Name: How Wawa Is Beating Fast Food Companies At Their Own Game
Uploaded: 2025-10-20T03:32:47.000Z
Duration: 9 min 31 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

It's 10am on a Monday and we're to Wawa, one of America's largest convenience store chains right outside of Philadelphia.

Inspired by Thanksgiving food has helped Wawa build a fiercely loyal fan base.

I love their products, their sandwiches, their coffee.

Any cult following starts with each customer, each visit, each transaction and turning it to something more than it should be.

Make it the best five minutes of their day.

Revenue has more than doubled and its workforce has grown by nearly 90% over the past decade.

Convenience store chains are perfecting food and fast food chains are expanding options and offering value deals and more customization.

You're going to see a continued expansion of high quality food service in the convenience industry.

And if anything, the quick service restaurants better watch out because if you can get better food faster at a gas station, that kind of changes everything.

But with an estimated $18.8 billion in annual revenue and nearly 1200 stores, Wawa is holding its own against public players like 711 and Casey's.

Just two miles away at Wawa's headquarters, the Innovation center is testing new hoagies or subs, sauces, coffees and smoothies.

Can we send back out several concepts to our Wingmates panel?

Aside from the dozens of fresh food and beverage options available to customers in store, Wawa offers 15 limited time items every year.

The Gobbler around Thanksgiving is its most popular.

There are already nine variations at its stores.

Dunkin or Pizza Hut was part of our offer here.

And customers said to us, we trust you, we trust your food, we trust the brand you are.

And so now every product we sell here, that's food or fresh beverages or Wawa branded, I think it offers a nice tart flavor.

Customers who shop at both Wawa and quick service chains, Burger King, Wendy's or Starbucks have been shopping more Frequently with Wawa than with the others since 2023.

Morning meal Traffic increased by 5% at Food Forward convenience stores like Wawa, while QSRs only increased by 1% in August 2025.

The big thing Wawa figured out is if you look at all of the negatives that were historically associated with the gas station industry, bathrooms, maybe the last resort, food.

Wawa flipped all of that and decided to turn those into positives.

Wawa's customer base is also increasing, while at competitors seven eleven, Circle K and Sheets, it's shrinking.

People create this warm environment that I think is somehow the secret sauce of what creates.

If there is a cult like following up next person.

When you're an owner, you're just vested a little bit more.

Our most loyal customers, they're here three, four, five, ten times a week.

You get to know them by name, you get to know their family, you get to know what's happening.

And that connection, it's not really an expected thing in training.

Wawa began as an iron foundry in New Jersey in 1803 before shifting to a dairy business in Pennsylvania.

Nearly a century later, as home delivery declined, the company pivoted again, opening the first Wawa food market in the 1960s.

When you think of convenience stores of the 154,000 about in the United States, many were born out of major oil companies.

Some were born out of the dairy heritage.

It just gave us, I think, a little bit of a leg up on food to begin with.

In the following decades, Wawa grew slowly in its home markets of Philadelphia and South Jersey and built a significant presence across three other East coast states plus Washington D.C.

it doubled down on convenience, becoming a 247 operation in the 70s.

At a time when most retailers closed early and offering surcharge free ATMs, free air for tires and finally fuel in the 90s.

As of 2024, the state holds more Wawas than any other.

Heading out to the Midwest, we had a lot of research.

We knew the customers, we'd done all the homework and the lines around those stores.

And those stores have performed on almost as well as core market stores coming out of the gate.

But the Convenience store business is getting more competitive as the industry has consolidated since 2022, Wawa has been focused on an aggressive expansion plan without mergers or acquisitions, growing from six to 12 states, and

its annual revenue rose by $4 billion in that time frame.

Store count has grown more than 50% over the past decade.

Doing that gives us the best chance of success.

Long term, it's a little more challenging.

Sure, M and A might open more doors and more growth for us, but

it's never been for us to be the biggest.

As opposed to other competitors like Casey's, which focuses on rural America, Wawa is in urban areas.

The company serves nearly 1 billion customers per year, with an annual customer traffic growth of 3% since 2015.

Though Wawa has been methodical about where and when to expand, scaling is still risky.

Quality and customer service must be maintained or the company risks damaging its reputation.

Anytime a company starts to expand far outside of its region in this industry, there there is going to be that challenge of how do I maintain the customer experience that I known for?

With Wawa's heavy emphasis on fresh food, maintaining a strong supply chain is imperative.

Even so, the company must rely on third party suppliers to deliver product, which poses operational vulnerabilities.

Competitor Casey's, on the other hand, has full control over its supply chain as it owns and operates both distribution centers and a transportation fleet.

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How Wawa Is Beating Fast Food Companies At Their Own Game

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