Glennie Bench’s career with Southwest Georgia Oil Co. spans more than three decades.
The president and COO of the fuel marketer and convenience-store retailer spoke to CSP about how Sun Stop stores compete with quick-service restaurants, how technology is evolving in the industry and the future of fuel. She also talked about its growth strategy—the chain is set to have 84 stores by this summer.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why is foodservice so crucial to c-store’s today, and how do you compete with other c-stores and QSRs?
We view foodservice as a differentiator. And even though our industry as a whole is prioritizing foodservice, everybody has their unique offering or their unique philosophy about it. So, it may be just a tremendously successful grab-and-go business, or it may be a particular franchise that they affiliate with. Ours is about offering home cooking, or Southern cooking, in a way that has a really high quality but offers a great value. That food is being prepared in our stores by our deli staff, and we have a traditional hot bar where you have side dishes, and fried chicken, and baked chicken and all kinds of different offerings.
- Southwest Georgia Oil Co. is No. 88 on CSP’s 2025 Top 202 ranking of U.S. c-store chains by store count.
And that’s not something that a national chain, many of them we are now competing against, can come in and offer. It’s very difficult to replicate that if you operate 1,000 stores. We're large enough to have some economies of scale and negotiate great pricing on behalf of our customers, and keep our price our retail prices affordable by virtue of our size, but we're not so big that we lose the ability to operate each store at its peak, at its maximum performance. So, it matters to us that this store’s deli has the best quality food for that community, and that this deli is now offering food where we haven’t in the past, and that creates a new community benefit. So that’s our differentiator.
What is Southwest Georgia Oil’s growth strategy?
We've never operated with a particular goal of a set number of stores. It's always been more strategic in filling in geographic gaps. For instance, our southernmost store is in Wildwood, Florida. But there's about 80 miles between it and our next nearest store. So, we know we need to create a district, a zone, nearer to that store for efficiency. It's very inefficient for our district manager to go to that store for supervisory purposes. It's very difficult for us to set up a fuel supply agreement 80 miles away from the next nearest store. So, we are focused on growing in that geographic area to create a zone.
We are also trying to grow stores that have a need for the foodservice that we offer, as opposed to stores that don't. And I think having some stores in maybe more rural areas that some of the national chains are not moving into becomes important, and there are a lot of great markets. And the way we operate our stores with a high focus on customer service and knowing your customer, and your customer knowing the staff that works behind the counter, is very important to us.
And then, separate from convenience stores, we're trying to grow our wholesale business. We have our own trucking division, so we haul our own fuel, we haul for other people and we are really trying to grow in the lubes and DEF and fuel additives [space].
What are some of the highlights of your new stores?
We are incorporating getting more grab-and-go space, which is beneficial to the prepared food space, too, because you can repurpose those things as a cold grab-and-go option or a take home option if you have that equipment in your stores. We're adding capacity for that. I think the unique thing about our stores is how open and airy they are. So when you walk in it, it's a very nice, high-end looking store, but we still offer the same opportunities for value and the same great snacks and things that you would expect from a convenience store, too.
What size are your stores typically?
Our prototype that we’ve spent the last six years building is about 5,300 square feet. One of the stores that’s under construction right now is about 4,100 square feet. That was developed to get the cost down so that we could build it in smaller markets.
How do you see the role of fuel, and alternative energy solutions like electric vehicles, evolving in in your overall business strategy?
We've dipped our toe into some EV offerings. We have a few sites that are partnered with Tesla to have their chargers on site. And even though there's generally not a direct financial relationship there, people who have Tesla charging stations will know what it's like to negotiate with them. They're great partners in the customer base that they bring into our stores and the customers are there for 30 minutes at a time. We make a point of offering free Wi-Fi to our customers in all of our stores, long before others in the industry did that, and that was one of the reasons. We want customers to feel like they can come in and eat at our delis and stay there and enjoy a meal in a nice, clean, comfortable atmosphere. We have music playing in our stores. So it's an enjoyable experience.
We have one EV charging station set up at our store in Tallahassee, Florida. And we use ADS-TEC, which is a battery-supplemented EV station. It’s a Level 3 charger, but the battery supplement allows you to avoid demand charges on your electric bill because the battery kicks in when you get above the 110 volts. And then the battery recharges itself so that the next person who pulls into the parking spot is able to get that full Level 3 speed without any need for the battery to have time to recharge. It’s a very slow return on our investment because it's still very expensive. But it I think it's just a good business builder and I think over time the use will grow.
What other emerging technologies will have the greatest impact on your business?
Because we're in rural south Georgia, we have not been on the forefront of developing mobile pay options and automated payment technologies at the pump. Our customers just weren't early adopters of those things. Well, they are beginning to do that. So, you're now seeing us devote more resources into that kind of technology. Developing a really robust loyalty platform is very important to our business. So we’re going to be focusing on a lot of that. And then some of it is sort of back-of-house technology that allows you to run 80-something stores efficiently and have the data that you need at your fingertips for quick reacting.
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