Welcome to Convenience Matters. My name is Jeff Lenard with NACS.

Rose Johnson:
And I’m Rose Johnson also with NACS.

Jeff Lenard:
Today we’re joined by Mario Spina. He is the owner and CEO of Parent Petroleum, which runs PRIDE Stores and a really cool brewery called 93 Octane. So welcome and thank you for joining us today.

Mario Spina:
Thank you for having me, appreciate it.

Jeff Lenard:
Before we dive into the suds and your food offer, can you give us an overview about PRIDE and Parent Petroleum?

Mario Spina:
Parent Petroleum is a wholesale distributor in the Chicagoland market. We distribute all the major brands, BP Shell, Mobile, Citgo, Marathon. We have about 405 accounts that we service in the area, and we also have a convenience store side called PRIDE Stores. We have 15 stores in Chicagoland. We have one location we just purchased about a year ago in Dyer, Indiana. That’ll be our first location outside Illinois. It hasn’t been fully converted to a PRIDE yet, but we’re working on that and we also have two new builds scheduled for this year. I don’t know if those are going to get in with construction and materials and all craziness going on. We’re hoping at least get one. We also have a real estate side, too, that we do all our own property management: buying and selling, leasing real estate, development, general contracting and of things of that nature.

Jeff Lenard:
When we first visited you for Ideas 2 Go a couple years ago, it was for the food. It’s really great burgers and…

Mario Spina:
Thank you.

Jeff Lenard:
…upscale fare. Can you talk about your three food concept?

Mario Spina:
One is called Urban Counter. We call it an American fare restaurant. Everything’s made to order, we do half-pound, hand-pressed hamburgers. We’ve got a blue cheeseburger where we have a bacon jam that we make in-house. Salads are all made to order, our breakfast sandwiches are great. We do hand-churned milkshakes. It really can rival any burger or salad you’re going to have out there regardless of a gas station or just quick service restaurant. The food is fantastic. And then we had another concept—we wanted to have a couple different food concepts so that if someone’s traveling and they see multiple PRIDE Stores or two stores are close to each other, then they can experience different food offerings at each one.

Mario Spina:
So it’s not the same thing every time they go to a PRIDE. The next one we came up was Taco Urbano, our Mexican fare restaurant. Again, everything’s made to order. It’s actually pretty cool when you order chips—we fry them up fresh, we hand churn the guac, make the guacamole to order. We cut up the avocados and make it to order. All the meats, all the salsas we make in house. It’s a really great offering as well. And then we have another concept called the PRIDE Cafe that we put into some restaurants that just don’t have room for a hood, they don’t have the parking, or they just don’t have the time where we need to get people in and out really fast. We do paninis, crepes, espresso drinks, most of them have TCBY frozen yogurt. So, those are the three different concepts that we do throughout our stores. And then we also have a commissary at our Warrenville facility where we do a lot of the prep for some of the restaurants. We do all our own grab-and-go sandwiches and we self distribute them out of the warehouse.

Jeff Lenard:
And then you decided, okay, I have a lot on my plate. Let’s, let’s start a brewery.

Mario Spina:
I was talking to somebody about this earlier, and they’re like how the heck did you come up with the idea of having a brewery along with everything else you guys do? We always joked around, how cool would it be if we brewed our own beer? How cool would that be if you brewed our own beer? We have a really great selection of craft beer at our convenience stores, we do heavy local, we just love craft beer … And then we started thinking a little bit more serious about it—we have, we had this place in St. Charles, we built a 5,000 square foot building,

Mario Spina:
we put our Urban Counter and our own liquor store called PRIDE Beer and Wine Plus Spirits. And we left 1,000 square feet on the end in case we wanted to expand one of the offerings, or if we wanted to do a different concept. And so we’re like, we got a 1,000 square feet here and it would be tight, but we might be able to do it. We started looking into equipment and fortunately for us, my cousin Chris is our head buyer—and now he runs the brewery—and also owns a distillery in Northern Illinois. It’s not exact the equipment, but it’s very similar for brewing and distilling. He understands the concepts of distribution and all the things you have to deal with in Illinois.

Mario Spina:
We started putting it together and it’s been a lot of fun. I’m not going to say there haven’t been challenges. Anytime you go into a new segment, it’s different. You got new things that pop up that you didn’t even imagine, but it’s been a lot of fun. I get a lot of people that look at me like, dude, you got so much other stuff going on. Brewing beer—it’s going to be one more avenue you want to get into. Overall it’s been great. It’s anytime you start a new segment, there’s always challenges, something different.

