How a Gas Station Chain Quietly Became America's Fifth Largest Pizza Seller

Casey's, the Fortune 500 gas station and convenience store chain founded in 1968, has quietly built itself into one of the biggest pizza sellers in the country, according to Fortune. The company runs nearly 3,000 locations across 19 states, with roughly half sitting in towns of fewer than 5,000 people, and its stock has climbed more than 50 percent over the past 12 months, pushing its market capitalization to $28 billion.

Bank of America Research ranks Casey's as America's fifth largest pizza chain based on prepared food and dispensed beverage sales. Tom Brennan, the company's chief merchandising officer, confirmed Casey's also holds the fourth largest liquor license position in the country and ranks third among convenience store chains overall.

The strategy behind that scale is deliberately unglamorous: go where national chains do not bother. Casey's has built its footprint on a small town first approach, planting stores in communities larger competitors tend to skip. Pizza has been on the menu since 1984, and the company added breakfast pizza roughly two decades later. Brennan describes the stores as a gathering spot for the towns they serve, anchored by signature items like taco pizza and a breakfast pizza topped with sausage gravy, eggs, and cheese.

The numbers behind the food business are notably strong. Prepared food carries gross margins around 58 percent, well above the company's overall 23.5 percent margin, and Casey's has kept pricing disciplined even as costs have risen elsewhere, with prepared food prices up just 5 percent over three years compared with a 14 percent increase in food away from home prices industry wide.

That combination of quality and price has found an unexpected fan base. Casey's social media penetration with Gen Z climbed 600 basis points over three years, fueled largely by TikTok and YouTube videos praising the chain's gas station pizza, a genre of content the company did not manufacture but has happily leaned into. Brennan credits the traction to decades of consistently delivering good pizza rather than any recent marketing push. With its small town model largely saturated in states like Iowa, where Casey's runs about 550 stores across roughly 3 million residents, the company is now eyeing small towns along Interstate 35 in Texas as its next major growth frontier.