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Since late 2020, local entrepreneur and TCU grad Chris Koerner has been in the spotlight for making a substantial amount of sales by reselling Buc-ee’s related items on his site TexasSnax.com.
Before Koerner came up with this idea, the popular chain really didn’t have much of an online store presence. That was until Koerner filled six carts with more than 600 items from the Denton Buc-ee’s locale to sell online in the fall of 2020.
Via LinkedIn
Chris Koerner
Two months later, he says he made nearly $200,000 in online sales.
“I was driving home from a Buc-ee’s one day and thought to myself that they must kill it in online sales,” Koerner said. “After I got home, I went to their website and didn’t see anything online.”
This was what Koerner, who graduated with an executive MBA after an doing undergrad entrepreneurial studies at University of Alabama, called his “lightbulb moment.”
Today, Texas Snax does $250,000 to $300,00 per month in sales, according to Koerner. In 2021, he said that after a full year of business, he verified that Texas Snax made nearly $1 million. This trend continues to grow nearly 50 percent and more every year, he says. But these amounts are only top line totals. In actuality, Koerner said Texas Snax has yet to turn a profit.
“We’re expecting this year, for the first time, to be profitable,” he said.
In the past two months, he has refocused his online brands partly “to get us to profitability.”
This all began as a “harebrained idea.”
His initial step following his lightbulb moment was to reach out to Buc-ee’s corporate office to see if the company had an interest in partnering with his then online company Send Eats.
“They never responded, so we just kind of had this harebrained idea like, ‘What if we did it for them?’”
Koerner’s initial shopping spree of 600 items cost roughly $1,500 in cash and an afternoon of his time.
After getting all 650-plus snack items back home, Koerner said he hired a photographer to take images of the products, so he could quickly launch a website. Koerner promoted the new venture by reaching out to several local media outlets. One of the media outlets that latched on to Koerner’s story was Texas Monthly. Koerner said the reporter he was working with on the article reached out to Buc-ee’s legal team for comment.
That’s when things took a significant change for the young entrepreneur.
“The reporter told me they wanted to talk with me and I was like, ‘Oh, crap, I’m going to be out of business before I’m even in business,’” he said.
To Koerner’s great surprise, the legal team said they actually loved his idea. The company merely wanted to be sure that potential buyers knew he was not connected to Buc-ee’s and was instead a third-party seller.
Agreements aside, Koerner said that he still pays full retail on all of the products available on his website, which also include nonsnack items like T-shirts, hats, and other Buc-ee’s apparel.
The supply chain works like this: Koerner submits an order form to several Buc-ee’s stores. They organize the items and pack them onto a giant pallet. Then one of Koerner’s employees picks up the order and checks out at the register like any other customer. Finally, the items are loaded onto a box truck and taken to Koerner’s air-conditioned warehouse.
“We ship these products internationally,” Koerner said. “We actually polled our customers out of curiosity once, and a third of our customers have never been to a Buc-ee’s.”
With Buc-ee’s fever still running hot in more than a half dozen states, Koerner said that his online business has shifted to offer Buc-ee’s products exclusively. This means that Koerner’s former company, Send Eats, is now Texas Snax.
Koerner also dropped all of Send Eats’ third-party clientele to focus only on Buc-ee’s.
“At the start of Covid we helped brands come online,” he said. “Over the last three years, we’ve learned this model has a very low margin and is a high headache business. That’s why we made the deliberate decision, two months ago, to fire all of our customers and just go all in on Texas Snax.”
Koerner says this move made sense, since Texas Snax was a company he and his partners already have full control of.
“You almost have to be as big as Amazon to be profitable in this kind of market, or you lose money,” he said. “That’s not sustainable, so now all we do now is Buc-ee’s stuff.”