Hello, thank you for joining us today for our Investor Day. It's great to see both new and familiar faces in the crowd. We are very excited to share our strategic plan. I'm Brian Johnson, Senior Vice President of Investor Relations and Business Development. Before we begin, I'll remind you that today's presentation includes forward-looking statements and non-GAAP measures within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including those related to the expectations for future periods, possible or assumed future results of operations, financial conditions, liquidity and related sources or needs, business and/or integration strategies, plans and synergies, supply chain, growth opportunities, and performance at our stores.
There are a number of known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause our results to differ materially from any results expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements, including, but not limited to, the execution of our strategic plan, the integration and financial performance of our acquired stores, wholesale fuel, inventory and ingredient costs, distribution challenges and disruptions, the impact and duration of conflicts in oil-producing regions or other geopolitical disruptions, as well as other risks, uncertainties, and factors which are described in the company's most recent annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q as filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission and available on our website.
Any forward-looking statements contained in this presentation represent our current views as of the date of this presentation with respect to future events. Casey's disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements in the presentation, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. A reconciliation of non-GAAP to GAAP financial measures referred to in this presentation are included in the appendix at the end of the presentation and can be found with the rest of the presentation and on our website at www.caseys.com under the Investor Relations link. Today, you'll hear from several members of our leadership team who both delivered on our most recent plan and will lay out how we plan to execute on another compelling three-year strategic plan.
First, we have Darren Rebelez here to speak about Casey's, highlight our most recent three-year performance, and discuss the evolution of our strategy. Next, Steve Bramlage will address the financials and the path to achieving our growth algorithm. Following Steve will be Tom Brennan and Brad Haga, who will discuss our plan to accelerate inside sales, particularly with food and beverage. We'll then take a short break, followed by Ena Williams laying out the strategy for growing units and enhancing operational efficiency. Nathaniel Doddridge will then join Ena to shed light on our scalable foundation. Subsequent to Nathaniel, Chad Frazell will take the stage to chat on how the team member value proposition fits into our strategy. Lastly, Darren will provide some closing remarks. That will really end with the star of the show, Casey's pizza for lunch. Following lunch, we'll have a Q&A session around 12:30.
We are extremely excited to share our next three-year plan with you today. Now I will turn it over to Darren.
All right. Good morning. Thanks, Brian. I'm Darren Rebelez, Chairman, President, and CEO of Casey's, on behalf of the entire Casey's organization, I'd like to welcome you to our Investor Day. We're really excited to share with you our vision for the next three years and let you hear from the leaders that are going to make it happen. Over the course of the day, we'll highlight our strong say-do ratio as proven by delivering on our commitments over the previous three years, discuss our clear competitive advantages, show how Casey's stands alone in the public marketplace as the only convenience QSR, show the advantage flywheel that that creates, share with you our confidence that this proven and resilient model has a long runway for compounding growth that'll continue to generate even more shareholder value in the years to come.
You see the word evolving here, that word is intentional. What you will not see today is a radical departure from a strategy that's been clearly working. Rather, we'll share with you how we intend to amplify our strengths and points of differences to further drive shareholder value. Before we get into the specifics of our strategy, first I want to introduce you to who Casey's is. We're an S&P 500 company that has an enterprise value of over $30 billion, operating in 19 states, primarily in the Midwest. We operate nearly 3,000 convenience stores, making Casey's the third largest convenience store chain in the U.S. Our delicious pizza has helped make us the fifth-largest pizza chain in the U.S., we also have the fourth most liquor licenses of any retailer in the U.S.
It's this combination of restaurant-quality food, inside offering, fuel capability within one convenience box that makes Casey's truly unique. We sit at the intersection of convenience and QSR, throughout today, we'll show you how Casey's differentiates itself from both the convenience store and QSR industries, with the result being industry-leading growth for the organization and market-leading shareholder returns. I couldn't be more proud of what we've built and are continuing to build, we have some unique advantages that set us apart from the convenience and QSR industries. First, roughly two-thirds of Casey's stores are in towns of 20,000 people or fewer, giving us a strong market position in rural areas. Secondly, our prepared food program is unmatched within the convenience space, with restaurant-quality food across all day parts.
We support an advanced AI-enabled technology platform, coupled with our nearly 11 million Rewards members, driving higher spend, increased visit frequency, and more personalized guest engagement. Our business is vertically integrated, distributing both inside products and fuel, giving us positive control over the value chain and the ability to support our rural footprint. Lastly, this is all supported by our consolidated scale and amplified by our 100% company-owned and operated retail stores, where we have end-to-end control over the upstream partnerships with vendors, enabling quicker speed to market for in-store execution. These unique advantages create an operating model that's unmatched in the public marketplace. What makes our model so powerful is the flywheel it creates, a three-legged stool with prepared food and dispensed beverages, grocery and general merchandise, and fuel, all operating under one cost structure.
Our guests can visit our stores and simultaneously get a hot meal, a cool beverage, and fuel their vehicle, all with one trip. Unlike traditional convenience and QSR operating models, we can do that for any meal or snack, as we have a relevant offering across all day parts. This helps drive consistent visits and creates a loyal guest base that's coming to our stores throughout the day for a one-stop shop across categories. With growing traffic, our operating leverage improves while also increasing resiliency and reducing earnings volatility, as we're not overly reliant on any one line of business. This creates a flywheel of leveraging shared fixed costs across three lines of business that generate diversified, resilient cash flows to reinvest back in our value proposition, driving more traffic to our stores and continuing to compound earnings growth over time.
The success of this flywheel has led to strong financial results and has been doing so for a long time. Recently, those results have accelerated. Consistent store count growth coupled with robust inside sales is proof that the Casey's model is working. This proven algorithm has led to compounding EBITDA growth and improving returns on invested capital. Recently, we've only gotten stronger, posting a 16% EBITDA CAGR over our most recent three-year strategic plan. This acceleration has also been noticed by the markets, as we were named a constituent to the S&P 500 in April. This is a big milestone for our company and shows our play delivers shareholder value over the long term. One of the things that we take pride on at Casey's is what we call our say do ratio.
In other words, when we make a commitment, it's our expectation that we make good on that commitment. With the commitments we laid out at our Investor Day three years ago, we did just that. First and foremost, we laid out an ambitious plan to deliver top quintile EBITDA growth of 8% to 10%. Over the three years, we delivered a compound annual growth rate of 16%. The guest is at the center of what we do, and we ended the three-year plan with overall guest satisfaction at an all-time high. We made a commitment to accelerate the food business. Our prepared food and dispensed beverage sales grew at a 10% CAGR, which are standout results relative to public restaurant peers.
These results were fueled by growth in Casey's Rewards members, 60% growth in Casey's Rewards members, as well as expansion of the wings and fries platform to 850 stores. We committed to growing our store count by at least 350 stores. Over the last three years, we added 504 stores via new construction and acquisition. Our operations expanded into three new states, including Texas, and we closed on the largest deal in the company's history with the Fikes acquisition. Enhancing our operational efficiency was another important pillar. We made a commitment to growing our operating expenses slower than our EBITDA, and we achieved that objective. Our operating expenses grew by approximately 600 basis points less than our EBITDA. Reducing same-store labor hours through continuous improvement was a major contributor to our efficiency gains, and Ena will review in detail our plans to continue these efforts later today.
Our enabling foundation is stronger than ever, as we made great strides in leveraging technology, with one example being an AI demand-driven forecasting tool that's helped us reduce distribution center working capital by 33% and improved order fulfillment at our stores. Our robust team member value proposition delivered better, more rewarding experiences, leading to significant reduction in team member turnover, industry-leading overall engagement scores, and a growing talent pipeline that executed more than 23,000 promotions over this time period. Look, I'm so proud of what we've accomplished these last three years, and the execution by our team has led to some outstanding financial results. Steve's going to get into specific financial goals and outcomes later, but I want to discuss a few key highlights from the last three years.
At our existing stores, we grew inside same-store sales at industry-leading rates, while also expanding our inside margin by 230 basis points. We added more stores while also improving return on invested capital by 90 basis points since fiscal year 2023. The result was a 16% EBITDA growth CAGR while generating excess free cash flow, which we can use to generate shareholder value. You don't have to take my word for it, the market is noticing as well, and our stock price and market cap over the past three years reflect that. That being said, Casey's has been growing EBITDA ratably for a long period of time, and our acceleration in share price gains is highly correlated with Casey's accelerated EBITDA growth. Now I want to shift gears a little bit and spend a few minutes discussing the industries that we operate in.
