Inside Kwik Trip's new 200,000-sq-ft bakery

New and upgraded technology enables the bakery to crank out more product at higher quality.

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Kwik Trip serves 11.5 million customers a week at 872 stores. A by-the-numbers look at how that happens

kwik trip bakery

Kwik Trip's meteoric growth is hardly a secret − the La Crosse-based convenience store chain has doubled its locations in less than 10 years and now operates 872 stores in six states and employs about 38,000 people.

The company welcomes 11.5 million customers a week ‒ Kwik Trip likes to call them guests ‒ many of whom are regular customers drawn by the company's consistency across locations, its savvy social media presence and the friendliness of its employees.

Behind that success is a well-oiled machine, one that's responsible for the daily presence of Glazers and a host of Kwickery sweet treats, Nature's Touch milk and ice cream, the Hot Spot, ready to eat meals, salads and all the other items that help to set Kwik Trip apart from its competitors.

Almost 8,000 people work at Kwik Trip's 140-acre food production campus in La Crosse, producing those items and delivering them six days a week.

Here's a look at some of the numbers behind the operation:

A dairy that's more than just milk

About 15 trucks a day arrived at Kwik Trip's dairy last year from farms that are all within 150 miles of La Crosse, bringing in 4.8 million pounds of raw milk a day. The milk is pasteurized and homogenized five days a week.

Last year, Kwik Trip stores sold 25 million gallons of milk, but that's just one product made by the company's 150 dairy employees.

Fat removed from the milk is used to produce 8,000 gallons of ice cream a day in 24 rotating flavors.

The dairy also produces and packages non-dairy bottled drinks including orange juice and iced tea.

A bottle factory with a secret

Kwik Trip's DIY approach to food production and transportation includes a bottle factory within the 220,000-square-foot dairy that makes a range of bottles from pints to gallons.

Last year the company made more than 65 million jugs and bottles.

Each includes an imprinted reproduction of a smiley face that former CEO Don Zietlow used to draw when he announced employees profit sharing payments at the company's annual meetings. They can be hard to find on many bottles, but pop out readily on the bottoms of chocolate and strawberry

Millions of Kwik Trip Glazers

The Kwikery Bake shop cranked out about 45 million Glazer doughnuts in 2023. One way to picture that: Laid out end to end that could make a doughnut highway extending coast to coast.

Each box is hand-packed because the doughnuts are too fragile to be handled by machines.

And that's just one part of the story of Kwik Trip's sweets bakery. Other products made by the bakery's 320 employees include:

  • Up to 275,000 Persians, Bismarks, and Long Johns a day.
  • Up to 250,000 cookies a day
  • 5 million cinnamon rolls a year

The sweets bakery is just one baking operation

Kwik Trip has a separate bakery for bread and rolls, where 117 people make 225 loaves of bread a minute and an astonishing 1,600 buns a minute.

That adds up to more than 170 million buns and 15 million packages of bread a year.

10 million pizzas a year is just a start

Pizza is just one of a host of items produced in Kwik Trip's commissary, where about 700 employees make burritos, take-home meals, salads, sandwiches, and ready-to-eat items for the stores' Hot Spots.

They also make Cheese Mountain pizzas - lots of them. Last year, the total was 10 million pies produced on a line that can make up to 50,000 pizzas a day. There's space and a plan to double that.

There will be no burrito shortage at Kwik Trip

A recent expansion of the company's burrito line doubled its capacity to about 90,000 burritos a day.

Hundreds of drivers deliver fresh food and more daily

Delivering fresh food, frozen products and everything else to stores six days a week means trucks and drivers, and Kwik Trip's got them.

Keeping the stores stocked is the work of 600 drivers who deliver products to retail locations with a fleet of 350 tractors and 250 trailers.

Not all of Kwik Trip's food and drinks make it to the customer

It's not uncommon for food businesses to sometimes have surpluses and Kwik Trip is no exception.

The company's retail operations partner with 14 regional food banks that received about 4 million pounds of food in 2023 and more than 20 million pounds of food since 2011.

IMAGES

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  3. Behind the scenes of Kwik Trip’s next-generation bakery

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  4. Photos: Take a sneak peek inside Kwik Trip's massive food production

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  5. A Look Inside Kwik Trip's Multifaceted Campus

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  6. Inside Kwik Trip's new 200,000-sq-ft bakery

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COMMENTS

  1. Inside Kwik Trip's new 200,000-sq-ft bakery

    Inside Kwik Trip's new 200,000-sq-ft bakery. New and upgraded technology enables the bakery to crank out more product at higher quality. Complete resource for grain-based food industry news, commodity markets, ingredients, processing trends and innovations, publications and more.

  2. Kwik Trip's dairy, bakeries, food and trucking by the numbers

    Kwik Trip has a separate bakery for bread and rolls, where 117 people make 225 loaves of bread a minute and an astonishing 1,600 buns a minute. That adds up to more than 170 million buns and...

  3. Our Story

    Delivering Fresh Daily. With our own Bakery, Kitchens, Dairy, Distribution and Transportation divisions, we produce much of what we serve ourselves and deliver it right to your local store every day, so you always get fresh, quality products. Our Bakery. We bake between 25 and 30 different items every single day. Our Dairy.

  4. Kwik Trip

    A brand of baked goods produced by Kwik Trip's bakery, including its popular Glazers donuts. The offerings include muffins, donuts, bagels, cookies, and a variety of sliced breads and buns. Nature's Touch. A brand of bottled water, juice, eggs, and dairy products.

  5. Photos: Inside Kwik Trip's operation in La Crosse

    Jan 23, 2023. 0. Scenes from the inner workings of Kwik Trip's kitchen, dairy, and sweets bakery in La Crosse. Dough for Persian rolls moves down a conveyer belt at the Kwik Trip sweets...