Rose Johnson:
Mario, you are committed to convenience, having all these different offerings in one space, and you’ve mentioned in the past how getting gas is the least favorite thing for people to do. And that is one of my least favorite things to do. I will drive home and park on ‘E’ and say, I will wake up in the morning to get gas. But you’ve made this an experience. Walk me through what one can expect when pulling up to one of your stores to get gas.

Mario Spina:
We try to do the basics like everyone should be doing: well-lit stores, clean, directionally it’s easy to get in and out—those are all the important things. When you initially pull into a station, the challenge is always getting somebody out from the pumps inside the store. I still don’t know if we cracked that egg or figured that out yet, but we’re trying to get a little better at it. If you go into any one of our locations each one we try to have the same feel in terms of aesthetics and design, but we want each store to be unique. So when you walk in, we want you to feel like you’re in a PRIDE Store but we want you to also see that each one is slightly different and designed either for the area or whatever the offering is.

Mario Spina:
We try to make a unique experience when you walk in. We do hardwood flooring most of the time, which is actually vinyl that looks like hardwood. We do nice tile finishes on the walls, exposed brick on the walls, nicer lighting. We try to just make it more of a warm experience when you walk in versus most convenience store offerings you see. I look a lot outside industry versus inside the industry. Not there’s not a lot of great things you can learn inside the industry, but I always like to see what other people are doing in other avenues. One thing I was always impressed with was with Starbucks. You walk into Starbucks and you know you’re in a Starbucks.

Mario Spina:
Every Starbucks is unique—I’ve never seen two Starbucks exactly the same. I wanted to try and do that for our stores as well. We also try to offer things that you might not see in other convenience stores. We try to do as many name brands as we can, but like I said, we make our own grab-and-go sandwiches, wraps, things of that nature. I love it when people come in and they see a half-pound hand-pressed burger and they’re like, ‘that’s coming out of a gas station—I don’t understand.’ It’s fun to see that, but we also do our beer, wine and spirits offering at our stores. We have one station—actually more than one now—we’ll go up to $80, $90 bottles of wine.

Mario Spina:
A lot of places you don’t see that. One of our stores actually sells two cases of wine a day-plus, which is for a gas station is a lot. One thing we started doing since we had our liquor store…we started doing bourbon barrel picks with certain distillers. That’s been a lot of fun because it’s a unique bourbon barrel or bottle of bourbon that you can’t just get on a normal shelf, it’s just not something like a standard bottle of bourbon you could buy. We partnered up with Knob Creek…bigger names where we have PRIDE bourbon barrel picks, where you got a bottle bourbon with the PRIDE logo on it along with the logo of the distillery.

Mario Spina:
Our slogan is, ‘Not your typical convenience store.’ We try to take that to heart. If somebody walks in, you want a unique experience for them where they can see things you’re not going to see at convenience store, typically. You might see it at a really nice liquor store, you might see it at a really nice freestanding, quick service restaurant. But you’re not going to see that all under one roof. That’s what we try to do for all of our locations that have the PRIDE flag.

Rose Johnson:
I love that I can walk in, I can fill up my tank, I can grab burgers for the family and I can find some local or even small crafted bourbons that I can’t find anywhere else. That’s a win to me.

Mario Spina:
That’s the goal. One of our biggest problems is we have a lot of different avenues that we tap into. One thing we started doing last year was making craft sodas that we put on draft. We also make our own cold brew coffee that we take into the store. We make it at our commissary, we keg it, and then we put draft systems in six stores. We’re selling handcraft of sodas. We’ve got a blackberry one, we’ll do a limeade one and they’re great. They’re made with fresh ingredients. One of the things we struggle with is we go into a lot of different directions. It’s hard to really explain to people all the things we do in one little segment. But yeah, what we try to do is make it a unique experience, make it fun. Somebody comes in and they have to spend money to fill their tank. At least they can come in and do other things at that same time. That’ll provide some more enjoyment than just filling your gas tank.

Rose Johnson:
And then on top of that, you also have events. You have live music sometimes.

