Our Terms & Conditions | Our Privacy Policy
Poppy Market is growing with its acquisition of National Petroleum. |Vintners Distributors
Poppy Markets LLC has acquired 11 convenience stores from Engineer’s Associates Inc. and its affiliates, doing business as National Petroleum, and will be rebranding them all to Poppy Market, Varish Goyal told CSP Daily News.
Goyal is CEO of Union City, California-based Vintners Distributors Inc., which runs the Loop Neighborhood Market and Poppy Market convenience stores. The National Petroleum acquisition, which also includes its wholesale fuels distribution business that supplies more than 100 dealers, will bring Poppy’s store count to 15 locations once the rebrands are complete. Goyal said he was approached by Matrix Capital Markets Group Inc., which provided merger and acquisition advisory services to National, about the deal.
“We’ve always known they ran a great organization,” Goyal said of National Petroleum founders and business partners Sanjiv and Nick Patel. “And they’re very entrepreneurial, and they’ve built a really good business. And so, when we had the opportunity to look at it, we’re like, ‘Let’s go for it.’”
Vintners’ growth strategy is usually through new-to-industry (NTI) stores—it hasn’t made an acquisition since 2010, Goyal said, when it acquired some stores from Shell Oil Co., which was selling off its retail assets at the time. It was at that time that Vintners formed a joint venture with Shell, he said. Vintners’ Loop Neighborhood c-store brand, which has about 140 stores, is primarily used with Shell-branded fuel, he said. The Poppy Market brand will be used for everything else, and it could have Chevron or private-label forecourts.
NTIs will still be its focus moving forward, Goyal said, but if there is an opportunity like with National Petroleum that is right for the business and the geographies they operate in, they will look at that. They’re slated to open six or seven new-builds this year, he said.
- Vintners Distributors, which owns Loop Neighborhood Market, is No. 54 on CSP’s 2024 Top 202 ranking of U.S. convenience-store chains by store count.
The stores Poppy acquired from National Petroleum varied a lot in size—some are about 2,000 square feet and fairly new locations, and some have three fuel bays with a small snack shop next door, Goyal said. Over the next year or so, Poppy will rebrand the stores.
“We’re going to start off with a soft branding, put up the signs, put the loyalty program in, those kinds of things, and then we’re going to start to work on more significant upgrades and branding to them,” he said.
The upgrades will be site specific, as some will require more work than others, Goyal said. But evaluating how to best use each property is Poppy’s specialty.
“We really like to take sites and then look at how to remodel them or reconfigure them to optimize,” Goyal said.
Goyal said he hopes to learn from National Petroleum more about the unbranded fuel business. Vintners uses the Shell and Chevron fuel brands, and started to build out its Poppy brand about a year and a half ago, he said.
“How do we learn more about unbranded? How do we become a better unbranded retailer? How do we become a better unbranded wholesaler?” he said. “That’s what we’re really hoping to learn and get better at through this acquisition is to become the supplier of choice for unbranded operators and also to be able to make our Poppy stores, operate them more efficiently.”
Vintners operates Loop Neighborhood Market and Poppy Market c-stores, and the rest of its stores are Shell- or Chevron-branded gas stations. The brand is supported by more than 20 fuel tankers that are visible on the highways throughout the Bay Area, where more than 140 company-operated stores are located. The company also operates gas stations and car washes and develops real estate. Vintners has a wholesale division that delivers fuel to about 60 dealer locations in the market. In 2023, Vintners opened its first Poppy Market.
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.
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.
Aggregated From –
Comments are closed.