Casey's General Stores
The Firm
Casey's is a Fortune 500 convenience retailer founded more than fifty years ago in Iowa, and by its own description the third-largest convenience store chain and the fifth-largest pizza chain in the United States, with roughly 2,900 stores after the CEFCO acquisition. The pizza claim is not a joke; prepared food is the economic engine, and its stated synergy plan for acquired stores is literally kitchen installations.
The buying runs at two scales. The headline deal was Fikes Wholesale, owner of CEFCO Convenience Stores, a family business that began as a single filling station in Cameron, Texas in 1952. The price was $1.145 billion all cash for 198 stores, a fuel terminal, and a commissary, at about eleven times EBITDA. It closed in November 2024, and the company has since described it as its largest acquisition to date. But the same release notes a recent 22-store acquisition in northern Texas, and the appetite renewed in writing: the three-year strategic plan announced in June 2026 commits to adding at least 400 stores through acquisitions and new-store development, building on the CEFCO integration.
For a convenience-store searcher the read is direct. Casey's is rarely bidding on the one-store deal an individual buys, but it is the exit that makes the trade investable, because a well-run store cluster in the Midwest or South sits squarely inside a published 400-store growth commitment. Anyone meeting the company should know the Ankeny, Iowa base, CEO Darren Rebelez's unit-growth pillar, and the kitchen-led integration model that turns fuel stops into food stores.
Read again in September 2026, from its filings, since its news pages wall a script: no seller has been named since CEFCO closed in November 2024, and the company keeps buying without naming anyone. Its fiscal 2026 annual report counts forty stores acquired through a variety of transactions, its first quarter of fiscal 2027 twelve more, and it expects at least 120 stores in fiscal 2027 through purchases and construction together. The filings opened that evening added the Fikes closing and an unnamed twenty-two store Texas purchase; sixty-three stores under agreement from EG Group in 2023 have no closing the filings name, and the investor site refuses every fetch.
What It Buys
Ankeny, Iowa. Convenience stores across the Midwest and South, grown store by store and chain by chain, including the $1.145 billion purchase of 198 CEFCO stores that sets the ceiling for c-store multiples.
Selling to them one day, or watching them as the other bidder? Track them in the Contact Book so the relationship has a next-touch date.
Confirmed Deals
3 deals traced to announcements by Casey's General Stores, 2023 to 2024, newest first. Firms that announce every deal show a fuller run here than firms that report acquisitions as quarterly counts, so read this as the evidence that clears the bar rather than as the firm's whole record.
Nothing newer has cleared the bar in 22 months, against a registry whose newest confirmed deal is September 30, 2026. A gap past 12 months can mean the firm has slowed, or that it has stopped announcing; treat it as a prompt to check its own newsroom before assuming either.
- Fikes Wholesale (closing) · November 1, 2024
The CEFCO purchase closed on November 1, 2024, by the firm's own filing.
- Fikes Wholesale (CEFCO Convenience Stores) · July 26, 2024
198 stores in Texas, Alabama, Florida, and Mississippi, plus a fuel terminal and commissary, for $1.145 billion.
- Twenty-two Texas stores (Lone Star Food Store) · November 2023
A twenty-two store purchase that took the firm into Texas, its seventeenth state, closed in November 2023 with no seller named.