Dive Brief:
- Casey’s General Stores has named Eric Long vice president of proprietary brands, a company spokesperson confirmed to C-Store Dive.
- Long will oversee Casey’s private brands program in the newly created role, the spokesperson said. Casey’s private label line includes hundreds of SKUs across products like chips, cookies, soda and energy drinks.
- Long’s promotion comes as Casey’s continues to overhaul its private label assortment. Since last year, the retailer has been implementing a tiered system for these types of products.
Dive Insight:
Long was most recently Casey’s director of prepared foods and dispensed beverages, and he’ll continue to lead that part of the business, the spokesperson said. His promotion isn’t his first foray into the retailer’s proprietary items, as he was initially hired as director of private brands in 2020, according to his LinkedIn bio.
Prior to joining Casey’s, Long was with c-store and supermarket chain Hy-Vee, where he spent most of his five years as group vice president of private brands, according to his LinkedIn bio.
Long will now shift his attention back to Casey’s private label line, which is undergoing a facelift.
Casey’s leadership first discussed its tiered private label system on an earnings call back in June 2024. That system slowly began to take shape earlier this year. When asked during Casey’s Q3 fiscal 2025 earnings call in March how the tiering initiative was going, Rebelez said some of those products were arriving in stores, and the initiative would ramp up over the next nine to 12 months.
This past June, Rebelez shared that the system officially includes a premium tier featuring products with “higher quality ingredients,” as well as a middle tier that “will be more of that national brand equivalent,” then finally “a more value-oriented tier that would be more commoditized.”
“We're in the process of refreshing the assortment across all of those tiers,” Rebelez said during Casey’s Q4 2025 earnings call in June. “And we think that gives us some really good opportunity to drive incremental business, drive some margin at the same time.”
