By the time this year is over, Kum & Go will have gone. The stores will remain, but the iconic Iowa name and branding “will disappear by 2025,” CSP Daily News reported on Monday.
In April 2023, Kyle Krause, the CEO of Krause Group, announced he would sell Kum & Go and Solar Transport, a trucking company also owned by the Krause Group, to Maverik, a Utah-based convenience store company that already had roughly the same number of stores as Kum & Go. The deal was finalized in August.
At that time, Maverik CEO Chuck Maggelet told the Business Record
that the Kum & Go name and branding would remain on all existing stores, except for the ones in five states — Nebraska, South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado and Utah — where Maverik and Kum & Go both had stores. Those stores would be rebranded as Maverik stores, the rest would remain Kum & Go.
Apparently that’s changed.
“I think there was some concern about the inadvertent double entendre of the Kum & Go name,” CSP, a trade publication covering convenience stores, quotes an anonymous “former Maverik member” as saying.
According to CSP, “None of the sources interviewed would agree to be quoted on the record.”
Those sources told CSP that scrapping the Kum & Go name was part of Maverik’s plan to expand the chain beyond its traditional territory in western and mountain west states.
“If you’re growing cross-regionally, which brand do you think will have more appeal to a new audience: Maverik or Kum & Go?” one of them said. “No disrespect to Kum & Go, but the answer is pretty clear.”
sometimes i wish you’d kum & stay
— Kum & Go (@kumandgo) March 26, 2021
Kum & Go has been part of the Iowa landscape since the mid-1960s, when William Krause and his father-in-law, T.S. Gentle, first used the name for one of the convenience stores they owned. The Des Moines-based chain eventually grew to become the 22nd largest convenience store company in the United States, with 393 stores in 13 states.
Maverik had 397 stores before it purchased Kum & Go. The purchase price was not disclosed, but last year Reuters estimated Kum & Go’s value at $2 billion.
Speaking to the Business Record in August, former Kum & Go CEO Kyle Krause, the son and grandson of the founders, as well as the father Tanner Krause, Kum & Go’s final CEO, said Willaim Krause and T.S. Gentle would have approved of the sale if they were still alive.
“Both would have been super proud and excited,” he said.
