Dive Brief:

• Murphy USA expects to open 40 new-to-industry convenience stores by the end of 2025, Chief Financial Officer Galagher Jeff said during the company’s second-quarter earnings call on Thursday.
• If Murphy reaches this number, it will have opened eight more NTIs this year than it did in 2024, Jeff added. When including the start of 2026, Murphy anticipates opening 50 new stores within the next 12 months, President and CEO Andrew Clyde said during the call.
• These sites are part of Murphy’s years-long plan to open 500 newly built c-stores by 2033, a goal which the company launched in 2023. So far, Murphy’s new stores featuring the company’s modernized design are heavily outperforming its traditional locations.

Dive Insight:

Murphy opened 14 new stores in the first half of the year and, as of Thursday, has 40 additional NTIs under construction, Jeff said. It will begin building another 10 in the next several weeks, Jeff said. The executive added that Murphy should reach 40 NTIs by the end of 2025 as long as it doesn’t experience any “supply chain shocks or jurisdictional delays.”

During Q1, Murphy’s new locations — which are double the size of its traditional 1,400-square-foot sites — outperformed Murphy’s older stores, with nearly 40% better merchandise margins and 20% more fuel gallons sold.

Jeff credited Murphy’s store development team, which is “aggressively looking for great sites.” The company’s pipeline of new stores stands at over 250, and Murphy expects to open 15 to 20 more in the first quarter of 2026, he added.

“We continue to see really good results from the stores that are open, and now we're building the pipeline to open more,” he said.

But Murphy has had some hiccups in its NTI development over the past year, including scheduling setbacks that hurt fuel and merchandise sales because stores were operating for less time than expected.

In 2023, Murphy set a five-year plan to generate $1.3 billion in EBITDA by 2028, and Clyde said on Thursday’s call that the retailer is about $20 million behind expectations due to store construction delays. However, the newly built stores are “performing well above pro forma” and can help make up for lost ground.

“The trajectory of the business will look far different in 2028 versus what we see today as we ramp up our NTI program,” Clyde said.