Gas Station Pizza Giant Casey’s Rides Gen Z Buzz and Small-Town Dominance to $28 Billion Valuation — BigGo Finance

A convenience store chain rooted in America’s smallest towns has quietly assembled a pizza operation that now ranks among the country’s largest, even as the broader quick-service pizza category cools. Casey’s General Stores, the Iowa-based Fortune 500 company known for its red-roofed gas stations, has seen its stock climb more than 50% over the past 12 months, pushing its market capitalization to roughly $28 billion.

Bank of America Research recently crunched the numbers and concluded that Casey’s ranks as the fifth-largest pizza chain in the United States when measured by prepared food and dispensed beverage sales. Tom Brennan, the company’s chief merchandising officer, confirmed the ranking in an interview with Fortune, adding that Casey’s also holds the position of fourth-largest liquor license holder and third-largest convenience store operator in the country.

“You don’t hear the other big pizza players talk about Casey’s,” Brennan said. “But at the same time, it’s evident from our growth … we’re taking share as we continue to grow.”

Casey’s absence from most pizza-industry rankings is itself telling. PMQ Pizza Magazine’s 2025 Pizza Power Report, which tracks U.S. sales at chains built specifically around pizza, lists Domino’s ($9.03 billion in 2023 U.S. sales), Pizza Hut ($5.38 billion), Little Caesars ($4.43 billion) and Papa John’s ($3.86 billion) as the top four dedicated pizza chains — Casey’s does not appear at all. The fifth-place ranking instead measures something different: total prepared food and dispensed beverage revenue across all of Casey’s roughly 3,000 stores, a category that includes pizza alongside sandwiches, breakfast items and fountain drinks. The two yardsticks are not directly comparable, which is part of why a gas-station chain can out-earn national pizza brands by one measure while remaining invisible on another.

The chain is approaching 3,000 locations, with nearly half situated in towns of 5,000 people or fewer and about two-thirds in communities under 20,000 residents. That footprint spans 19 states, concentrated heavily in the Midwest but increasingly stretching into new territory.

A Digital Following Built on Scratch-Made Dough

While Casey’s has long been a fixture for Midwestern drivers buying diesel, ice, and lottery tickets, a younger audience is discovering the brand through a distinctly modern channel: social media. TikTok and YouTube have cultivated a durable genre of “gas-station pizza” content, where creators approach heat-lamp fare with low expectations and emerge genuinely impressed. Casey’s appears frequently in these videos, with creators highlighting its scratch-made dough and on-site pizza ovens.

Brennan said the company’s social team has measured a 600-basis-point increase in Gen Z engagement over the past three years. “What underpins all of this is just this incredible fandom and brand love that we’ve generated,” he said.

The executive attributed the momentum to something an algorithm cannot replicate. “It’s really built on decades of delivering high-quality pizza and food, a great experience.” He described the chain as the “gathering spot” for its communities, pointing to newer offerings like Sauced Wings, which launched as a pilot in January 2025 and has already expanded to nearly 900 stores, with a full chain rollout planned over the next two years.

From One Iowa Service Station to a Category of One

The company traces its origins to 1968, when Donald Lamberti opened a converted service station in Boone, Iowa. Brennan said he has spoken with Lamberti about the founder’s original strategy: “Hey, this will probably work in the next small town.”

“Literally, they just went from small town to small town, building Casey’s,” Brennan said.

That approach created what Wall Street analysts describe as a defensible moat. Most national brands have little interest in developing sites in communities too small to justify the investment, leaving Casey’s to operate largely uncontested. Pizza joined the menu in 1984, followed by the breakfast pizza roughly two decades later — a combination of sausage gravy, egg, and cheese that Brennan calls “iconic.”