Last year Casey’s sold $10.6 billion of gasoline and $1.8 billion of prepared food.
The gasoline produced $1.50 billion of gross profit. The prepared food produced $1.04 billion.
Read that again. One business is six times larger and earns barely half again as much.
Fuel is 60 percent of the revenue and 35 percent of the profit. Prepared food is 10 percent of the revenue and 24 percent of the profit. The margins are 14.1 percent and 58.6 percent.
Which is why the company that everyone thinks of as a gas station describes itself, in a slide deck filed with regulators, as the fifth largest pizza chain in the United States.
The catch is in how it counts.