(Radio Iowa) – The Ankeny-based Casey’s convenience store officially announced the acquisition today (Friday) of 198 stores in the southern U-S that includes 148 in Texas and 50 in Alabama, Florida, and Mississippi. . Casey’s is purchasing the CEFCO convenience stores for more than $1.145-BILLION dollars. Casey’s C-E-O Darin Rebelez talked about the purchase in a conference call for investors. “This acquisition will quickly expand Casey’s presence in Texas, a very attractive market for Casey’s, in addition we’ll be able to expand our footprint further into the South as well,” he says.

Casey’s had already owned 22 stores in Texas and will have 29-hundred stores overall once the acquisition is complete. Fikes Wholesale owns the stores and Rebelez says they will fit well with their operation. “Acquisitions this size and strategic fit do not come along very often. And we seize the opportunity to add these large, high quality stores to our network. The fit between fives and cases is outstanding,” Rebelez says. “CEFCO’s large format stores average over 48-hundred square feet. comparable to the news stories at Casey’s builds today.”

He says the Texas stores are mostly in smaller towns in the Dallas to San Antonio to Houston triangle. The Florida stores are mainly in the panhandle area. CEFCO is known for its chicken, and Rebelez says they plan to remodel the kitchens to bring in Casey’s pizza. “CEFCO has done a really nice job of building their own food business and they have kitchens and a lot of their stores, so that should make the integration process go a little smoother for us. But still we see that as our biggest synergy. Fuel it’d be the next largest synergy that we have,” according to Rebelez.

(Casey’s photo)

CEFCO has a fuel terminal that is included in the agreement. Rebelez says the plan is to put the Casey’s name on the stores. “It would be our intention over the next couple of years as we are able to remodel that we would rebrand these stores to Casey’s. There are a handful of stores that have some Q-S-R ours and they’re, they’re under franchise agreements and so we’ll have to navigate that and that’s not unusual,” he says.

Rebelez says they acquisition will help them meet the goal they set in 2023 to expand by 350 stores in half they time they had expected. The acquisition should be completed by the end of this years.