that gives the Mint concept an edge.

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“One of the big problems with car washes in Lethbridge or Alberta or western Canada is, a lot of them are the gas station car washes and they tend to take seven, eight minutes per wash while you wait in line quite a bit. So this is a high-volume, high-express, fast-express, fast-moving car wash in which we can do a lot of cars in an hour,” he said.

Nelson, who hails from Lethbridge, said smaller communities work best because they can service a larger area from a central location.