Wawa's Journey From Small-Town Dairy to Cult Phenomenon

Six years ago, when the Vatican announced that Pope Francis would be stopping in Philadelphia as part of his visit to the United States, local businesses responded en masse. Manayunk Brewing Company made Papal ale. The pope’s likeness appeared on pizza boxes. Local station WZMP started a “popecast.” But no welcome stuck in local memory more than the one given by Mayor Michael Nutter, who stood before the cameras in Center City and proclaimed: “I’m pleased to announce that we expect to serve Pope Francis a Wawa hoagie of his choice.” For Americans who don't live in the Mid-Atlantic region, the likely response to this news was, “What’s Wawa?” But for the initiated, it was more like, “Oh, of course.” That’s because Wawa boasts the kind of fanatical following that most sports teams would envy. As Philadelphia magazine wrote, “Wawa, our homegrown convenience-store chain, has achieved the level of cult-like customer devotion that every consumer brand on the globe dreams about.” And they’re not kidding. In 2009, five young women hit the road in a quest to visit all 586 locations Wawa had at the time, a feat that took them two years. Couples have met at Wawa—and married there, too. MTV's Jackass actor and stuntman Johnny Knoxville sports a Wawa tattoo, and so does skateboarder Bam Margera. In 2017, a rapper named Aaron Out dropped a tune about his love for Wawa hoagies, which Jimmy Fallon and The Roots later performed on The Tonight Show. None of this surprises Wawa vice chairman Howard Stoeckel, who, during his tenure as CEO from 2005 to 2012, helped build the company into the regional powerhouse it’s become. When asked about Wawa’s secret for success, Stoeckel told Adweek: “If you want to build a reservoir of trust with customers, err on the side of quality. There are a lot of things we’d like to do—but if we can’t do it right, we won’t do it.” Originally, Wawa did just one thing: deliver milk. Opened in 1902, the Wawa dairyman brought the freshest milk in Philadelphia. But when supermarkets began to drain off market share, Grahame Wood, grandson of founder George Wood, put Wawa into the convenience store business. As Stoeckel recounts, Wawa immediately differentiated itself from competitors like 7-Eleven with a fresh and fully stocked deli case. And since Wawa also sold fresh bread, one thing inevitably led to the next. “We got into the hoagie business because customers said, ‘Look, you have a deli and you have bread. Can’t you make me a sandwich?’ [So] store managers began to make sandwiches,” Stoeckel said. Today, those sandwiches top the reasons why Wawa enjoys a cult following. Alas, that legion of believers never did come to include Pope Francis, who rolled through town without stopping at Wawa. Even so, Philadelphians who responded to a Gawker poll voted for the hoagie that the pontiff would be most likely to choose: the Italian Shorti. The Meatball Classic was a close runner-up. The bird is the word The name’s not as strange as Piggly Wiggly or Kum & Go, but what’s a Wawa, exactly? Wawa takes its name from the Pennsylvania town where the company’s original dairy farm was located, and the town’s name comes from the Ojibwe word for Canadian goose. (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow rhapsodized about the “wild goose, Wawa” in his "The Song of Hiawatha.") This is also why the brand uses a silhouetted goose as its logo and why it even sells a plush goose—named Wally—for $9.99. Roadside attraction Wawa opened its first store (1) in Folsom, Pa., in 1964. From the earliest days, employees actually seemed happy to be working at Wawa (2), which Stoeckel attributes to them owning 40% of the company. While convenience stores hardly enjoy a reputation for fresh food, Wawa has long stood out by offering not just soda and candy bars but fresh meats and produce (3). But Wawa’s biggest differentiators are its hoagies (4), which are so popular that many customers actually go ‘out to dinner’ at Wawa.

Perspective

Wawa's Journey From Small-Town Dairy to Convenience Store Phenomenon

The name is unusual, and so is its cult following

Robert Klara

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Robert Klara