Legendary convenience and travel chain Buc-ee’s didn’t have an online store for its popular treats. Chris Koerner, a business management graduate from the University of Alabama, decided to change that.
It wasn’t his first entrepreneurial move though. Since graduating from the Capstone in 2011, he’s started and sold numerous companies, including one of the first smartphone repair shop chains, a wholesale distribution company and a real estate firm.
Buc-ee’s, famous for its pristine bathrooms, unrivaled in-store experience and eight-figure sales volume per location, has a loyal fan base.
Last year, the first Buc-ee’s chain opened its third location in Alabama to massive crowds. But perhaps above all, Buc-ee’s-branded snacks and merchandise is what keeps them coming back.
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Chris Koerner told The Hustle, who first shared his story, he’s a spreadsheet guy who is “maniacally curious.”
“In late 2019, he connected with a friend who owned a bread company that exclusively sold to physical retail stores around the Dallas-Fort Worth area,” The Hustle reports. “This friend was doing pretty well for himself, with sales of ~15k loaves per week. But Koerner saw untapped potential.”
Koerner set up a website and logistics for the business – which quickly resulted in a massive sales boom driven by pandemic online shopping.
Not long after, he took his wife and two kids to Buc-ee’s to purchase every single one of Buc-ee’s snack products, totaling 650 items at a final cost of $1,470.97
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Texas Snax, the company he started from that trip, generated $161,000 in sales in its first month. Quite the return on investment.
Fast forward to today, Koerner said the idea is paying multimillion-dollar dividends.
“Buc-ee’s put[s] a lot of their locations in the middle of nowhere. So you end up stopping there and never going there again … Then find yourself craving this stuff, with no way to get it,” he told The Hustle.
“So, it creates a secondary market.”
Grayson Everett is a staff writer for Yellowhammer News. Follow him on Twitter @Grayson270
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