Legacy Markets Looks to the Future With Big Acquisition Aspirations

Photograph: Shutterstock

Legacy Markets LLC, which this week completed the purchase of JH Reaben Oil Co. and its 10 Triangle Stop Food Stores in western North Carolina, intends to live up to its name. The new company was formed to acquire Triangle Stop, but its plans don’t stop there, Matt Thomas, vice president of business development, told CSP. He said the company intends to build on this initial purchase, creating a retail portfolio by acquiring many more convenience stores throughout the United States this year and beyond.

The acquisition consists of 10 convenience stores in western North Carolina primarily in the Hendersonville and Brevard, North Carolina, markets. JH Reaben Oil and Triangle Stop are based in Hendersonville. The locations offer Marathon-branded fuels. In store, they feature Hunt Brothers Pizza. The Triangle Stop loyalty app offers deals on fuel and food.

As an ongoing strategy, Legacy Markets, also based in Hendersonville, hopes to leverage the meaning of its name by focusing on maintaining the brand, employee base and culture of each acquired store, allowing the “legacy” of the multi-generational sellers to continue in each local market.

“Triangle Stops is our first 10 stores,” Thomas said. “And we anticipate being a much larger company by the end of the year. We will probably end up buying many family-owned businesses and family-owned assets and keeping the legacy that they have in place. So that may be company name and culture and their offering to the community and what they’re done for and the communities they operate in.”

For the most part, acquired location will keep their existing store branding, although forecourts will be rebranded, he said.

Thomas said Legacy Markets is “very focused” on growth in the Southeast, but the company is under contract to purchase assets in other parts of the country as well, and that announcements are “forthcoming.”

Legacy of Deals

Thomas is building a personal legacy along with that of the company.

Most recently, he was director of financial planning and analysis for retail company Majors Management, Lawrenceville, Georgia, where he worked on the company’s 2023 acquisition of 192 MAPCO convenience stores from Santiago-based Compañía de Petróleos de Chile S.A. (COPEC), splitting the purchase with Laval, Quebec-based Alimentation Couche-Tard, which acquired 112 MAPCO stores.

Before that, he helped found and was a mergers and acquisitions analyst at Transit Energy Group, Greenville, South Carolina. Richmond, Virginia-based Arko Corp.’s GPM Investments acquired 145 Flash Market company-owned c-stores and approximately 200 dealer sites from Transit Energy in 2023. “We were the second largest privately held portfolio in the Southeast at the time,” said Thomas.

Members help make our journalism possible. Become a CSP member today and unlock exclusive benefits, including unlimited access to all of our content. Sign up here.

Greg Lindenberg has been covering convenience-store news and writing about the c-store and gas station industries for more than a quarter of a century. He specializes in mergers-and-acquisitions (M&A) news.

View All Articles by This Author



_{Images are for reference only.Images and contents gathered automatic from google or 3rd party sources.All rights on the images and contents are with their legal original owners.}