Mario Spina:
At our brewery we do. We have live music on Thursdays and Saturdays. When first built the brewery, we only had 1,000 square feet of space and it was tight. The tap room only had 20 seats in it. So we expanded the building to the West and doubled the size of the brewhouse and then added permanent outdoor seating in front of the expansion that’s a covered roof. We enclosed it with vinyl panels for the winter so we were able to utilize the space all year. We went from having only 20 seats to having 62 outdoor and indoor. That allowed us to do even more events and some other fun things besides the live music. We had ESPN Radio out for a live broadcast one day. We did an Oktoberfest evet too, which was a lot of fun.

Jeff Lenard:
You’ve used the word fun couple times. You can see that when you go to your store and sometimes it’s a subtle thing, like the sign for the car wash doesn’t say car wash. It says dirty cars. I think that also washing a car may not be all that much fun, but it reinforces that we can have fun in life. If you think through that lens, you can get a customer.

Mario Spina:
That’s what we hope. As you said, Rose, nobody go wakes up the morning and its like this is awesome, I get to fill up my tank with gas. Nobody ever gets excited for that. If we can figure out a way where, all right I gotta fill up with gas but I might as well go to PRIDE because I can also get a burger, a nice bottle of wine, a six-pack beer, then hopefully we got something. That’s the goal. Anything we do, we try to do it just as good if not better than anyone else in that industry.

Mario Spina:
We don’t try to measure ourselves in our food offering compared to other convenience stores. We try to measure ourselves against other burger places that are in our market, other quick-serve restaurants. If we want to do something we want to try and do it just as good, if not better, than anyone else out there in that segment. That was one of our biggest concern with opening a brewery—we wanted to make sure that if we’re going to open a brewery, we want to make a really good beer that competes with anybody else out there at an affordable price and make a real high quality—which lately we’ve been killing it. We’ve been making some really good beer. So that’s also the challenge too, is to make sure that you’re doing things just as good as anyone else out there.

Rose Johnson:
To that point, one would think why would someone who is in the convenience store and gas industry even want to open a brewery? Why would you want to compete in that space? But you have recently been named top five best breweries in Chicago suburbs out of over 200 breweries. So congratulations on that.

Mario Spina:
Yeah, that was pretty cool. That was pretty cool to see. There’s a lot of great craft breweries, local breweries in our marketplace and in the suburbs too. A lot of great breweries in Chicago as well, but to even be on the list was awesome.

Jeff Lenard:
I don’t know of any other gas station brewery, and I don’t know of any gas station that is canning beverages in the facility, let alone beer.

Mario Spina:
We used to use a mobile canning line where they brought in the canning line from outside and they canned onsite. So we purchased our own canning line and we started canning on our own beer, which has been awesome. Not only can we have a little bit more control of the canning aspect of it, the mobile canning line business is a crazy business because craft beer is such a boom that you have to schedule your canning dates a month or two months out. It really kind of pigeonholes you if you want to be a little bit more nimble and switch things up. So to get our own canning line was huge because it allowed us to can whenever we had beer.

Mario Spina:
We’re in over 200 accounts right now and we want to continue to grow. We service a lot more than just our PRIDE Stores, which is nice. It’s been great to be able to can though on our own because it’s given us so much more flexibility. It’s a packaging/process facility in the back and right now we have 12 beers on draft. We’re in the process of adding more tap handles, we just need the space. We’re going to start bringing in some other specialty stuff we want to start doing and we just don’t have the room right now. So we’re going to be adding four more tapper heads, which is going to be exciting.

Mario Spina:
We’ve got some really great beer…The brewery is called 93 Octane. It looks like the button on a pump. Every beer we make, we try to somehow tie into either fuel or oil or cars or something like that. Our coffee porter is called Turbo. Our wheat ale is called Hugger Whip, which plays on a hugger orange color for classic motor or classic muscle cars. All of our stouts are named after oil. We have a 10w 30 style, which is our lower alcohol style. And we have an imperial style that’s called 20w 50.

Rose Johnson:
And I think with the uniqueness of your offerings and the way that you name your beers, I would imagine it goes over well, like on social media, everyone wanting to be the first ones to say, ‘oh look what’s out here’ and helping you in promotions in that way.

Mario Spina:
I remember a friend of mine’s father was a big muscle car guy and he saw the Hugger Whip and he just like, oh my God, that’s the hugger orange color, I had a car that was that orange. It’s been fun when we get some names out there and people love it. We have a beer that’s a cream ale that tastes like a like vanilla cupcake or a piece of vanilla cake. We call it Clown Car and we have a clown on top of a car driving around. When somebody posts something online and you get the reviews on it, it’s been fun. Most of the time, if someone’s posted something about a gas station, it’s usually not positive, right? It’s fun with the beer aspect of it because people get excited for craft beer.