We'll begin with the QSR industry. Franchise-heavy QSR industry has historically been pretty resilient, but has become vulnerable in recent years, with operators facing mounting pressures as customer preferences are shifting. Over the past 20 years, both store count and dollar sales have grown. However, costs have risen at a faster rate, resulting in QSR profit margins being squeezed. The QSR industry is dominated by the franchise operating model, and company-operated stores are generally performing better than franchise stores in the current environment. Company-operated stores benefit from more control, faster execution, and better consistency without the limitations of a lack of scale. They also have an economic advantage as they don't have royalty or franchise fees and can make decisions optimally for the entire chain rather than a collection of individual franchisees. Casey's 100% company-owned and operated model is a distinct advantage versus the franchise QSRs.
Cost pressures on the QSR operator are accelerating, as average hourly wage increases have grown twice as fast as historical rates. With only one leg of the stool, cost pressures have forced menu prices higher, which has created a vicious spiral as higher menu prices are pressuring restaurant traffic. The combination of increased costs and declining traffic is pressuring earnings and reducing operating leverage, forcing menu prices even higher. Even with a 42% increase in the food away from home CPI, QSR profit margins are down still roughly 200 basis points from 2019 levels. Not only are the earnings being pressured, but customers are prioritizing flexibility and convenience over the dine-in restaurant experience. Customers are moving away from on-premise dining and shifting towards off-premise, and the younger generations are doing so at a more pronounced rate.
Casey's is perfectly positioned to benefit from this shift, as younger generations are only accelerating that trend. As the QSRs are dealing with some structural challenges in their industry, convenience stores are experiencing changing dynamics as well. The industry, again, is generally resilient, but customer preferences are shifting, and the food-forward operators are separating themselves from the rest of the industry, resulting in fragmentation and consolidation. All of this results in scale mattering now more than ever. The convenience store industry has historically proven itself to be resilient over the long run, but the number of total of convenience stores and total fuel gallons sold in the U.S. have been remarkably steady while inside sales have continued to grow. Casey's has also proven resilient as our advantaged operating model outpaces the industry and continues to gain share.
While traditional convenience store operators have one more leg of the stool than the QSRs do, they too are facing increased operating pressures. Like the QSRs, average hourly earnings have grown twice as fast as in the past. The combination of increased cost pressures, the secular decline in cigarettes, and the lack of a prepared food program has many of convenience store operators increasingly reliant on higher fuel margins to make ends meet. The result has been declining traffic, and declining traffic, combined with increased costs, is pressuring earnings and reducing operating leverage, creating a vicious downward spiral effect on their business. As the industry is shifting away from cigarettes and towards prepared foods, earnings are shifting with it.
As compared to the bottom seven deciles of the National Association of Convenience Stores, Casey's inside sales skew 11 percentage points higher in prepared foods and five percentage points lower in cigarettes. This favorable mix leads to approximately double the EBIT per store versus the industry. The trend is clear. Food-forward operators like Casey's are winning, and Casey's has 40+ years of experience in the food business. Despite the convenience industry maintaining a steady store count, it remains very fragmented. Nearly two-thirds of the stores in the industry, of the 150,000 convenience stores in the industry, are operated by chains of 10 stores or fewer. As we've discussed, those smaller operators are struggling to keep up with inflation and other costs, and most don't have the scale, technology, or capital to make the necessary investment in food to thrive.
As such, the industry is consolidating, and the larger, more sophisticated players like Casey's can leverage our superior positioning to grow through M&A. Ena will speak more to our growth strategy later in the presentation, these trends in the industry really represent a tailwind for Casey's, which really puts us in a position to win with our advantage model. We have what we refer to as a unique convenience QSR profile that is differentiated from any public competitor. Our rural footprint and restaurant-quality food service allow us to operate in areas others do not, with a prepared food offering that is a true differentiator. We also have a robust private label offer and sophisticated fuel capabilities, we don't rely on fuel as a sole traffic driver, as 70% of our inside transactions aren't even tied to fuel.
These advantages feed into our convenience QSR flywheel, where our three lines of business under one operating cost structure provide maximum optionality to deliver value back to guests and thrive in really any operating environment. As our robust and competitively priced inside offer, including pizza and wings and private brands, attract more guests to our stores, we continue to take fuel gallon share from the industry. Our competitive prices at the pump, combined with our sophisticated fuel capabilities, provide Casey's a stronger margin profile. This concept allows us to be flexible on where and how we're driving gross profit dollars. We're nimble to our evolving guest needs, and we can manage each business to complement the other. We can do all of this in an efficient manner, as we have one cost structure for the entire operation.
By being 100% company-owned and operated, we have the flexibility to make timely decisions that are in the best interest of Casey's, not an individual store or a franchisee. This creates compounding earnings growth, and the flywheel continues to spin. Don't just take my word for it. You can see the flywheel in motion. Since we're not beholden to using menu price as our only lever to offset costs, our prepared foods value proposition is widening. Over the past three years, food away from home prices have increased 14%. Over the same period, Casey's has increased the average prepared food selling price by only 5%, while maintaining a strong margin rate. The result is taking share from the QSR industry.
With our high-quality food offering at a strong value, Casey's has driven prepared food and dispensed beverage traffic up 13% over the past three years, and we're doing that while the QSR traffic has declined 1% over the same period of time. Those guests that are coming for our food have also filled up at the pump, as our same store gallons have increased by 2%, while the mid-continent OPIS fuel demand has declined by 8% over the same period. We're not sacrificing fuel margin to do that, as our cents per gallon have been $0.39 or higher each of the past three fiscal years. The momentum continues as disciplined investment enhances guest value and operational efficiency. Taking share and maintaining or improving margin has been achieved while also operating the business more efficiently.
We're growing EBITDA more than we're growing operating expenses, which is a key component of our algorithm. Our competitive advantages, coupled with our advantaged convenience QSR flywheel, have proven to be successful. As we continue to grow, leverage our scale even further, and press our advantages, we're entering the next three years in a position of strength. Our operating model of primarily small, rural communities and suburbs with 100% company-owned and operated stores and positive control over the distribution network, combining the best of convenience and QSR at scale, gives us confidence in our ability to meet or exceed our commitments over the next three-year strategic plan. I love the hand we're holding, and I'm excited to share the plans for the next three years. Our goal for the next years will look familiar to many of you, and that's by design. We prioritize ratable, consistent, and industry-leading growth.
Steve will discuss how we get there from a financial metrics standpoint. Following Steve, we'll discuss how our unique insights into our guests, a strong enabling foundation, and an excellent team member value proposition will help support our growth drivers, which are, number one, accelerating the food and beverage business while growing the number of units and continuing to focus on enhancing operational efficiency throughout the organization. Before I get into the details, I'd like to illustrate how our EBITDA growth algorithm stacks up against historical results of others in the industry. Growing earnings is hard enough, but compounding growth over the short, medium, and long term is rare. Only 20 of the 53 retailers and restaurants in the S&P 500 or 400 grew EBITDA by at least 8% over the past year. That number dwindles down to 10 when you add a five-year requirement.
Finally, over a one, five, and 10-year timeframe, only seven companies, including Casey's, have been able to achieve that ratable and consistent growth over a 10-year window. There's very few retailers or restaurants in the S&P 500 or 400 that have achieved that sustained growth that we have over the short, medium, and long term. There are no public companies that are a convenience QSR. Casey's is truly a category of one and a strong investment opportunity. Now I'm going to turn it over to Steve to discuss the financials.
Thanks, sir. Okay. Thank you, Darren, and good morning. There we go. Today, I'm going to discuss our financial expectations and the goals that we have for the next three years, and I hope to clearly reaffirm why we feel so confident in our ability to deliver against them. I'm going to quickly cover four topics. First, we're going to revisit our actual results over the past three years. We're not aspiring to a performance level that is any different from what the company has already delivered over many, many years. As Darren showed a couple of minutes ago, the past three years, they've simply been an acceleration of that historical success. Second, the achievement of our commitment has translated into accelerating free cash flow. It's an important determinant of increasing shareholder value.
