Yesway

BW Gas & Convenience Stores joined the convenience-store industry in late 2015 with ambitions to operate up to 1,000 stores. It first acquired 10 Country Store sites in late 2015, then added 21 sites purchased from Kum & Go. All 31 stores are in Iowa. The chain has slowly accumulated stores through acquisition ever since. Most recently in March 2018, Yesway has acquired the In & Out BP Travel Plaza in Marshalltown, Iowa, the 85th location for the chain. And in February 2018, it acquired five Rip Griffin Travel Centers in Texas and one State Line Convenience store in Missouri. In late May 2018, the company surpassed 100 stores with an acquisition in Missouri.

The company is an affiliate of Beverly, Mass.-based Brookwood Financial Partners, a real-estate and private-equity investment and asset management company with more than $2.2 billion in holdings. Brookwood Financial Partners LLC formed BW in 2015 and announced its c-store brand—Yesway—in summer 2016.

Source: Convenience Digital Resource Library, Technomic. For benchmarking purposes, store counts are year-end 2017.

Photo courtesy of Yesway.