Rose Johnson:
You’re growing, you’re constantly coming up with new ideas, looking at other industries to get ideas. You still have time to also give back. You work with charities to give them exposure and then also participated in Folds of Honor. Can you talk to those a little bit?

Mario Spina:
We support a lot of different charities throughout the year. We’ll do spirit pumps for local charities or local schools where we give a portion of every gallon sold at one specific dispenser to that either school or charity. We have three main charities that we support year-round. One is Casa, which helps underprivileged kids. Another is Living Well, which gives free cancer support to individuals dealing with cancer. And Folds of Honor is another one that we support, where we give a portion of every cup of coffee we sell to Folds of Honor. And then we also make a beer called Wing Man. The individual that started Folds of Honor was a pilot in the military, so we took the jet that he flew in service and had it re-drawn on the can.

Mario Spina:
We give a portion of every four pack of Wing Man to Folds of Honor. And for Living Well, we give a portion of every gallon of gas sold at every PRIDE Store back to them every year. They’re just a great charity to work with. We give a portion of every grab-and-go item that we sell out of our coolers back to Casa in King County. I love trying to tie in certain items that we sell to that charity because we’re able to post signs about the charity. I think people feel good if they’re buying something they know goes to support a bigger cause.

Jeff Lenard:
I would imagine that that’s particularly important now with higher gas prices. The April NACS Magazine cover story is looking at what consumers say about gas prices and retail. The thing that struck me most was a question we always ask: Would you drive five minutes out of your way to save 5 cents a gallon. No surprise, 64% said they would, but 74% said they would drive 5 minutes out of their way to go to the store they like. I think that pretty much sums up your offer. How do you make it fun? Like what Rose was saying earlier because nobody likes buying gas and I wouldn’t do what she does, I wouldn’t wait until the next morning to fill up…

Rose Johnson:
Living on the edge!

Jeff Lenard:
…I would use my wife’s car and then switch over to one that has more fuel or something like that when I need it, making it somebody else’s problem the next day. I think that at the essence of what you do, where it’s, it’s make them want to drive out of their way for the experience, and because they believe in you.

Mario Spina:
That’s what we hope to accomplish. We have such a unique and fun offering for the customers that even if we’re a few cents higher than the competitor down the street, they’re still going to come up and fill up and get gas and then purchase other items. It’s always the goal. You’re not going to be able to be the cheapest on the street or within a few pennies of the cheapest on the street, so you hope that your offering is so good that people still come to you, even if they gotta pay 3, 4, 5, 6 cents more a gallon.

Mario Spina:
I know that can be a challenge sometimes, because again, nobody likes to buy gas and everyone’s watching their budgets. But hopefully you have such a great offer that people don’t mind paying a little extra funds every once in a while. We try to be as competitive as we can to be even with the cheapest on the street at all times, if possible, but sometimes we just can’t do it. And so we hope that people realize that we usually are priced well, but every once in a while might be a little higher and they still come.

Rose Johnson:
Value is definitely important. And as the survey showed, people will pay for value and I cannot wait to see what y’all come up with next. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today.

Mario Spina:
I appreciate you guys allowing me to talk.

Jeff Lenard:
One quick before we let you go, we have trivia. We promise it will be painless. We have a trivia question for you based around what we’ve been talking about. What was the first light beer: Coors Light, Miller Lite, Bud Light or • Gablinger’s Diet Beer?

Mario Spina:
I never heard of Gablinger’s. I’m pretty sure Miller Lite was before Bud Light and I’m pretty sure it was before Coors Light. I’d probably have to say Miller Lite.

Jeff Lenard:
Coors Light was briefly introduced in the 1940s and it was considered the first, even though it didn’t have mass rollout till 1978.

Rose Johnson:
Well, Jeff, we didn’t give him a chance to phone a friend to make sure his answer was correct. He was close. Maybe we could give it to him still.

Jeff Lenard:
Thank you again for joining us today and having some fun with the trivia. You can see the entire Ideas 2 Go video at convenience.org/ideas2go and if you want to subscribe to the podcast, please do so. I think you’ll learn something every week about our industry and how to get better and hear from industry leaders like you, Mario. So thank you for joining us.

Outro:
Convenience Matters is brought to you by NACS and produced in partnership with Human Factor. For more information, visit convenience.org.

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