Kwik look at Kwik Trip
Kwik Trip’s meteoric growth is hardly a secret − the La Crosse-based convenience store chain has doubled its locations in less than 10 years and now operates 872 stores in six states and employs about 38,000 people.
The company welcomes 11.5 million customers a week – Kwik Trip likes to call them guests – many of whom are regular customers drawn by the company’s consistency across locations, its savvy social media presence and the friendliness of its employees.
Behind that success is a well-oiled machine, one that’s responsible for the daily presence of Glazers and a host of Kwickery sweet treats, Nature’s Touch milk and ice cream, the Hot Spot, ready to eat meals, salads and all the other items that help to set Kwik Trip apart from its competitors.
Almost 8,000 people work at Kwik Trip’s 140-acre food production campus in La Crosse, producing those items and delivering them six days a week.
Here’s a look at some of the numbers behind the operation:
A dairy that’s more than just milk
About 15 trucks a day arrived at Kwik Trip’s dairy last year from farms that are all within 150 miles of La Crosse, bringing in 4.8 million pounds of raw milk a day. The milk is pasteurized and homogenized five days a week.
Last year, Kwik Trip stores sold 25 million gallons of milk, but that’s just one product made by the company’s 150 dairy employees.
Fat removed from the milk is used to produce 8,000 gallons of ice cream a day in 24 rotating flavors.
The dairy also produces and packages non-dairy bottled drinks including orange juice and iced tea.
A bottle factory with a secret
Kwik Trip’s DIY approach to food production and transportation includes a bottle factory within the 220,000square-foot dairy that makes a range of bottles from pints to gallons.
Last year the company made more than 65 million jugs and bottles.
Each includes an imprinted reproduction of a smiley face that former CEO Don Zietlow used to draw when he announced employees profit sharing payments at the company’s annual meetings. They can be hard to find on many bottles, but pop out readily on the bottoms of chocolate and strawberry.
Millions of Kwik Trip Glazers
The Kwikery Bake shop cranked out about 45 million Glazer doughnuts in 2023. One way to picture that: Laid out end to end that could make a doughnut highway extending coast to coast.
Each box is hand-packed because the doughnuts are too fragile to be handled by machines.
And that’s just one part of the story of Kwik Trip’s sweets bakery. Other products made by the bakery’s 320 employees include:
● Up to 275,000 Persians, Bismarks, and Long Johns a day.
● Up to 250,000 cookies a day
● 5 million cinnamon rolls a year
The sweets bakery is just one baking operation
Kwik Trip has a separate bakery for bread and rolls, where 117 people make 225 loaves of bread a minute and an astonishing 1,600 buns a minute.
That adds up to more than 170 million buns and 15 million packages of bread a year.
10 million pizzas a year is just a start
Pizza is just one of a host of items produced in Kwik Trip’s commissary, where about 700 employees make burritos, take-home meals, salads, sandwiches, and ready-to-eat items for the stores’ Hot Spots.
They also make Cheese Mountain pizzas - lots of them. Last year, the total was 10 million pies produced on a line that can make up to 50,000 pizzas a day. There’s space and a plan to double that.
There will be no burrito shortage at Kwik Trip
A recent expansion of the company’s burrito line doubled its capacity to about 90,000 burritos a day.
Hundreds of drivers deliver fresh food and more daily
Delivering fresh food, frozen products and everything else to stores six days a week means trucks and drivers, and Kwik Trip’s got them.
Keeping the stores stocked is the work of 600 drivers who deliver products to retail locations with a fleet of 350 tractors and 250 trailers.
Not all of Kwik Trip’s food and drinks make it to the customer
It’s not uncommon for food businesses to sometimes have surpluses and Kwik Trip is no exception.
The company’s retail operations partner with 14 regional food banks that received about 4 million pounds of food in 2023 and more than 20 million pounds of food since 2011.