This also has further strengthened our balance sheet, and it provides us with tremendous current and prospective financial flexibility to invest. Third, we're going to review the specific outlook for the next three years and the growth algorithm that continues to underpin it. Fourth and finally, I'll discuss our capital allocation strategy along with our return on investment expectations when we invest shareholder money. With that, let's start with revisiting our performance vis-à-vis our aspirations from three years ago. I see a lot of green on this slide, and it's a testament to the excellent work from our 50,000 team members in the stores, in our distribution centers, our drivers, our leadership team, and everyone in between. I mentioned this on our fourth quarter call recently in the context of our FY 2026 results, but it's equally valid and it's even more germane for the past three years.
Results like this are not easy to achieve, and we are really proud of what the team has been able to do. We grew EBITDA to 16% CAGR over the past three years, and that exceeded the top quintile target of 8%-10%. This was generated from both existing units, or what we refer to as the mothership, and the 504 new stores that we built or that we acquired. That level of growth was well in excess of our initial 350-unit goal, aided in part by the Fikes acquisition, the largest so far in the company's history. Inside the store, we grew same-store sales at 4% CAGR and same-store gallons at approximately 1%. These are especially impressive, as we know that we're outperforming our geographic competition both inside and outside the store.
From a margin standpoint, we saw expansion inside, where we grew margin 230 basis points, and at the pump, where we averaged approximately $0.40 per gallon. We were able to successfully leverage our growing scale and continue to invest in our capabilities as we grew operating expenses on a CAGR basis almost 600 basis points less than EBITDA. The result was free cash flow expansion. We generated almost $1.7 billion in free cash flow over the course of the last three years, which was itself an acceleration of the approximate $1.2 billion that we generated over the previous three-year plan strategic cycle. In fact, we generated more free cash flow from FY 2024 to FY 2026 than we did in the preceding 13 years.
Free cash flow generation has been a priority area of focus for us in the past two strategic plans based on investor feedback, and I think that it's developing as we hoped and as we expected as it would. This additional cash flow puts our balance sheet in an extremely strong position, and it enables our investment plans for the future. Simply put, we can invest capital as we need and choose to in order to expand our strategic and our operational advantages both inside and outside the store without compromising our ability to grow units, EBITDA, and ROIC. Our leverage ratio of 1.5x is currently a bit below our long-term target of two times, and we have ample liquidity of $1.4 billion, along with a low cost of debt.
If the right strategic opportunity comes along, we have the ability to take on several additional turns of leverage. Realistically, there's not a lot of potential deals of this size, but in the right circumstances, we would be willing to temporarily increase leverage. Bundle it with a firm commitment to quickly work our way back towards our long-term target of two times, as we demonstrated with both the Buchanan and the Fikes acquisitions. As you can see on the chart, we don't have any substantial near-term debt maturities that will be a strain on cash or expose us to unfavorable market dynamics in any material way. Let's transition from the past to the present and to the future.
I know that I speak for the entire management team when I say again that we love the hand that we're holding, and that we firmly believe that we control our own destiny. The play we're running is winning, and we have spent a long time pressure testing it to ensure the reality and the facts of our exogenous environment support our premise that this play is poised to continue to work far into the future. The strategic differentiators that make Casey's sui generis are stronger than they have ever been, and our relative advantage in this industry that is highly fragmented and lacking scale is only growing. We hope that this page is not a surprise to anyone in the room. It continues to represent a high level of performance for anyone in the retail and the restaurant space, not just the convenience industry.
It also represents more of the same. We're not trying to do something that we have been unable to do in the past. We have consistently been able to achieve this level of performance across multiple economic cycles and against an ever-evolving consumer and competitive set. It's really difficult for our competition to replicate the flywheel effect of our business in the way that our prepared food business, our grocery business, our fuel business, and our scale all complement, supplement, and ultimately reinforce each other. The rest of the day is meant to reaffirm for you with specific facts and examples why we believe the plan's achievable, and to instill in you the same level of confidence that we already have in our ability to execute it.
Specifically, the EBITDA growth target of an 8%-10% CAGR over the next three years is still a top quintile growth, and it's consistent with our historical results. For transparency, we define top quintile growth as EBITDA growth on a multiyear CAGR basis for all of retail, excluding REITs, and restaurant companies that are within both the S&P 500 and the S&P 400 composites. Simply put, we intend to accomplish this by doing what we already do well and to continue to get better at it each and every day. We plan to grow the store base by at least 400 units. That's a CAGR of at least 4% over the next three years, and that'll be through a mix of organic growth and acquisition. Please note there are no large deals assumed in this number.
We will be able to achieve this growth exclusively with single store and smaller multi-unit deals combined with new construction. For some perspective on the pipeline, we're currently land banking construction sites for opening in our fiscal 2030 and beyond. Hopefully, we've already demonstrated that we have the balance sheet and the integration experience to take on a larger deal that would help us exceed the goal if the opportunity were right, and financially it would act very similarly to the way Fikes did in our last plan, which was really to serve as icing on the cake for these goals over that three-year plan. We plan to grow inside same-store sales at a mid-single digit pace while also modestly expanding inside margin.
This will be a combination of prepared food and dispensed beverage growth outpacing grocery and general merchandise growth, mix shift within the grocery and the general merchandise category itself, as well as continuing to leverage our scale and our relationships with vendors to optimize margin. Please note that our goal is not simply to harvest every margin expansion opportunity that we see. We're trying to drive more gross profit dollar velocity, and often it makes sense for us to reinvest in promotion and price support inside the business to maintain our value abundance positioning and to drive more traffic to the store rather than simply drop through more margin. In fuel, we expect to be approximately flat on same-store gallons, which likely will mean that we're continuing to take share in our geography.
Similar to FY 2027, while we do not guide per se to fuel margin, to make the algorithm work, we would expect the plan to average approximately mid-$0.40s per gallon. Over the course of the plan, we generally expect for margin to annually grow commensurate with CPI as it has done for many, many years. We have more opportunity in front of us to leverage our scale in the organization and our central capabilities to keep growing operating expenses at a rate that's lower than EBITDA, making the next store a little bit more efficient than the store that came before it. This level of performance should generate free cash flow of approximately $2 billion.
Just a quick reminder on the two-pronged algorithm that about half of the growth will come from the existing business and the other half will come from the new unit growth we referenced earlier. Over the remainder of the day, Tom, Brad, Ena, Nathaniel, and Chad will lay out the plan on how we will execute it. We've proven over the short, the medium, and the long term that we can ratably grow EBITDA, and we're simply better equipped now than we have ever been to execute this plan over the next three years. Everyone in Casey's leadership team is keenly aware of our role as a steward of the legacy, the culture, the communities, the guests, and the team members that those who preceded us have left to us. We're also stewards of shareholder money.
The easiest way for me to describe capital allocation at Casey's is as stops on a bus. The first stop is always to reinvest into EBITDA and ROIC accretive growth via new store construction and M&A. Because our maintenance requirements are quite low, approximately 75% of our PP&E spend is, has been, and likely will continue to be growth-oriented. The second stop on the bus, we target a steady state leverage ratio of two times debt to EBITDA. Given our current leverage, you should expect no discretionary de-leveraging from our current levels. The third stop, we have a long track record of returning cash to shareholders with 27 consecutive years of dividend growth, and we are really proud of the fact.
I am keenly aware of the fact that our dividend yield has been declining over the past couple of years. Honestly, I, for one, am totally okay with the reason that that has happened. Our long-term philosophy on the dividend is to maintain an approximate 15%-20% payout ratio and to increase the dividend consistent with the midterm EBITDA growth. At the final stop, once we've met our first three priorities, we get to share repurchase. Now, historically, this has not been a major part of our capital allocation plan. However, as we continue to grow and generate more and more cash, we have leaned into share repurchases. The reality is, at the current scale of the company, we're going to generate more free cash flow in most years than we have opportunities to reinvest it within a 12-month period of time.
Absent a large contemporaneous deal with an above-trend investment and de-leveraging need, we will become a more consistent and ratable repurchaser of shares. As a reminder, we have a fresh $1 billion share repurchase authorization available to us. I want to cover our return expectations when we invest shareholder funds. As a starting point, our current cost of capital is a touch above 7.25%. For the fiscal year of 2026, we had an ROIC of 12.7%, which is a 90-basis-point expansion from our fiscal 2023, and it represented our highest level since 2018. Our return expectations for a new unit are the same, whether we build it or whether we buy it. The expectation is double-digit after-tax returns by the second or the third year, and mid-teens by year five or six.
