Family-owned, founded 1965, HQ La Crosse, WI. 850+ stores across WI, MN, IA, IL, MI, SD under Kwik Trip / Kwik Star / Kwik Spirits / Stop-N-Go / Tobacco Outlet Plus brands; ~30+ new stores/year (about-us).
Headcount: "over 38,000 coworkers" per about-us; their IT careers page says "over 850 stores and 36,000 coworkers" — both are their own numbers, use ~36-38k (about-us, IT page).
Vertical integration is the identity: own bakery, dairy, kitchens, food-safety lab, distribution center, LP plant, blow-mold plastics facility, transportation company, and health clinics. 80% of in-store product is own-brand, made/shipped/sold by the company. Scale: 225 bread loaves/min, 80,000 gal milk/day sourced within 100 mi of La Crosse ("cow to store in 24 hours"), 40,000 pizzas/day (kwiktrip.com/vertical-integration).
Investing hard in that engine: $151M expansion of dairy/commissary/bakery in La Crosse plus a new distribution center and offices in Onalaska, ~500 new jobs by 2027, WEDC-incentivized (C-Store Dive, 2023-12-19).
Culture note that will come up in the room: 40% of pre-tax profits shared with coworkers annually (8-12% of gross wages) (IT page).
Technology & data signals (public evidence)
ATS = Phenom People — verified tonight by plain fetch of jobs.kwiktrip.com: assets served from cdn.phenompeople.com, tenant refNum KTQKTRUS in the embedded phApp config, phenomtrack.js in robots.txt (jobs.kwiktrip.com/us/en).
Databricks in production. Data + AI Summit 2024 session "Kwik Trip's Databricks-Driven Operational Insight Revolution": a 12-person Data Services team migrated reporting/analytics to Databricks in ~2 years; Spark Streaming from fuel pumps for near-real-time monitoring; hourly food-sales forecasting app. Speaker Logan Carlson was a Kwik Trip data engineer (session listing — page now redirects to the 2026 summit; details from the search-indexed abstract + session video on YouTube).
AI-powered loyalty just launched. Eagle Eye partnership announced ~2026-05-20: AI "Personalised Challenges" (individualized, gamified offers from shopping history + predicted behavior) across 5.25M Kwik Rewards members (Retail Technology Innovation Hub, CSP Daily News). Kwik Rewards app is live on iOS and Android with digital punchcards, auto-applied coupons, fuel discounts.
Data Services is a named org. Matt Korger, Director of Data Services (LinkedIn); profile-level references to a Snowflake data-warehouse migration, CDC engineering, Airflow, and Databricks. Grade: LinkedIn-profile signal only — no press or case study corroborates the Snowflake piece. If real, they're running Snowflake AND Databricks side by side (a phData conversation in itself).
Jobs snapshot (sitemap slugs, fetched tonight): 1,790 live postings; open tech roles skew infrastructure/security — Director of Information Security, Network Engineering Manager, System Engineer, Availability & Recovery Systems Engineer, Sr Endpoint Engineer, InfoSec Administrator, Manager IT-AV Collaboration. Zero postings titled data engineer / data scientist / BI / analytics in this snapshot (sitemap index). Read: the 12-person data team isn't visibly scaling via external hiring — capacity gap or vendor-leaning posture.
IT careers page (server-rendered) lists role families: Developer, Network Engineer, IT Business Analyst, Security Analyst, Retail Systems Integrator, Desktop Support; "700+ jobs across our entire support center" (IT page).
GitHub: no public footprint. Org kwik-trip exists (created 2021) with 0 public repos — internal-only engineering, no OSS signal (per the brigade's github-presence station artifact, landed 2026-07-10).
What we could NOT read (the honest gap)
jobs.kwiktrip.com is a Phenom SPA: job descriptions, requirements, salaries, posting dates, and search results are JS-rendered — plain fetch gets only the page shell, meta tags, and sitemap URL slugs. Titles above are from slugs; nothing deeper. Phenom scraper is queued (brigade jobs-snapshot ticket parked pending it).
The Databricks 2024 session page no longer serves the original abstract (redirects to the 2026 summit); details rest on the search-indexed abstract and the YouTube listing, not a primary page read.
Five discovery questions (DSA discovery, not vendor pitch)
Your 2024 Data + AI Summit talk showed a 12-person Data Services team streaming fuel-pump data and migrating reporting into Databricks — two years on, where is the platform straining: cost, governance, or self-service demand from the business?
Public signals suggest both Snowflake and Databricks in the picture — is that a deliberate warehouse/lakehouse split or accumulated history? What decides which workload lands where, and what does the CDC/Airflow layer feeding both look like?
With Eagle Eye now running personalization for 5.25M members, how does loyalty and transaction data flow back into your own platform — who owns the customer-360, and can your team query it freely?
Vertical integration means you run manufacturing, logistics, and retail demand signals in one company — "sell it today, replace it tomorrow" replenishment across dairy/bakery/commissary/DC. How much of that forecasting is model-driven today, and where does the hourly food-sales forecast live?
Open IT hiring skews infrastructure and security while AI arrives via vendors — what's the internal posture on GenAI/agents (pilots, governance, appetite), and who makes build-vs-buy calls for data and AI capabilities?
Logistics
HQ / support center: 1626 Oak Street, La Crosse, WI 54602-2107 · 608-793-6000 (about-us). Expansion campus in adjacent Onalaska.
Intro meetings Mon 2026-07-13 and Tue 2026-07-14 (remote); onsite in La Crosse Mon-Tue 2026-08-03/04.