Wawa Inc. - Company

Company

The original location is still open, and many Wood family members are still active within the company as of July 2009. Although Wawa is a family-run business, the employees of Wawa also hold a relatively large percentage of stock. Most Wawas are open 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. The chain's name comes from the site of the company's first milk plant and corporate headquarters in the Wawa, Pennsylvania area. The name of the town Wawa is in turn derived from the Ojibwe word for the Canada Goose (taken from "The Song of Hiawatha"). An image of a goose in flight serves as the Wawa corporate logo.

As of 1989, the convenience stores, which numbered around 400, generated $450 million ($843.7 million in today's money) per year, making up 95% of Wawa Inc.'s revenues. Cynthia Mayer of the Philadelphia Inquirer said that the dominance of the convenience store market is "making the whole town, dairy and Canada goose history a severe case of the tail wagging the dog." Wawa sells over 195 million cups of coffee a year. Wawa was among the first convenience stores to implement self-serve computer touch-screen menus for food orders, in an attempt to improve accuracy. It can potentially be used as gateways to up-selling, as well.

The current president and CEO of Wawa is Howard Stoeckel. Eleuthère (Thère) du Pont has served as both the CFO and president, but is no longer associated with the company. Richard D. (Dick) Wood, Jr. is chairman of the board of directors.

In 2011, Wawa ranked 47th on the Forbes Magazine list of the largest private companies. As of July 2011, Wawa employs 18,000 in 600+ stores (210 offering gasoline) and had total revenues of $6.99 billion in 2011. Since 1996, many Wawa stores have been relocated to "Super Wawas," with 12-20 gasoline pumps, and all new Wawas constructed are of the "Super Wawa" variety (though not all feature gas stations). Wawa, for the most part, covers the parts of Pennsylvania not already covered by fast-growing in-state rivals Sheetz and Turkey Hill Mini Marts.

In the late 1980s and through the 1990s, Wawa engaged in a scholarship sponsorship program that involved Irish students (mainly from UCC in Cork, Ireland) running a considerable number of stores on the Pennsylvania Main Line. This was a successful program that allowed the students to study for their MBAs from Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia.

In 1994, Wawa opened a store in Center City, Philadelphia which sells fast food only; no groceries are sold.

In 2003, Wawa and McLane Co. reached a 30-year agreement to construct a distribution center in Carney's Point, NJ to handle the majority of Wawa's distribution needs. The center began operation in May 2004.

In 2005, Wawa partnered with JPMorgan Chase to offer a Visa credit card branded with the Wawa name. It ceased issuing new cards in December 2007, and as of November 2010 the program has been canceled.

In 2006, the "I Love Wawa" MySpace page had over 5,000 members. The "We Love Wawa" page on Livejournal had about 950 members.

In the spring of 2007, Wawa began offering its own line of soda in its stores. In the summer of 2008, Wawa introduced a special on their hoagie line called "Hoagiefest", which offered a price reduction on four selected varieties of their "Shorti" size hoagies, each variety on sale for a two-week period in an eight-week rotation. The Hoagiefest ad campaign relied on a style very reminiscent of The Beatles, using 1960s psychedelic imagery and songs. "Hoagiefest" has been revived in the summers of 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012, and it was expanded in 2010 by both length of time and that two styles of hoagies are available at any particular time. The John Lennon-esque character's name is Kotter Doppelgänger.

On February 12, 2010, KYW-TV announced on their 4:00 pm broadcast that Wawa would become the primary sponsor of the Welcome America series of Independence Day celebrations in Philadelphia, starting on July 4, 2010. The previous sponsor was Sunoco.

On June 30, 2010, 20 Wawa locations in Pennsylvania started selling Pennsylvania Lottery tickets from automated kiosks as a trial to explore whether to expand the service to all Pennsylvania stores. On December 6, 2010, it was announced that all 210 Pennsylvania Wawa locations would sell lottery tickets from kiosks by Spring 2011.

On October 21, 2010, Wawa began testing the sale of diesel fuel at 12 of its New Jersey locations because of the increase in use among cars. If the test runs well, all locations with fuel may have diesel fuel within two years.