Mature markets tend to be on the early end, and new markets a little bit later in that range. The difference is primarily a function of how quickly in new markets our prepared food takes off, think of buying pizza from a gas station, relative to our core markets. Finally, I'd point out that our long-term incentive plans are fully aligned with EBITDA growth, ROIC improvement, and TSR as the three performance metrics that determine our payouts. I, for one, am proud of the success we've had both in growing the company and improving returns at the same time over the past several three-year cycles. As I wrap up, I want to leave you with a couple of key points. First, the ultimate expectation is the same as it's been, to continue delivering top-quintile EBITDA growth of 8%-10%.
Second, we are confident in our ability to execute on this goal as we've done it for a long period of time. We just completed a plan where we grew EBITDA well in excess of that goal, and we were able to achieve all of those underlying metrics across the board. Third, we're able to support this growth with a really strong balance sheet that affords us ample liquidity to operate and grow the business while being ready for the next right large acquisition without compromising our small deal M&A and the building of new units. Our balanced algorithm has proven to be successful. We're generating EBITDA growth from both our existing stores and from the new and acquired stores.
All of this gets funded with a capital allocation strategy that prioritizes driving EBITDA and ROIC growth and accretion while generating more free cash flow than we have ever had. In conclusion, we love the hand that we're holding. We have a proven strategy to ratably grow this business. We've done that over the short, the medium, and the long term. We continue to control our own destiny. Our play is more effective, and it's harder to replicate than it has ever been. I, for one, am extremely excited for the next three years at Casey's. Let's start talking about specifically why we feel so good about that statement and how we're going to do it. With my great pleasure that I'm going to turn it over to Tom Brennan, our Chief Merchandising Officer. Tom? All right, all you, Tom.
Thanks, Steve. My name is Tom Brennan, and I am the Chief Merchandising Officer at Casey's. Let me start with a simple framework for how to think about the business. Everything we're going to show you today starts with the guest how that translates into consistent and ratable growth for the long term. We serve a loyal, high-value guest with strong wallet share. Importantly, that base is getting younger, positioning us well for sustained success. We're also differentiated in how we serve that guest. Our category of one model spans both convenience and QSR, allowing us to capture more trip missions and dayparts than traditional peers. Underneath that are three core structural advantages. Disciplined, dynamic category management, vertically integrated partnerships and exclusivity, and a loyalty platform that's increasingly a real-time personalization engine.
When you put those pieces together, what you'll see is an integrated system, one that drives frequency, increases basket, and creates a flywheel of engagement, data, and reinvestment. That system is what enables us to consistently drive traffic. That, in turn, gives us confidence in delivering mid-single-digit same-store sales increases year-over-year, with an overweight on unit growth supported by modest pricing. If you start with a guest, the data is compelling. We have a broad generational mix with increasing engagement from Gen Z, giving us both stability today and growth over time. While we skew more rural, our guests still value convenience. Roughly 70% of our rewards members earn over $50,000 annually. We operate in six of the top 10 and 13 of the top 20 lowest cost of living markets in the U.S., which strengthens disposable income. They're also highly loyal.
On average, Casey's Rewards members have visited more frequently and spent roughly four times more than non-members. Importantly, satisfaction is at an all-time high. When you put it all together, we have a guest base that is engaged, high value, and increasingly digital, exactly the profile that supports consistent, repeatable performance. What do our guests actually want? It comes down to five things: great taste, strong value, convenience, consistency, and relevance. The key is that we've designed our model to deliver all five every day across our approximately 800 million annual transactions. That's why we invest in real kitchens, proprietary innovation, and a regionally relevant assortment while continuously removing friction and improving reliability. That combination, quality and value delivered with convenience, is what drives repeat behavior and long-term loyalty. One of our most important structural advantages is the breadth of trip missions we serve.
We're not just competing as a convenience store or a QSR, we're operating across both throughout the day. That gives guests more reasons to visit and engage with Casey's. You see that reflected in the business. Over 70% of guest visits are non-fuel. Dinner is a meaningful and growing daypart, and on-trend categories like energy drinks continue to grow at a strong pace. The result is a structurally advantaged model with more ways to win across dayparts and more opportunities to drive trips. The way we manage categories is a key driver of how we translate demand into returns. Every category has a defined role, whether it's driving traffic, building baskets, enhancing margins, or creating future growth optionality. Directly informs how we allocate space, capital, and marketing investment across the business.
What this enables is a more dynamic model, where we can scale winning categories faster, exit underperformers more decisively, and continuously improve returns on invested capital. The result is an assortment that stays aligned with the evolving guest demand and a system that drives stronger performance over time, both foundational elements for ratable mid-single-digit same-store sales growth. A great example of that framework in action is the energy drink category. I like to say the growth of energy drinks defies gravity. We've responded by expanding Cold Vault space to support that increasing velocity. The speed at which we can adapt to changing categories is one of the big structural advantages of being 100% company-owned and operated. Giving more oxygen to a growing category in the form of additional facings translated directly into results, helping to drive mid-teens growth in both sales and units over a three-year period. Truly gravity-defying.
It's a good proof point of how we operate. We identify where the guest is moving. We reallocate space and capital quickly to capture that opportunity. Another key traffic lever is being early and exclusive on new high-quality product launches. Our scale, strong vendor partnerships, and vertically integrated model allow us to bring differentiated products to market quickly and with meaningful impact. These launches are highly incremental for both Casey's and our partners, capturing guest attention and driving engagement at the shelf. For example, during our lead market launch of Monster Ultra Red White & Blue Razz, 28% of purchasers were new to the energy drink category at Casey's. Clear evidence of incremental trial. This isn't about shifting share, it's about driving new trips and expanding our guest base. Underpinning all of this is a highly integrated marketing engine.
We operate seamlessly across social, loyalty, paid media, digital merchandising, and our own channels. This isn't a set of disconnected functions. It's one coordinated system designed to acquire new guests, engage them across touchpoints, and ultimately drive them back into the Casey's ecosystem. That level of integration is a real differentiator for us and a key driver of sustained traffic and engagement. Importantly, this creates a powerful flywheel. We invest in digital capabilities and personalization, thereby driving higher loyalty participation. That, in turn, increases transactions and engagement, which generates more data and unlocks new monetization opportunities. We reinvest those gains back into the system, further strengthening the cycle. This flywheel is a key driver of our ability to deliver repeatable long-term growth. A critical enabler of that flywheel is our investment in the digital experience.
We've rebuilt both the app and web platforms, giving us the ability to personalize at scale and accelerate our speed to market. From here, the focus is on continuing to simplify the guest experience, expanding rewards functionality, and ensuring our backend infrastructure can support continued growth. This is both a near-term growth driver and a long-term capability unlock for the business. Where this really comes to life is in personalization. We're now dynamically segmenting guests and engaging them in real time across their life cycle. That allows us to drive frequency with active guests, prevent churn, and reactivate lapsed users. Importantly, we're doing this in a highly automated, scalable way. We're moving from static campaign-driven marketing to always-on data-driven engagement. We're seeing that translate directly into loyalty performance. We've hit nearly 11 million members with strong growth in both enrollments and engagement.
What matters most is how those members behave. Personalized offers are driving cross-category trial, and new capabilities like gamification are increasing engagement and frequency. Loyalty at Casey's is no longer just a program, it's a core growth engine for the business. In parallel, we're scaling our digital commerce and delivery capabilities. We've significantly simplified the ordering experience, removing friction and expanding the assortment available digitally. On delivery, we've now scaled to over 2,000 locations and are seeing strong order growth. By bringing more of the store into our e-commerce experience and expanding delivery, we're driving incremental traffic, accelerating sales, and increasing Casey's relevance with our guests. Another piece of the model gaining real momentum is Casey's Access, our retail media network. We're seeing increasing vendor investment driven by strong returns, particularly when paired with our food-led activations.
At the same time, we're expanding the inventory, giving partners more ways to engage across both digital and in-store touchpoints. Importantly, that revenue is reinvested back into our marketing engine, driving incremental traffic and sales. This creates another reinforcing loop within our ecosystem, further accelerating growth over time. When you step back and look at the results, the impact is clear. Digital sales are growing at a high teens rate on a multi-year basis, led by particularly strong growth in delivery. We're also seeing a meaningful shift toward digital in the ordering mix, bringing in a more engaged, higher-value guest. That's the point. This isn't just digital for convenience. It's digital as a driver of frequency, basket growth, and long-term compounding. From a broader perspective, what you've seen is a guest-led model where demand is broad and growing.
