KDSN RADIO News
Kum & Go convenience store brand to be retired
.jpg)
It will be Kum & Go no more. A trade publication called C-Store Dive reports the Utah company that bought the Iowa-based convenience store chain in 2023 will rebrand all Kum & Go locations as Maverik stores in 2025.
Sekar Raju, chair of the department of marketing in Iowa State University’s Business School, says a brand name is one of a company’s assets.
“It’s the trust, it’s the promise, it’s the connection between the consumer and the company and it’s extremely valuable,” Raju says. “If you you look at Apple, for example, much of the value that the brand holds is actually equal to or more than all of the other assets that they have.”
Kum & Go has sold caps, koozies and other items that bear the Kum & Go logo, but Raju isn’t sure of the long-term value of that memorabilia once the brand is retired. “There will be some nostalgia related to the brand,” Raju says. “People might be collecting these things.”
The Kum & Go brand was launched in the 1970s by Bill Krause and Tony Gentle, who started the chain. They opened their first gas station in 1959 in Hampton. Jim Davies, a Hampton native who’s chairman of the Hampton Historic Preservation Commission, remembers when the company started selling food and merchandise as well as gasoline.
“The stores were really nothing like the convenience stores of today,” Davies says. “They were much smaller.”
Davies and his family attended the same church when the Krause family lived in Hampton. “In 1963, Krause Gentle introduced the company’s first convenience stores,” Davies says. “I think Store #1 is located on north Highway 65. There was another store located on west Highway 3 across from their corporate headquarters.”
The company’s corporate headquarters moved to Des Moines in 1988.
According to C-Store Dive. a Maverik spokesperson said Kum and Go stores will briefly close, be rebranded as Maverik stores and reopen with the same employees.
