How Kwik Trip Cooked Up a Successful Company Culture

That recognition of people's individual value extends to the customers Kwik Trip serves, Kleine added. "We want them to come in. We want to treat them like guests," she said. "It's a hospitality thing."

Crafting a Foodservice Legacy

Foodservice itself has been a baseline of Kwik Trip's culture for many years, since former President and CEO Don Zietlow, who was also a company cofounder, looked at the convenience landscape and predicted that c-stores would not survive long-term focusing on gasoline and cigarettes as their moneymakers. 

At the time, pivoting toward foodservice was not an obvious right call, according to Ben Wilson, also a director of foodservice with the retailer.

"It was not easy. It was extremely hard," he said, noting that Kwik Trip's early foodservice efforts included a lot of trial and error and throwing things away when they got it wrong. "It took a lot of perseverance and drive to work through all that to get to the right mix of product and to start building the foodservice program that we have today."

Zietlow's early vision for Kwik Trip's foodservice culture, and the ensuing trial and error as the company worked to make it a reality, led to a focus on company values that persists to this day and is regularly discussed at meetings on all levels.

"The idea of our vision is to be better than the best. It's the idea of constant improvement," Wilson said, adding that Kwik Trip's goal is fundamentally a variation of the Golden Rule. "It's to serve our customers and the community more effectively than anyone else by treating our customers, coworkers and suppliers as we personally would like to be treated, and to make a difference in someone's life."

Alignment with Kwik Trip's core values is something the company looks for in its hiring process. "We can train a lot of things. It's hard to train values," Wilson noted.

Once hired, coworkers have numerous opportunities to grow within the company, but long-term advancement requires foodservice experience. Currently, seven of Kwik Trip's 10 zone leaders and 58 of its district leaders were once foodservice district leaders.

"To grow in our organization, you need to be part of the foodservice program," Wilson said.

Inside its stores, Kwik Trip coworkers focus on fast and friendly service first, as well as food safety, clean restrooms, and the quality and freshness of its food and beverage products. Coworkers are empowered to do what's needed to make things right for the customer. 

Visually, the retailer's focus on food is obvious from how it stocks and displays a wide array of fresh and hot items, take-home meals, baked goods, grocery staples and more.

[Read more: C-store Operators Advance Foodservice Through Technology & Automation]

"If you can't figure out we're in the food business, we probably did something wrong," Wilson said. "Everything in front of you screams foodservice." 

Both foodservice directors experienced long-term, food-focused growth at Kwik Trip firsthand. Kleine started working for the company in high school, while Wilson balanced work at Kwik Trip with his service in the National Guard for more than a decade.

"When I think of how fast you can grow with the company, if it's something you really want to do, the growth is there," Kleine said. "If you want it, you just have to be willing to put the time in."

The practical needs of Kwik Trip's foodservice program remain a top priority — the idea of foodborne illness is something that keeps them up at night, Wilson noted, but so is the decay of the company's culture. "We do a lot of things to prevent both."

While Kleine's and Wilson's careers and Kwik Trip's foodservice offering may have changed over the years, Zietlow's vision for the company's culture has not.

"Don talked a lot about how his job was to take care of us as employees. If he takes care of us as employees, our job is to take care of the customers. If our coworkers are happy, then our customers are happy," Kleine said. "A lot of that comes down to our coworkers having a purpose and knowing why they come to work every day, and their 'why' is to take care of our guests. And if they love what they're doing, they're going to want to come to work."

Headquartered in La Crosse Kwik Trip sits at No. 9 on the 2025 Convenience Store News Top 100 ranking with 879 convenience stores.

The 10th annual Convenience Foodservice Exchange event, held May 8-9 in Denver, was an exclusive networking and experience-focused conference that gave attendees actionable knowledge and research to strengthen their foodservice business. 

Sponsors of the 2025 Convenience Foodservice Exchange included gold sponsors Hunt Brothers Pizza, Johnsonville Foodservice, Krispy Krunchy Chicken, LSI Industries, Steritech, Stuffed Foods, Sugar Foods, SupplyIt by Jera Concepts and BOHA!; silver sponsors J&J Snack Foods Corp., Vollrath and Chester's Chicken; and Innovation Zone sponsor Upshop.