We're reallocating capital dynamically to capture it, digital loyalty and marketing are amplifying that growth. Put together, this creates a reinforcing system that drives traffic, frequency, and basket over time in a ratable, repeatable fashion. From that foundation, we will transition next to Brad Haga, who will share how Casey's will accelerate food and beverage growth as part of this next three-year plan.
All right. Thanks, Tom. My name is Brad Haga, Senior Vice President of Prepared Food and Dispensed Beverages here at Casey's. As you just heard, we start everything with the guest, especially when it comes to our prepared food platform, the first key pillar of our strategy map we'll talk about today. Today, we're going to cover the following ground. First, we've been serving pizza for a long time, our innovation in pizza continues to pay dividends. Secondly, our goal is to make everything we do as good as the pizza. We'll also talk about winning another occasion with our wings platform, finally, leveraging our proprietary food expertise to drive our private brand platform. Casey's serves many needs for our guests, as you saw in the Mission Trip Scorecard that Tom shared.
We think about our menu the same way, whether it's starting your day, grabbing a quick lunch, a fill-in trip, or a family dinner. We have built a menu that serves occasions throughout all day parts for our guests. Now, we put a lot of effort into the rest of the menu, make no mistake, the crown jewel is pizza, roughly half of our revenue in prepared food. To execute Casey's delicious pizza, we make it by hand daily in our kitchens. What sets us further apart is our ability to drive the pizza business through innovation. A few years back, we solved a big gap in our assortment with crust innovation, thin crust. Another big differentiator for us is our specialty pizza assortment. There is nothing more unique and beloved than Casey's famous breakfast and taco pizzas. We haven't stopped there.
Within the past year, we've added four new everyday specialty pizzas and delivered a steady stream of exciting limited time offers. If you're in the room today, you're going to get to try some of our new specialty pizzas for lunch. One is a past Casey's favorite that our guests begged us to bring back, so we improved it and brought back our bacon cheeseburger pizza for this summer in celebration of America's 250th birthday. Quality and abundance are king for us, we don't stop there when it comes to giving back to our guests. Each Saturday through the college football season last year, we offered our guests 40% off any whole pie. This effort drove 40% unit growth on our whole pie business on Saturdays, which also helped us to drive double-digit unit growth across the entire system for the whole fiscal year. That's winning in pizza.
To make sure that volume comes consistently delivering pizza that is Casey's great every time, as of today, we have pizza-certified 15,000 of our team members to ensure our guests always get the best pizza from us. Now, we are winning in prepared foods, where the pizza QSR industry is struggling. We've accelerated growth over the past year, growing our prepared food business 16% over the three-year period. That growth has shown up across our markets as well. 60% of our stores reside in DMAs where we own number one pizza market share position. Even better, 40% of our stores grew pizza units north of 10% this past fiscal year. Now let's dig into the rest of the menu. Our hot sandwich business has been on fire.
We have put a tremendous amount of energy into our breakfast and lunch sandwich quality improvements and innovation over the past three years. Incredible numbers. We have grown sandwich sales by 26% annually. Our bakery business also has shown aggressive growth, growing 8% per year since our last Investor Day. Once again, product innovation and building a more premium offer has delivered with a new delicious cookie program that features amazing collaborations with big brands like Reese's, Snickers, and Hershey's. Another area that we've placed a ton of effort has been in our dispensed beverage platform. In just a few short years, we have launched our new coffee brand, Darn Good Coffee, and more recently, we now have our own frozen carbonated beverage brand, FROSTBITE by Casey's.
We leverage our dispensed beverage businesses to drive traffic to our stores, and this summer, you can get any fountain or FROSTBITE for $0.89. And when you're in Casey's country, our FROSTBITE beverages are always free on FROSTBITE Fridays. As you've heard, we have been very busy driving quality improvements across our existing assortment and developing new and exciting products and program. The real key to our success is how we sustain growth quarter-over-quarter, year-over-year. Let's take a look at a short video that will give you some insight into how we get things done, from aligning on an opportunity all the way to commercializing and scaling across our stores. Let's take a look. In the communities in which we operate, our guests count on Casey's to be there for them every day. 40 years ago, Casey's became the pizza place.
We were really looking for another occasion to build off the success of pizza.
Chicken is the fastest growing QSR segment. It's a $50 billion market. That is a large place for us to play.
Wings became the next opportunity because guests are looking for chicken. We want to go where the guests want to go.
If we can deliver a delicious wing that a guest craves, that travels well, and we can consistently execute it in a store, we can win.
They're tasty. They're good. The innovation process is just a simple and repeatable process. It really focuses on four main stages, opportunity, design and build, test and learn, and scale. We take every product through this process, whether it's an LTO or a large-scale platform like wings.
There's an entire team of R&D food scientists and chefs behind every product that launches at Casey's. My team got to work in the kitchen. With wings, we had multiple iterations. We looked at over 30 different types of sauces and 10+ types of wings. Casey's can't do it alone. We have tremendous external supplier partners that help us anywhere from ingredients to packaging.
As we started to build out wings, guests told us they wanted something with it.
It was clear from our guest feedback that they wanted fries and homemade ranch as a side.
Great ranch is key to wings and fries. We knew it was a non-negotiable that we had to make buttermilk ranch in our kitchens every day.
At Casey's, we have a very high expectation of ourselves. We don't scale anything until we've proven it works with real stores, real kitchens, real team members for real guests.
When we nailed the final iteration on wings, that first bite was delicious, and we were really excited to get it in front of our guests.
When we scale platforms at Casey's, we have to ensure that it works not just for one store, but for thousands across our chain. The most exciting feedback from team members is to hear them appreciate how easy the builds are.
Guests have had really positive feedback.
They love the variety of flavors that we offer, it's just been really great. The success of the wings platform showed us that we really have a solid foundation for future platforms.
Wings just won us an occasion. Now we're working on what's next. All right, a little peek under the tent, covering some of the why and the how we went after the wing opportunity. Our approach with wings was to create a wing program that rivaled best-in-class wing purveyors. We don't want to just participate. We want to win with wings. I know there have been a lot of questions about our plan to expand sauced wings and how are we going to do it, here you go. As of now, we have scaled the program across our Ankeny DC, about 850 stores. This fiscal year, we will roll the program to markets served by our Terre Haute DC, as well as our CEFCO-acquired sites. The following year, we will scale to the rest of the system.
Essentially from here on out, we'd be fully scaled in the next 24 months. A few other nuggets on wings so far at Casey's. Half our stores do not have a formalized large-scale pizza or wing competitor within five miles. Secondly, for our wing-only basket guests, order frequency has grown by 30% since the initial trial. Lastly, and we don't mind selling wings with pizza, thus far, guests who added wings to a pizza have a basket that is 50% bigger than whole pies alone, and we will take that all day. Now let's talk a little bit about private brands. We have had a lot of success with our private brands. We've closed in on about 10% of our grocery unit mix is private brands with about 350 SKUs. Private brands now for us is represented in half the grocery categories.
When we look at Casey's proprietary products, that's combining prepared food and dispense bev with private brands, roughly 30% of our inside revenue comes from private brands, and 40% of our inside gross profit comes from Casey's proprietary items. We really see a bright future ahead for these items that truly differentiate Casey's. We're now leveraging all of our culinary resources and business process to optimize the Casey's private brand program. What you saw in the wing video will be applied to private brand program development from here on out, and there's three areas of focus. We're going to start with the products themselves to ensure they stand tall from a quality and taste perspective. We will be looking at the value proposition to drive more volume to our products in a time where guests are looking for more value.
Finally, we're working to ensure we have the right brand design framework to enable us to drive and build sustainable growth with our private brand platform. In summary, we are taking share versus QSRs. A strength of our business can clearly be seen in our differentiated traffic trends that start with delivering great food at a tremendous value. Away from home CPI would suggest we've taken far less retail than the QSR industry. Passing more value to our Casey's guest has helped us grow prepared food and dispensed beverage 16% on a same-store basis over the past three years. While the QSR marketplace has seen continued pressure, we plan to continue to focus on delivering more value for our guests. Driving prepared foods is something that clearly QSRs and most convenience stores see as an important strategic initiative, but doing food well is hard.
