FRAMINGHAM, Mass. --Cumberland Farms CEO Ari Haseotes said he is returning his company to its roots following the recent sale of Gulf Oil, which enabled Cumberland Farms to get out of the wholesale business and focus exclusively on retail.
That strategy brings Cumberland Farms more in line with how it was run by its founders, Haseotes’ grandparents, in the early years of the nearly 80-year-old business, he told The Boston Globe. Cumberland Farms is the owner and operator of nearly 600 convenience stores located in eight states in the Northeast and Florida.
Affiliates of Boston-based private-equity firm ArcLight Capital Partners acquired Gulf Oil in late December.
The sale enables the family-owned company to devote more resources to remodeling its convenience stores and revamping its Westborough, Mass., distribution center, the report said.
Haseotes said the company has pumped hundreds of millions of dollars into those efforts in the past five years, and there’s more work to be done. One focus is bringing more fresh, ready-to-go meals to the stores. The company now sells sandwiches made every day in Westborough, according to the Globe.
Also, Cumberland Farms is preparing to relocate its headquarters from Framingham, Mass., to the Westborough complex, which the Haseotes family owns, the report said. Haseotes said he expects the transition to take place during the next year.
Haseotes said private ownership allows him to offer stronger benefit packages to his approximately 8,000 employees than a comparable public company could.
“Being private has afforded us the ability to think in decades instead of years, or what’s more common, quarters,” he told the Globe. “We’re able to make investments that may take many, many years to pay off.”
The chain’s employee strategies garnered praise in 2015 from President Barack Obama, who cited Cumberland Farms as an example of a company that is finding success by empowering its employees.
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