Modular retail infrastructure · Switzerland
GreenServe is a 20-foot container that opens as a walk-out store with no checkout. It arrives complete, lands in a day, and works on two kinds of Swiss site that conventional retail has written off: EV charging stops, and villages that lost their last grocery.
One container
6.06 × 2.44 m · 14.8 m²
One day on site
Two pads, one power feed, one lift
Nobody behind a counter
No checkout · solar roof
A fast charge takes twenty to thirty minutes. Most Swiss EV charging sites have no shop, no coffee and nowhere to sit, so the driver waits in the car and spends nothing.
Mountain villages have the opposite problem. Enough people live there to want a shop, but not enough to pay for one. A normal shop needs a building, a rent, and someone behind the cash register every day, and a small village cannot cover that. So running out of coffee or nappies means a drive down the valley and back.
Both are places with real demand and no retail format small enough to fit it. The binding constraint is not footfall, it is fixed cost. GreenServe takes the building out of the equation and keeps the shop.
Deployment envelope
Illustrative section. The same container specification works from the Mittelland motorway network up to valley settlements above 1 400 m.
Context 01 · Motorway
Placed alongside existing fast-charging bays. The site host already owns the ground, the grid connection and the traffic. GreenServe supplies the format, the assortment and the operating standard, and the host earns from time that is currently worth nothing to them.
Context 02 · Mountain communities
Lowered onto two pads at the edge of the village. It restores basic grocery supply to communities that cannot carry a conventional store, and it can be lifted out again if the numbers do not hold. No permanent building, no permanent commitment.
Climate case
GreenServe does not cut emissions directly. What it does is remove car journeys and avoid putting up a building. Those are worth keeping separate, because that is the first distinction to disappear when a small shop calls itself green.
We plan to measure this rather than just claim it. Each item below shows how solid the evidence is. Some we can measure directly once the first unit is running. Some we can work out from the design before anything is built.
In a village with no shop, every forgotten item is a round trip down the valley. A unit in the village removes those trips for basic supply. On current thinking this is the biggest single saving, and it can be read from till data against a baseline survey of residents.
Measured in pilotRefrigeration and lighting are the bulk of the unit's demand, and refrigeration load peaks with the sun. The rooftop array runs against it directly, with the balance metered to the grid.
Measured from day oneA reused container on two pads avoids the embodied carbon of a permanent structure and its foundations. A unit that stops working is relocated rather than demolished, so the material stays in use instead of becoming rubble.
Calculated in advanceChilled meals are where convenience retail wastes food. Shelf-level sales data sets replenishment per site rather than per region, which is the only thing that works at this size.
Calculated in advanceA charging site with somewhere to stand removes one of the reasons drivers give for keeping a combustion car for long journeys. We think this matters. We do not think any single site can honestly claim the emissions saved by someone else's decision to switch.
Not claimedTake what you want off the shelf and walk out. Cameras above the aisle and sensors in the shelves keep track of what you picked up, so there is nothing to scan and no till to stop at.
The charge is taken afterwards, once the basket has been checked, so something you picked up and put back never reaches your card. The interior is built for a five-minute visit: chilled meals on one side, drinks and snacks on the other, coffee at the end. Nothing here is designed to identify a customer. No facial recognition, no biometric identity, video kept briefly and then discarded, and the whole layout specified against the revised Swiss Data Protection Act rather than retrofitted to it later.
The visit
A driver plugs in, walks nine metres, taps a card once, picks up food and coffee, and walks out. That is the whole visit.
It takes about eight minutes and leaves most of the charge still running. The customer does one thing an ordinary shop would not ask of them, which is tap a card at the door. Everything after that is normal shopping, minus the till.
01
Charging starts. The charging operator's own app can surface GreenServe at exactly that moment, which is the cheapest customer acquisition available on the site.
02
Tap a card, or use an approved app or identity token, at the terminal by the door. One action, and only once.
03
The door unlocks. Pick things up, put things back, change your mind. There is nothing to scan.
04
Ceiling cameras and shelf sensors maintain a virtual cart as you move through the unit.
05
Leaving closes the session. Payment is captured after the basket is validated, not before.
06
The receipt arrives digitally. Anything that went wrong is handled by remote support, not by a queue.
Exceptions
Uncertain basket goes to human review. Payment failure goes to digital resolution. Emergency triggers fail-safe egress.
Illustrative site plan, drawn to scale. Times assume a 50 kWh charge from 20 to 80 per cent. In the villages there is no clock on the visit at all. Same unit, same technology, no session to fit inside.
An unstaffed shop has to know who came in. The question is how much it needs to know, and the answer should be as little as possible.
One access orchestrator sits behind the door and accepts whichever credential the customer already has. It validates, tokenises and authorises, then issues a single-use token to open the door. It does not build a profile, and there is no account to create before a driver can buy a coffee.
EMV token and pre-authorisation. No registration, no app, nothing to install.
Deep link from the charge point operator, or a QR or OAuth token from the car.
Optional verified identity, and the route to selling age-restricted goods later.
Credentials the driver already holds for parking and roaming charging.
A one-time browser flow plus a payment wallet, for anyone carrying none of the above.
Validate · Tokenise · Authorise
Token 01
Unlocks once and cannot be replayed. It opens a door, it does not become a login.
Token 02
Held against the card at entry, captured only once the basket has finalised.
Token 03
App, email, SMS or plain web receipt, chosen by whichever rail let the customer in.
SwissID and EasyPark are integration candidates. Whether either is used depends on technical and commercial agreements not yet in place.
The unit is built from proven retail components, specified as one package and commissioned before it ever reaches a site.
That keeps technical risk low, it means a unit can be built and commissioned in months rather than years, and it means the pilot tests whether the format works rather than whether the technology does.
Hardware
Software
The unit
Every unit is the same specification, so the second one costs less to build than the first and the fiftieth is a production run rather than a project.
Unit specification
Front elevation · glazed run, roof array, charger bays
The unit leaves the fabricator finished. Shelving, refrigeration, systems and roof array are installed and tested before it ships.
On site it needs two pads, a power connection and a lift. That is a low-loader and a crane in most places, and for the villages with no road wide enough for either, a Super Puma. Switzerland already moves buildings this way. GreenServe only makes the shop light enough to be one of them.
Open when the charger is open. No opening hours to staff.
The model
GreenServe does not want to own a property portfolio. It wants to own the format.
Site hosts co-invest in the unit that stands on their own ground. GreenServe supplies the specification, the assortment, the systems and the operating standard, and takes a margin across the network. The capital intensity sits with the party that already holds the land, and the thing that compounds is the number of sites running the format.
Charging operators, municipalities and transport operators already hold the land, the connection and the traffic. They put in the site. We put in the format.
Every unit is the same build, so fabrication moves from a project to a production run and site works reduce to groundworks and a connection.
A unit that underperforms gets lifted and re-sited. No lease to break, no fit-out to write off. That changes how many sites we can afford to try.