We have structural strategic advantages when it comes to winning with food. Starting with, Darren talked about it, we've been doing this for 40 years. That's a lot of reps. Making great food is not foreign to us. Our stage gate product development process and culinary expertise is not different than what you'd see in a sophisticated restaurant chain. I can tell you our pantry is full. We have 60 items in the pantry that we will launch over the next 24 months. Essentially with food, two years of our next three-year strategic plan is in the hopper already. Another advantage, controlling the supply chain. It's Casey's resources, it's our warehouses, our trucks, our drivers, making sure the stores get what they need.
Maybe most importantly, it's just a restaurant mindset that shows up in our kitchens each and every day where our guests can enjoy handmade pizza throughout the footprint. When you put all this together in a mixing bowl, you get a formula that is very difficult to copy, and that's why we would expect the gap between Casey's and whomever is across the street to widen. Thank you very much for your time today. Let's take a quick break. We'll come back with Ena Williams chatting about another key pillar of our strategic plan, growing units.
[Break]
Hey, everybody. We're going to get started here in about three minutes. If we could get you guys to take your seat, Ena will be out to kick off the back half of our presentation very shortly.
[Break]
Folks, welcome back. It got quiet really fast. My name is Ena Williams, and I'm the COO at Casey's. Growing the number of units is a key pillar in our strategy. As Steve mentioned earlier, we are planning to build or buy at least 400 stores over the next three years. I'm excited to share with you our plan to get there. For our time together today, I'll start with our long track record of ratable growth and our effective dual-engine approach to adding stores. I'll discuss specifically how we use our ability to both build and buy to deliver consistent unit growth with strong returns. I will talk about our ample white space opportunity and the tools we put in place to increase our options to grow.
Through our two-pronged approach of combining acquisitions and new store development, we are able to deliver consistent, disciplined, and ratable growth. During our most recent three-year plan, we built or acquired more than 500 stores, including the largest acquisition in our history. We complemented acquisition activity with new store construction, while at the same time building a robust land bank to ensure long-term flexibility. As I previously stated, looking ahead to our next three-year plan, we expect to add at least 400 units through a balanced mix of acquisitions and organic growth, each of which delivers a unique value proposition. M&A provides an attractive ratable path to value creation through multiple arbitrage and a lower total investment. On average, an acquired store costs about a million dollars less than a new build. We are also able to maintain the same return requirements as building a new store.
The highly fragmented convenience store industry, made up mostly of independent operators, creates attractive opportunities for Casey's. Acquisitions generate meaningful value through synergy capture with even higher realization on single store and small deal transactions. These synergies are driven by Casey's prepared and proprietary food offering, our self-distribution model, and our ability to leverage scale. Here's an example of a single store acquisition we made back in August of 2023. Walnut is a town of around 1,500 people in rural Illinois, and we were able to acquire the store and remodel it to a Casey's for less than it would have cost to build a new store. It is worth mentioning that the seller built this store because he wanted a quality C-store in his town, and he was now ready to retire and focus on his family's farm.
While it doesn't always work this way, it's nice when Casey's can be the retirement plan for a member of the community we are entering. After we completed our remodel, the store saw fuel gallons grow about 10%, and inside sales jumped 75% as we added Casey's prepared food and center store offerings. This sales lift, coupled with rolling the store into the Casey's distribution network and the operations cadence, enabled mid-teens returns by year three. This type of M&A transaction is ingrained in Casey's DNA, and we are highly confident in executing ratable growth over the next three years, both by executing on transactions like Walnut, Illinois, and by building new stores. New builds enable targeted infill and precise trade area penetration. We have a data-driven approach to new store growth, where we leverage our AI tools and other proprietary data to optimize our store growth plan.
We do this by first determining the best location using our network planning capabilities. From there, we identify the specific site within that geography that has the best performance metrics. And then we determine the right store type to optimize our capital investment to generate the best returns. The results have shown that recent builds continue to outperform our chain average, delivering double-digit, year one, pre-tax return on invested capital. This is a reflection of the enhanced data-driven site selection and disciplined capital deployment. Together, this balanced approach allows us to consistently execute our growth strategy. Our existing store base is well-positioned within the optimal driving radius of our three distribution centers. However, even within this footprint, there is substantial white space, creating a meaningful opportunity to infill new markets while staying within that distribution radius.
In fact, approximately 75% of towns with a population of 20,000 people or less do not have a Casey's. I'm not saying you should expect to see a Casey's in every small town, but this is just an illustration of the possibilities that exist in our footprint. In addition, with the CEFCO acquisition, we've gained valuable experience working with a third-party distributor. Those stores had an existing contract, and a number of them were outside of our distribution network. To be clear, though, we are not changing our self-distribution strategy. However, if there is a highly strategic acquisition outside of our distribution area, we feel confident in our ability to leverage our new third-party relationships to service those stores until we have critical mass to expand our distribution network. This gives us even more flexibility when looking for larger deals.
As proven with CEFCO, when we make an acquisition, we are not just changing out the signage. We build the stores the Casey's way. I am so proud of the team for how they have executed the plan to bring Casey's to life. See for yourself.
Casey's growth strategy is really a balance of organic growth along with acquisitions. We're looking for those big opportunities where we can go out and buy a really high-quality asset chain of stores to bring our Casey's model to life.
CEFCO is a perfect example of our two-pronged strategy at work. Whether that's through a ground up or through an acquisition, we get to serve new guests. From getting more stores in Florida and Alabama and Texas, it opens up a world of opportunity.
Converting a CEFCO to Casey's can be anywhere from a couple days to upwards of a couple weeks.
Remodels to us are not just rebranding the store. It is Casey's merchandising. It is Casey's kitchen with our equipment.
Our Casey's food program is the single biggest differentiator between us and everyone else in the convenience store industry. This isn't just a CEFCO with a new sign. This is a Casey's.
Is this your first time at a Casey's?
My first time, yeah. First time ever, actually.
You said you're coming in for pizza.
Yeah.
You've never had it before.
No, I've never had the Casey's pizza before.
Do you want to give it a try?
Yeah, for sure. I did not expect it to taste this good. This is better than New York pizza you find downtown. Wow. It's really good. Actually has a lot of flavor, too. I love all of the pizza here. I was completely expecting just a normal gas station pizza, and I got blown away by the taste.
How are the people who are working here? What's your experience?
Oh, they're amazing. They're friendly, they're warm, welcoming.
Pizza's good, food's good. Hospitality was great.
We're not just growing store count. We are bringing the full Casey's experience to new communities.
CEFCO was a really great acquisition for us. We have proven we can buy a large set of stores all at the same time and have a path forward to turning them into a Casey's.
We've really honed in on a scalable, repeatable integration model. This represents a long, long runway for Casey's future growth. We're just getting started.
All right. Now when we add new units into the Casey's store base, whether built or bought, we need to operate them efficiently. Next, I will discuss some of our successes from the last three years with continuous improvement, talk about expanding this approach from our store team members to the entire enterprise, and how we will streamline our kitchen operations in the process. Over the past three years, we deliberately focused our continuous improvement efforts where we could drive the greatest impact, our stores. Roughly half of our total operating expenses are at the store level. The approach was straightforward, but disciplined. The goal was to simplify operations, remove unnecessary complexity, and enable our store teams to operate more efficiently. The financial goal was to grow operating expenses slower than EBITDA.
During this time period, we implemented roughly 50 process improvements to reduce or eliminate non-value added complexity within the store. Here are a few examples. We introduced a smart safe process, saving the store manager upwards of two hours a day closing the books. We added label makers in the kitchens to produce labels on demand, eliminating the need for rolls and rolls of item-specific labels, taking up space in our stores and our warehouses. We outsourced laundry, giving team members that time back to focus on execution and serving the guest. The results were clear as we reduced our same-store labor hours by approximately 5% over the three-year period and grew EBITDA almost 600 basis points more than operating expenses on a three-year CAGR basis. We did this the right way. How do we know this?
Team member engagement scores and guest OSAT reached all-time highs, and turnover has improved by 70 percentage points. Building on that success within our stores, we are now expanding continuous improvement across the entire enterprise. The strategy is consistent, but the scope is broader, and we are applying the same disciplined approach of clearly defining business problems, prioritizing the highest value opportunities, and then scaling those solutions. We've organized this work into 5 core work streams. First, continuing our focus on store simplification, which remains foundational from the prior strategy. Some of these projects include prepared food packaging optimization, such as bagged cheese sauce instead of cans; digitized cigarette audits, reducing the time it takes to count inventory; bulk windshield washer fluid for automatic refills at the pump island instead of team members refilling manually; transforming our kitchen with improvements like installing dedicated hot water lines.
