Dive Brief:
- East Coast convenience retailer Pops Mart Fuels has sold its c-store and wholesale businesses to multiple buyers, Terry Monroe, president and founder of American Business Brokers & Advisors, which coordinated the deal, confirmed to C-Store Dive.
- Sunoco LP purchased 36 of Pops Mart’s 54 convenience stores in addition to its wholesale distribution business, according to American Business Brokers & Advisors’ website. Meanwhile, according to the website, Petroleum Marketing Group acquired seven of Pops Mart’s c-stores, and details on who acquired the other 11 stores were not immediately available. Financial details were not disclosed.
- The deal marks yet another example of a regional convenience retailer exiting the industry as smaller operators struggle to stay afloat in a difficult operating environment.
Dive Insight:
Pops Mart’s run as a standalone business was short-lived. The South Carolina-based retailer formed its own LLC in 2021 after former parent company Winnsboro Petroleum sold its then two dozen locations to retail fuel investors Don Draughon and JD Dykstra. The company made several small-scale deals in the process of growing its network to 54 stores. The acquisition of DJ’s Mart introduced the company to Wisconsin in 2023.
Monroe said that one of the company’s founders is retiring, but declined to say who. Draughon’s LinkedIn bio lists him as Pops Mart’s CEO while Dykstra’s profile states he is the company’s president.
According to an announcement from Monroe, Draughon was considering acquiring more sites to grow Pops Mart’s dealer network before Dallas-based oil company Sunoco approached him and his team about buying the assets. The “synergies between the two companies was one of the compelling factors to consider the sale of the convenience stores to Sunoco,” according to Monroe’s announcement.
Questions have swirled around what Sunoco intends to do with the hundreds of company-operated c-stores it acquired from Parkland last year. Although this latest development doesn’t provide full clarity, it appears to show that Sunoco intends to grow its branded retail fuel network. Monroe confirmed that the stores Sunoco is acquiring are dealer sites as opposed to company-operated locations.
A spokesperson from Sunoco declined to comment on the acquisition, which Monroe said officially closed in December. However, they pointed to a note in the company’s 2026 guidance, which states that Sunoco “has a multi-year path of bolt-on acquisitions totaling at least $500 million annually.”
Pops Mart’s exit from the industry continues the wave of smaller convenience retailers — many with between 10 and 50 locations — selling their assets amid a difficult operating environment. Industry experts have said they expect this trend to continue in 2026, with customer visits dropping and transaction counts inside c-stores in recent years mostly flat.
