LA CROSSE, Wis. — The best is yet to come for Kwik Trip, said Steve Loehr, vice president of the La Crosse, Wis.-based convenience store chain, in a recent Talks From the Top session as part of CRU Community.
- Kwik Trip is No. 12 on CSP’s 2021 Top 202 ranking of c-stores by store count.
Kwik Trip began 2021 with 67 more convenience stores than it operated a year earlier. The chain in December 2020 closed on the purchase of the assets of Stop-N-Go of Madison Inc., which operated 36 Stop-N-Go stores in southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois. Today, the chain has 750 stores, said Loehr. From here, Loehr said the goal is to build more than 50 stores a year moving forward.
But according to Loehr, the team at Kwik Trip thought of themselves as a grocery store selling gasoline, at least when the business began. “We didn’t think it was strange selling bananas at a convenience store,” he said.
Loehr said Kwik Trip shares 40% of gross net profit with co-workers and claimed Kwik Trip has the lowest turnover and highest productivity in the industry.
As a c-store chain that thinks of itself as a grocer, Kwik Trip naturally was the first in the industry to join Partnership for a Healthier America in 2014. “All of us realized in the early 1990s that tobacco income and sales were going to keep eroding. We had to look for a replacement. In our case, we felt that was food and commodities in our stores,” said Loehr.
To this day, the chain sells a similar selection of items as many grocers. Kwik Trip sells 400 lbs of bananas per store per day, according to Loehr. But shifting to healthier foods as part of Partnership for a Healthier America came with some lessons learned, namely supply chain challenges. Loehr said salads are delivered fresh to the stores every day. Originally, Kwik Trip’s salads weren’t delivered to the stores until the morning so they could be on the shelves by noon. Customers, however, wanted to pick up their salads in the morning on their way to work, so Kwik Trip moved the delivery time earlier.
Today, Kwik Trip has 16 varieties of take-home meals and a wide variety of meat. “Our goal is to generate more net profit dollars from food than we do gasoline,” said Loehr.
As the chain looks to the future, Loehr said last-mile services are on their way. “By this fall, we’ll have curbside pickup ready to go.”