How Maverik Turned the Gas Station Into an Adventure Brand

At a Maverik in the Mountain West, the first thing for sale is obvious. Fuel prices rise above the forecourt in illuminated digits, legible at road speed. The more interesting sale happens after the turn signal. Inside, a driver meets hot burritos under the BonFire name, coffee, bright drinks, trail-map graphics and a loyalty program that speaks in Trail Points. A necessary stop has been dressed as the first move in an adventure.

That may sound like a cosmetic trick, but convenience retail is a business of tiny decisions. Drivers often have several stations within a few exits. Gasoline is regulated, familiar and difficult to make proprietary. A retailer has minutes to answer a handful of blunt questions: Is the entrance easy? Is the restroom clean? Can I get breakfast? Will the line move? Is the price fair? Maverik's strategy is to make those answers coherent, then add a personality customers can remember.

The company now reports 818 locations across 20 states, from the Midwest to the West Coast, staffed by nearly 16,000 people. It is privately held, company-operated and owned by FJ Management. No franchisee sits between the brand promise and the store visit. That control matters because the product is not a single object. It is the combined performance of the pump, kitchen, shelves, app, restroom and employee at 7:12 on a cold morning.

Roller skates, two pumps and a Wyoming winter

Maverik's origin story is unusually good because it sounds invented. In 1928, 20-year-old Reuel Call used money he had earned renting roller skates to open a two-pump station in Afton, Wyoming. Four years later, he added a second location in Jackson. The business supplied fuel to nearby towns and ranches before separating from a national brand in 1954 and taking the independent path that became Maverik.

Call was not only a fuel merchant. He was a pilot, mechanic and inventor who founded Call Aircraft Company and helped design airplanes for rugged mountain country. He built snowcars pushed by aircraft propellers. The modern chain's obsession with peaks, trails and movement therefore feels less like a brand workshop pasted onto a gas station than a polished descendant of the founder's world. The scenery came first.

A commodity becomes memorable when the experience around it has a point of view.The Maverik operating idea

FJ Management acquired a majority interest in Maverik in 2012, bringing together two branches of the Call family's fuel-business history. The ownership structure gives Maverik the patience and vertical coordination of a family-controlled company. It also links the retailer to fuel supply, logistics and a broader portfolio without requiring quarterly public-market theater.

The pump brings traffic. The burrito builds the basket.

Maverik serves commuters, families, road-trippers, outdoor enthusiasts and professional drivers. They are not necessarily shopping for a convenience store. They are going to work, towing a boat, crossing a state or realizing that lunch disappeared from the schedule. Maverik intercepts a trip already in progress and solves several problems at once: energy for the vehicle, food for the person, a predictable restroom and a fast transaction.

Fuel remains the traffic engine, but inside sales make the format richer. BonFire food includes burritos, sandwiches, pizza and baked goods prepared in stores. Coffee and fountain drinks create repeatable morning and afternoon occasions. Snacks and travel staples catch the unplanned need. The store is less a small supermarket than a carefully edited answer to what someone might require in the next hour.

The Adventure Club loyalty program supplies deals, digital punch cards, freebies and points that can be redeemed in stores. Nitro adds a bank-linked payment layer, offering larger fuel discounts, boosted in-store points and mobile payment. The app connects the system: customers can find locations, view fuel prices, track rewards, favorite stores and pay. A 2025 redesign improved mapping, accessibility and performance.

The mechanism is straightforward. A fuel discount earns enrollment. Mobile payment reduces friction. Food rewards encourage another category. Purchase data makes offers more relevant. Each piece gives Maverik another chance to be selected before the price sign enters view. For customers, the practical benefit is savings and speed. For the retailer, it is frequency, a larger basket and better knowledge of what sells where.

Branding that behaves like an operating manual

Maverik competes with 7-Eleven, Circle K, Casey's, QuikTrip, Love's, Pilot and a long list of regional chains, grocery fuel centers and independent stations. Some rivals have more stores. Others own a famous food item, a larger truck-stop network or denser urban coverage. Maverik's distinction is not that no competitor sells hot food or rewards. It is that the company makes many familiar pieces sound and look as if they belong to one world.

Adventure's First Stop is the governing phrase. Headquarters becomes Base Camp. The chief executive is also Chief Adventure Guide. Points become Trail Points. Stores feature panoramic photography, maps of nearby outdoor destinations and videos at beverage stations. The vocabulary risks becoming cute, but repetition gives it utility. Employees, designers and marketers have a shared filter for decisions.

“Treat Others Better Than They Expect to be Treated.”Maverik's Titanium Rule

Culture is where that language meets labor. Maverik describes a Titanium Rule centered on exceeding how people expect to be treated, plus a simpler pandemic-era reminder: be kind. In a business with early shifts, food-safety routines, fuel-price changes and impatient customers, culture cannot live only in an employee handbook. It must show up as a stocked cooler, a clean counter and a colleague who helps when the morning rush goes sideways.

Buying the map is easier than redrawing it

The largest turn in Maverik's modern story came in August 2023, when it completed the acquisition of Kum & Go and Solar Transport. Kum & Go brought more than 400 stores across the Midwest and Rocky Mountain region. The combination moved Maverik from a strong western operator to one of the larger convenience chains in the United States almost overnight.

The transaction's price was not disclosed. Its operational cost is visible in every conversion. A rebrand means more than replacing a red-and-white sign. Maverik has introduced its BonFire program while retaining selected menu favorites, moved stores to Adventure Club, installed its point-of-sale technology, changed fuel-canopy displays and wrapped interiors in local adventure imagery. By April 2025, it had completed more than 180 conversions. Two new Garden City locations also brought the Maverik name into Kansas.

This is the central test. Scale can improve purchasing, logistics, technology investment and marketing reach. It can also flatten the regional character that made a chain worth choosing. Maverik must standardize the pieces customers rely on while letting a store in Arkansas feel grounded somewhere different from one in Utah. The brand's local maps are a small admission that consistency and sameness are not identical.

A convenience company in the transition lane

Maverik sits in a market being pulled in several directions. Cars are becoming more efficient and electric. Prepared food makes convenience stores compete with quick-service restaurants. Apps turn anonymous transactions into measured relationships. Customers still care about fuel price, but a station increasingly needs reasons to exist beyond dispensing gasoline.

Maverik's response is to treat the forecourt as a platform. Fuel creates the visit. Food and beverage broaden it. Loyalty connects one stop to the next. Company ownership makes the system easier to coordinate. The expertise lies in site selection, high-volume store operations, fresh-food execution, category management, fuel logistics and the analysis of local demand across a wide geography.

Community programs extend the same footprint. In 2025, Maverik and affiliated philanthropy reported that their Feeding America partnership supported more than 20 million meals. A food-rescue network involved 437 stores, 22 food-bank partners and more than 1.1 million pounds of donated food. The company has also committed $20 million through Podium34 to Utah's 2034 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games and associated community work. These programs are material, but their strongest logic is local: a store's neighbors are both its customers and its context.

Ninety-eight years after Reuel Call's first station, Maverik is no longer a Wyoming roadside curiosity. It is an integration machine, a food operator, a payments product and a regional brand trying to carry a mountain-town sensibility across 20 states. The adventure language makes it easy to smile. The underlying discipline is serious. Win a few minutes, remove a few frictions and give a routine stop a reason to be chosen again.