For people in and around their home base of Philadelphia, convenience store chain Wawa is more than just a place to grab a hot coffee and stock up on toilet paper. Thanks to their hoagies, it’s a popular dining destination. Now, executives are hoping your latest Wawa food obsession will be their pizza.
According to The Cherry Hill Courier-Post, the chain is rolling out pies to virtually all of their 1000-plus locations this summer. Customers can use their app or a touch screen to order a 14-inch or 16-inch pizza ($12.99 and up) with their choice of toppings beginning at 4 p.m. and running through their late-night closing time at 3 a.m. As the pizzas are made fresh, consumers face a somewhat inconvenient wait time of 20 minutes or so.
In a statement [PDF] announcing the menu addition, Wawa said that “years” were spent perfecting their pizza recipe, which includes freshly-made dough and “proprietary” sauce. Their pizza plans were first leaked in 2022, when some test stores got pies.
This isn’t the first time Wawa has gotten into the pizza scene. The chain offered pies courtesy of Pizza Hut in the 1990s and later introduced a deep dish pizza in 2014. It can be notoriously difficult for anyone other than a pizza chain to succeed in pies (see McDonald’s McPizza for proof), but it’s possible Wawa’s legendary brand loyalty among customers could prevail.
That might depend on one's expectations for gas station pizza. In a review for The Morning Call, writer Jennifer Sheehan noted that while “Wawa’s pizza was better than most frozen pizzas you’d get from your local supermarket and had an edge over chain pizza restaurants such as Domino’s,” it would not likely be posing any threat to your favorite independent pizzeria offerings.
This article was originally published on www.mentalfloss.com as Attention, Shoppers: Wawa Is Now Serving Pizza.
