Cumberland Farms S-1 Breakdown: Fuel, Snacks, and Debt

**CJ Gustafson** (0:00)
Cumberland Farms has just filed for an IPO, and this is the S1 breakdown you probably didn't think you needed. You're gonna stay for the fuel and snack unit economics, plus a heavy dose of private equity platform billed and by Execution at Scale. Grab your Slurpee, and let's get into it.
Is this thing on?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:21)
Yesterday's price is not today's price.

**CJ Gustafson** (0:32)
Cumberland Farms is permanently woven into the fabric of my adolescence. On school half days, we'd walk, quote, uptown, which sounds exciting, but it really wasn't. There was no Duncan in my town, there was no Starbucks, there was a Cumberland Farms, and there was the parking lot in front of the Cumberland Farms. And we would loiter in that parking lot for three hours drinking slushies and eating candy and being annoying 14 year olds with nowhere to be. It was my definition of freedom. There was a guy working the front register back then who looked exactly like Skinny Pete from Breaking Bad. And when I stopped in for a granola bar this year while visiting my parents' home 20 years later, he was still standing behind the same counter ringing people up. He appears to have achieved full tenure. I hope Skinny Pete makes out like a bandit on this IPO because he's really put in the work.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:18)
It's all there, man. Every dollar.

**CJ Gustafson** (1:19)
This was also peak South Beach diet back then. I think this was probably like in the 2005, 2006 time frame. So naturally I invented a personal variant where I eat less at lunch and drink an extra large slurpee from Cumberland Farms every single day on the theory that liquids simply do not count towards caloric intake. There were roughly 3000 calories and like a bajillion grams of sugar in those things, which it didn't really matter because I was chugging them in between football two days in the August heat. If you're not from Massachusetts like I am, and you don't have the attachment, like Pennsylvania has Wawa, Florida has Racetrack, Cumbies is our version, except it's not as nice and it's staffed by someone who is visibly furious to be working there on a cold December and having to clean up after people who trek salt on their boots in to get coffee. And if you've seen the Casey Affleck Dunkin Donuts commercials, you could drop him into a Cumbies and not change a single frame of that commercial. Which is why the most disorienting thing in this entire filing is that Cumberland Farms is an absolute powerhouse in Europe. More than half of its stores are over there. Scrolling the European portfolio gave me a flashback to eating Chicken Francaise at a gas station in Royal Tuscany in 2009, which was, and I need you to trust me here folks, excellent gas station Chicken Francaise. Pit stops in Europe are full blown malls. It's way different than the Cumberland Farms that I grew up with.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:42)
From the outside, it looks like any other London convenience store, but once inside, you discover it's anything but.

**CJ Gustafson** (2:49)
It's very juxtaposition to the rubbery taquitos of my youth that were rotating on this greasy pinwheel for several weeks at a time. All right, a few key stats here before we drown in debt. So revenue, $16.3 billion, down 4%.
So it was down from $17 billion in 24 and $18 billion in 23 So they have three straight years of revenue decline. Q1 of 26 was up 7%, but that's fuel price, not more customers, because gallons actually fell by 2%.
So I want you to ignore this line and pass go straight to gross profit, because this is the closest thing to a revenue number that matters, and it has not grown in three years. Their gross profit was 2.675 billion, down 3% year on year, not great. Adjusted EBITDA was 693 million, down 5% year on year. It was down from 24 and slightly down from 23 But Q1 of 26 was 137 million in adjusted EBITDA versus 102 million in the quarter of the previous year, up 34%. First green shoot in this filing. Net loss from continuing operations in 25 They lost 145 million and 270 million in 24 So they've lost money in both of these years. They had this weird 1.9 billion of net income in 23, but that was a sale lease back gain. So they were actually selling the real estate that they bought up to try to pay down some of their debt, which we'll get into later. Fuel volume down 2.7% year on year.
Yeah, down three years in a row. Fuel margin was 43.8 cents per gallon. Same store sales in FY25. Well, the US specifically, fuel gallons down 1.2% and inside sales down 1.7%.