I'll speak more about that project later. These all sound simple but add tremendous value. The second work stream focuses on optimizing non-store labor and expenses. The third one is around streamlining merchandising and supply chain operations. The fourth on automating administrative and transactional work, and the fifth work stream involves taking a hard look on how work gets done across the organization. The goal is simple: embed continuous improvement as a core enterprise capability. I mentioned a few of the improvements we made in our stores, and many of those were in the kitchen. Working in the Casey's kitchen is hard, and we owe it to our team members to continue looking for ways to make their jobs easier and more efficient. We have identified a few areas to make that happen. The first is around having the right equipment available to remove complexity.
I'll give you an example using our crown jewel, our pizza, and our made-from-scratch dough. This is one of the important factors that sets us apart from our competition and adds to the quality our guests love and expect. What you may not know is that dough making involves science with precise measurements, and the hot water needs to be within a specific temperature range. Before, now picture this, our team members had to run the water until it got hot, then use thermometers to measure until the right temperature was achieved. If it was too cold, then more hot water had to be added. If it was too hot, then they had to add cold water. Back and forth, back and forth. You get the picture.
To make it easier, we installed a dedicated spigot and tank system to dispense water at the right temperature every single time. This simple change not only saves water usage and time, but also ensures consistency with the crust. In addition to removing tasks from the kitchen, we identified an opportunity to optimize the way the kitchen and equipment are laid out. We worked with a process engineer to help us change the kitchen configuration. By placing equipment and ingredients closer to the make area, it reduces the time team members are walking and crossing over each other. This new layout will help our team members handle increased unit volume. All new store builds will be specced with this new equipment and layout, and we will be determining how to scale these improvements across our existing store base.
Another way we can support the kitchens is by leveraging technology and our AI tools. Using technology to improve our ingredient ordering process for both accuracy and inventory management is a priority for our strategic plan. In addition to improving our ordering processes, we will continue to leverage technology to improve production planning for our grab-and-go items, as well as optimize our made-to-order systems to have items like our pizza ready when the guest expects them. We know our kitchens and our restaurant-quality prepared food are a couple of our biggest differentiators, and we are always working to make sure our team members and guests get the best food and experience they can. The simplification and optimization efforts I just spoke of will help us meet these goals. I've spent some time discussing how we're going to operate the business more efficiently.
I want to talk about how we are laying a foundation that will be scalable as we grow the store base past 3,000. In this next segment, I will cover the importance of achieving a scalable foundation and how we will leverage our technology and AI tools to support this growth. Nathaniel will take you through the ways our fuel business also helps facilitate our growth. Our prior three-year strategy was primarily about building a foundation, centralizing capabilities, modernizing systems, and creating the infrastructure needed to support growth. As we look forward, the focus shifts to leveraging that foundation. Because of the investments we've made across our store support center, our fuel operations, field leadership, and supply chain, we are now positioned to scale the business more efficiently. We also have a strong, experienced leadership team to execute using these tools.
In practical terms, that means growing our store footprint with proportionally lower incremental investment. We've built a platform that is centralized, scalable, and future-ready, allowing us to increase capacity, improve planning, and drive productivity across the organization. As we scale the strategy, AI will be an important tool, but it will be used in a targeted and specific way. We are looking for clearly defined opportunities where AI can help Casey's operate better. In some cases, AI enables us to move faster, whether that's improving throughput or modernizing systems. In others, it helps us solve problems more effectively by identifying root causes or removing friction. The key point is discipline. AI is a tool that supports continuous improvement. It's not a substitute for it. We have already identified successful use cases. Earlier, Tom discussed our hyper-personalized guest experience.
I talked about how we're using AI in our real estate selection process, and later Nathaniel will discuss how we are optimizing fuel. Now, I want to highlight two other examples in which we have found success using AI. This first case study shows how we identified an opportunity to improve our demand forecasting and planning. We implemented RELEX Solutions as our inventory management and demand forecasting solution to stand up a fully integrated process as opposed to the fragmented manual model we had before. We had several goals when we started this journey, from improving store in-stock levels to simplifying the store ordering process, with the goal of reducing working capital in our distribution centers and increasing capacity. The results have been significant.
A 550 basis point improvement in merchandise availability, a 94% reduction in manual order adjustments, a 33% reduction in warehouse inventory dollars, an increase of DC capacity by about 300 stores, and a 4% decrease in average order size. To date, we focused on general merchandise and grocery that is delivered to our stores through our distribution centers. Our next steps are to extend these capabilities further to include prepared foods, kitchen ingredient forecasting, direct store delivery vendors, and third-party distribution partners. This is a great example of how scalable systems, combined with continuous improvement, create both immediate results and long-term value. This next example highlights how our field leadership team found value using AI-enabled tools as well. Now I will take you through a day in the life of a Casey's district manager who has, on average, 12 stores in his or her territory.
Previously, our district managers took almost a full day to pull reports and gather data from various sources in order to identify opportunities to address. This work informed the district manager where to spend their time and how to map out the week ahead. Through our Store Insights capability, we can now automatically generate weekly summaries of key performance metrics across all their locations. Not only does this new tool eliminate the need for field leaders to manually pull data from multiple reports, it gives them time back to spend in stores, coaching and developing store managers, and creating action plans alongside store leadership to close gaps. This is a game changer for our field team. Another clear example of how AI, when applied thoughtfully, can enhance productivity, improve decision-making, and reinforce operational discipline. I'll now welcome Nathaniel to the stage to discuss our expansive fuel capabilities. Nathaniel? Thanks.
Thanks, Ena. My name's Nathaniel Doddridge. I'm the senior vice president of fuels at Casey's. As you've heard today, our scalable foundation gives us ability to grow while driving efficiency and leverage across our business model. Fuel is a very important part of that foundation, not only as a meaningful business on its own, but as an enterprise capability at Casey's that strengthens our cost position, our resilience, and our long-term growth. Over the last few years, we've invested heavily in the fuel business, and the recent results highlight our ability to win. Our recent quarter is an example of what winning looks like, as we grew fuel profit by over 29% to $397 million in the quarter. Now let me walk you through how we'll continue to leverage our robust fuel capability as we maintain our winning track record.
Our fuel strategy starts with an integrated supply chain built for cost advantage, flexibility, and resilience. Our contracts with refiners, which cover 75% of our total demand, have strong overlap with our retail footprint and provide access to over 300 fuel terminals that allow us to optimize our procurement cost and maintain the utmost flexibility. We pair that with our newest capability, our upstream self-supply and risk management capability, which helps us navigate volatility, create additional incremental value, and add security of supply. As you would expect, this multi-pronged approach to supply has been really handy during the recent Iranian conflict. We execute our supply plan through our physical network, including our proprietary transportation fleet, which spread out across 40 different markets, includes over 450 fuel drivers, and delivers over 60% of the fuel that we sell at our stores.
We also have our growing terminal access, which includes our company-owned, company-operated fuel terminal in Waco, Texas, which gives us direct control over our delivery economics, keeping our buying benchmark below OPIS. This outcome of leveraging these capabilities is really simple. Lower cost per gallon delivered to our retail locations as well as our other business lines, greater control in these very volatile markets that we're experiencing in a system that becomes even more valuable as we continue to grow our gallons. It's really the combination of all of these capabilities that I describe, not just one of the individual capabilities on their own, that really differentiates us from most of the convenience store industry. Our fuel capabilities don't operate in isolation. They really work together to create this compounding growth engine.
As mentioned prior, in the procurement and transportation side, we drive structurally advantaged cost and supply security. At retail, our sophisticated pricing capability allows us to optimize our market positioning while also maintaining a consistent, competitive, and fair price for our guests. As we grow, we're also extending these benefits and their capabilities into our business-to-business relationships, which includes our fleet business, our dealer business, as well as our wholesale business. All of these benefits continue to compound as we're also improving our asset utilization all along the way. Due to our investments in our people, our processes, and our technology, fuel has now become a very reliable and ratable M&A synergy for us, helping us to continue to create value for the enterprise as we scale. All of this, coupled with our in-store offer, which we've talked about heavily today, has allowed us to take market share.
