Earnheart Oil splits its fuel and convenience assets between Fleet Fuels and Perfect Food & Gas

Earnheart Oil has broken itself in two, handing its fuel business to Fleet Fuels and its convenience assets to Perfect Food & Gas, according to Mobility Plaza. Terms were not disclosed. One buyer took the fuel business and the other took the stores.

For anyone running a jobber book with a handful of stores attached, this is the trade that keeps coming up. In most of these books, fuel distribution and c-store retail ended up under one roof because whoever bought the tanks also ended up owning the buildings, not because the two businesses run alike. One is a logistics and credit operation, where you win on freight and supply contracts and on how fast you turn a receivable. The other is a food and labor operation, where you win on inside margin and on whether your foodservice program brings anyone back on a Tuesday.

Why sellers keep doing this

Splitting the two lets each half get bid by buyers who actually want it. A fuel-focused acquirer like Fleet Fuels will pay for gallons and for supply position. A retail-focused acquirer will pay for store-level EBITDA and the foodservice upside. Sell the whole thing as one lot and you tend to get bid by whoever values the weaker half, which usually means you leave money on the table.

The flip side matters too. Once fuel and retail have separate owners, the supply arrangement between them becomes a contract instead of a hallway conversation. That can go fine. It can also mean the store side eventually shops its gallons and the fuel side loses volume it used to count on. The thing to watch here is whether those stores keep buying from Fleet Fuels or start taking gallons from someone else.

What to watch

Whether more mixed jobber-retailer families follow Earnheart's route and sell in halves rather than whole. If buyers keep paying more for the pieces than the package, brokers could start structuring deals that way by default, and the single-owner fuel-plus-store model may get rarer.

Also worth watching: what Perfect Food & Gas does with the foodservice program at those stores. Foodservice is usually where the return on a c-store acquisition has to come from, and it tends to show up in inside margin before it shows up anywhere else.