How Kwik Trip created a cult-like following in the Midwest

Across the Upper Midwest, customers frequent Kwik Trips, sometimes for gas, sometimes for (no longer bagged) milk, cheap bananas or a signature glazers doughnut.

But the one constant everyone leaves with: a pleasant interaction.

“Vanessa, Joe and Colleen, just to name a few,” said weekly shopper Philomena Morrissey Satre of her Eagan store’s staff, “are always super friendly, helpful and genuinely care about every customer who walks through the door.”

That personal touch, replicated in 850 stores and growing, has made the La Crosse, Wis.-based convenience store chain a cultural icon in its region. And it starts and ends with Kwik Trip’s trademark farewell, a self-fulfilling prophecy its cashiers utter thousands of times a day from St. Cloud to Kenosha: “See you next time.”

Kwik Trip — and its Iowa counterpart, Kwik Star — has won the type of cult following common among regional convenience store brands. East Coasters love their Wawa, Texas has Buc-ee’s, and Great Plains folk swear by Casey’s General Store pizzas.

Convenience stores are developing strong identities thanks in part to social media, and as Americans increasingly drive up for more than just gas and lotto tickets. Fresh produce, hot meals and other staples have made gas stations a one-stop shopping destination. With Kwik Trip’s larger-than-average stores, that’s especially the case in rural areas that have lost local grocers.

“We’re really not competing with other convenience stores. We’re competing with the big box retailers,” said John McHugh, vice president of external relations at Kwik Trip.

Still, there’s a choice to make when pulling off the interstate and deciding between Holiday and Kwik Trip. With more than 150,000 convenience stores around the country, loyalty is everything.

“It’s about what can you be famous for,” said Jeff Lenard, vice president of strategic industry initiatives at the National Association of Convenience Stores. “Once you have a relationship with a store, if you go somewhere else, you’re cheating on them.”

For Kwik Trip, the strategy is simple: Create quality, affordable products — like glazers doughnuts, Nature’s Touch milk, cheese-stuffed breadsticks and self-proclaimed “chicken with serious rizz” — and sell them with a smile.

“If we feel welcome at the place where we shop, there’s an emotional attachment,” McHugh said. “Especially in the Midwest, we want to go places where we’re known, where they recognize us. And that’s an instinctive human need that I think we fulfill in our communities.”

Kwik Trip grew slowly after opening the first store in Eau Claire in 1965, eventually planting its corporate headquarters in La Crosse in 1973. The company built a bakery, dairy plant and distribution center — vertical integration that’s helped control costs and quality — but it averaged only a handful of new stores per year through its first few decades.

Then the Zietlow family took full ownership in 2000 and introduced hot food in 2003. Fresh groceries like bananas and packed salads followed soon after, and dozens of stores started popping up in new communities every year. A store redesign in 2011, modeled off a prototype in Rochester, led to the now-familiar brick exteriors encasing the modern day Kwik Trip.

The number of stores more than doubled in the years since. And Kwik Trip is now the ninth-largest gas station chain in the country by number of stores ― not counting independently owned ones affiliated with oil brands like BP and Cenex ― according to the National Association of Convenience Stores.

That rapid expansion in the past 20 years has led to $4 billion in yearly sales. More than a quarter of inside-store sales come from food-service offerings like egg rolls, burgers, chicken sandwiches and corn dogs.

“You can sell all the food in the world you want, it still has to taste good,” Lenard said. “Kwik Trip spends an awful lot of time making sure their food tastes great.”

A majority of regular convenience store shoppers the Acosta Group surveyed rated hot food items “just as good as fast food or quick-serve restaurants, often at a better price.”

Groceries also remain a big draw. Kwik Trip has its own banana-ripening facility, its own fleet of distribution trucks and a commissary at its 141-acre campus that supplies a majority of Kwik Trip’s products at its company-owned stores, which will number 900 by the end of the year.

Inside one of the company’s bakeries in La Crosse, hundreds of doughnuts shoot down an assembly line every minute. An expansion will crank up those speeds even more to keep the ever-growing roster of new stores stocked.

“For our cake doughnuts, we’re going to make about 644 a minute. And for our dunkers, we’re going to run about 400 a minute,” Sweets Bakery director Jamie Gay said on a recent tour of the frosting-scented facility.

Across campus at the dairy plant, Kwik Trip makes its own plastic bottles before filling them with milk and orange juice.

“We’ll have milk delivered today, we’ll pasteurize and bottle it today and ship it out to stores for sale the next day. Farm to store in 24,” dairy director Jeremy Nickelotti said as milk streamed through pipes above a dizzying array of conveyor belts. “Milk volumes are falling across the nation, but with our store growth and our market share, our milk sales are increasing.”

Kwik Trip shares 40% of its pre-tax profit with all 36,000 employees, which contributes to an incredibly low turnover rate compared to the industry, McHugh said.

But that’s also one of the reasons why the company hasn’t opened stores in major metro areas like the Twin Cities or Milwaukee. The price of land in urban cities makes it too expensive to build out Kwik Trip’s bigger stores and parking lots — new stores are more than double the industry average — considering how it would affect the bottom line.

“Because 40% of our profits come back to our co-workers, we have an ethical obligation to make sure that if we spend a huge amount of money on a site, that there’s a huge return on that investment,” McHugh said. “So we’re very self-conscious about how we spend our money, because it’s our co-workers’ money.”

Another one of Kwik Trip’s strengths is also one of its challenges to growth. Because of the centralized facility in La Crosse that produces all of its products, new locations are ideally within 300 miles of that campus.

Kwik Trip is spending more than $151 million in the coming years, though, to expand its campus and build a second distribution center near Madison, which will lengthen its reach and keep up with its growing footprint.

Next year, Kwik Trip will open stores in North Dakota for the first time and plans to add another 500 stores across the Midwest in the years beyond.

CEO Scott Zietlow has the same hunger as his father — former CEO Don Zietlow who retired at the end of 2022 after more than a half century with the company in various roles — when he looks at a map and sees all the towns the retailer has yet to conquer.

“Growth is good,” said Scott Zietlow, a Mayo Clinic surgeon and longtime Kwik Trip board member, in a statement last year, “not only for Kwik Trip, but most importantly for our coworkers and the communities we serve.”

There is an unofficial Facebook fan page with more than 144,000 members who toast their hometown Kwik Trips and roast competitors.

“All Casey’s employees should be taken to Kwik Trip as part of their training, then maybe I could shop at Casey’s,” one fan wrote recently.

That kind of brand devotion “transcends anything that we specifically do,” McHugh said. “It’s just going back to this basic human need to belong.”

Kwik Trip actually deploys strict hiring practices to weed out un-caring applicants who can’t recount recent acts of kindness in the interview.

“If you’re bad to the bone, there isn’t a darn thing I can do in a training program that’s going to fix you so that you provide great customer service,” McHugh said. “You have to be hardwired for it.”

A clerk at a Zumbrota store said a regular customer buys chocolate bars for the staff every month because he appreciates them. Excerpts from some of the thousands of notes Kwik Trip receives show the depth of the relationship between worker and patron: In Davenport, Iowa, employees all signed a card for the family of a regular who died, and in Oak Creek, Wis., an employee comforted a grieving customer.

“He approached me with kindness and concern. He paid for my purchases,” that shopper wrote. “I’m a customer for life because of his kindness and care.”

Lenard said in an industry that sells the concept of convenience — it’s right there in Kwik Trip’s name — speed isn’t everything.

“It feels a lot faster when you’re actually enjoying the experience.”