As Darren showed earlier, total gallons in the U.S. have been roughly flat. In the Midwest, we've seen mid-single-digit declines. However, when you look at our gallons over the last three fiscal years, we've grown gallons by over 30%, finishing FY 2026 at just over 3.5 billion gallons sold. This is a combination, of course, of our growing store base, but we think even more importantly is more gallons from our existing stores, which highlights and informs our ability to take market share. With our gallon growth, our cost advantages continue to grow. Our returns grow with those as well. With a strong foundation of capabilities in place, our primary focus over the next three years is the same as what we've said throughout the day. Run the same play, scale what's already working. Because the math for me, as a fuel guy, is pretty easy.
Every penny that we add to our fuel results generates over $35 million in annual fuel gross profit. Over the next three years, our focus, like I said, is extending this advantage in a disciplined and repeatable way. We're focused on four key areas. The first, optimizing our portfolio, continuing to refine our supply economics by utilizing our internal data science team. Also leveraging our modernized technology stack that's underpinned by AI. We're going to continue our relentless pursuit of pricing excellence while also making sure that the products we sell at our stores to our guests are continuing to evolve, like more premium and more higher ethanol blends. Scaling our physical supply chain will be the second item, leaning in on our newest self-supply capabilities. Self-supply has grown substantially over the last two years, and it now makes up approximately 15% of our total supply mix.
We know there's additional opportunities to continue to refine our supply mix. Scaling our supply chain will also be anchored by growing our transportation fleet. Both of these items, growing our fleet, leaning in more on self-supply, lowers our total cost of goods for our retail sites as well as our other businesses. We're also going to focus on expanding our integration benefits, continuing to refine our M&A playbook to accelerate synergy capture. We feel great about our progress in this space, especially post-CEFCO integration. If you recall, fuel was one of the very first synergy opportunities we committed to. We know there's still opportunities out there for us to reduce unnecessary cost and really realize some of these M&A synergies. Finally, growing gallons with discipline, not just growing gallons to grow, particularly as we think about our fleet business. That's a huge opportunity for us.
Even more specifically, at our 300+ locations that have commercial fueling lanes where diesel is actually the majority of the fuel that's sold at those stores. This is about scaling a model we believe works with clear line of sight on stronger economics and additional long-term value creation. As I wrap up, our fuel capabilities have become an important part of our scalable foundation. Although fuel has always been a key component at Casey's, I'm not sure we've always said that it's a key growth enabler, but that's what we're saying today. The fuel foundation is now in place, we have a strategy that's working, we're winning. Our robust capabilities enable favorable pricing and procurement, further enabling our growth. That growth then amplifies our advantages through scale and utilization. Growing store count and in turn growing gallons puts more volume back in our flywheel.
Overall, fuel is a durable engine for value creation for the enterprise, it's a very important part of our uniquely positioned, I think everyone would agree, our now well-balanced three-legged stool business model. I'll now turn the presentation over to Chad to talk about our team member value proposition.
Thanks, Nathaniel. Good morning. My name is Chad Frazell, Chief Human Resources Officer. Today I want to walk you through how our people strategy is supporting Casey's growth, and more importantly, why our talent and leadership strength is a reason to be confident in our long-term outlook. At Casey's, we anchor everything in our team member value proposition or TMVP. It's designed to deliver our cares culture, build a strong leadership pipeline, support engagement and well-being, and ultimately power sustainable growth for the business. Over the past three years, we've made meaningful progress. As we look ahead to our next three-year strategic horizon, we're doing so from a position of strength. Let's start with where we've been. Across the organization, our TMVP has driven tangible, measurable results.
We've lowered overall turnover, maintained engagement levels above 80%, achieved our lowest store turnover rates since pre-pandemic levels, and delivered all-time high guest OSAT scores, all while improving operational efficiency in our stores. That combination matters. It tells us we're running more efficiently while improving both the team member and guest experience. The foundation behind these results is disciplined talent management. We've invested in store and district manager compensation to improve market competitiveness while strengthening performance management, succession planning, and internal development with a particular focus on the field where the majority of our workforce and future leaders come from. This has allowed us to create a strong internal pipeline and reduce reliance on external hiring for critical leadership roles. As we look forward, our strategic focus narrows to one critical pillar, career growth.
We believe the ability to clearly see, assess, and progress along a career path is one of the strongest drivers of performance, retention, and leadership development. Over the next three years, our career growth strategy will focus on two areas that matter most to our long-term success, store leadership and the extended leadership team. There is no better example of this than our Division Vice President, Annie Alabaugh. She started her career in 2000 working part-time in a kitchen. Over 26 years later, having worked in nearly every store and multi-unit leader position, she's leading one quarter of our chain. In stores, clarity and consistency are key. First, we've brought role clarity to the front line. We've clearly defined what success looks like at each leadership level and created a deliberate path to store manager, one that moves through the kitchen.
That path ensures store leaders develop the operational, people, and financial skills required to lead high-performing stores. Second, centralized hiring continues to be a differentiator. Our plan is to continue to extend centralized hiring to the majority of our stores over the next three years. It's helping us lower both team member and store manager turnover, improve quality of hire, and allow store leaders to focus on running great operations rather than constantly staffing vacancies. Third, we're increasing leadership readiness through a new district manager and training program, ensuring district leaders are fully equipped to coach, develop, and sustain performance across their markets. Together, these efforts strengthen the talent bench responsible for leading the majority of our workforce and directly support consistency, execution, and growth at the store level.
Beyond the stores, our extended leadership team is a significant strategic strength and an important reason to be bullish on Casey's future. First, we make intentional leadership moves. These aren't about simply filling roles, they're about increasing enterprise capability. Rotations, expanded scopes, and targeted assignments help us to develop leaders who can operate across functions and scale with the business. Second, we leverage trusted external partners to accelerate development. These partners complement internal capabilities and allow us to expose leaders to best-in-class thinking faster. Third, and critically, we benefit from strong leadership tenure. Deep institutional knowledge drives better decision-making, stronger collaboration, and stability during periods of growth and change. Over time, this compounds into stronger successors and smoother transitions. The result is exceptional leadership depth, high engagement, strong intent to stay metrics, and an organization that's ready for what's next. The extended leadership team is fully aligned and all in.
What ties all of this together is what we call building the talent machine. Our model integrates three gears, culture grounded in Casey's cares and engagement, compensation and well-being, ensuring we remain competitive and supportive, talent management with career growth at the center. When these elements work together, we create a self-reinforcing system, one that attracts, develops, and retains the people who will drive performance for years to come. To close, we're starting this next three-year strategic plan from a position of strength. I've spent the entirety of my 35-year career in retail, 10 years in store operations and 25 in human resources. I can confidently say I've never worked with a team that is more capable, experienced, and engaged. Our leadership pipeline is deeper, our processes are more disciplined, and our commitment to developing leaders, especially in the field, directly supports execution, stability, and growth. Thank you.
I'll now pass it back to Darren to close out.
All right. Thank you, Chad. Well, we hope you in the audience and those on the webcast have a greater appreciation for who Casey's is and why we remain a compelling investment opportunity. We operate as a category 1 in the public marketplace as the only convenience QSR. We're positioned at the intersection of convenience and QSR. Our three-legged stool operating model with prepared food and dispensed beverage, grocery and general merchandise, and fuel creates an unmatched flywheel for growth. We have clear competitive advantages, including our unique rural footprint, a restaurant quality food program, which is vertically integrated at 100% company-owned and operated stores with consolidated scale. We have a loyal and growing guest base that prioritizes great products and a great value, and Casey's Rewards now has nearly 11 million members, creating a sticky guest base that drives traffic.
We have substantial white space to continue our proven track record of disciplined unit growth in either existing or new markets through both M&A and new stores. All of this has resulted in durable ratable growth and long-term value to shareholders. We have an outstanding tenured leadership team with relevant experience and a proven track record of delivering results. To sum it all up, we have a growth algorithm that has proven to be successful over the long term, has grown even stronger in recent years, and has tremendous white space for continued growth for the foreseeable future. Before I wrap things up, I just wanted to leave you with this. Today actually marks my seventh year anniversary with Casey's as the CEO, and when I reflect back on that seven years, I couldn't be more proud of what this team has accomplished.
This is the beginning of my third three-year planning cycle, and I can confidently say with 100% conviction that we have never been holding a better hand and never been better positioned for the next three years than we are sitting right here today. With that, I want to thank you for attending today, listening to our plan, and now for the star of the show, we're excited to share our lunch pizza. You got to have the breakfast pizza earlier today. For those on the webcast, we'll be back at 12:30 Eastern for our Q&A session. Thank you.