SuperAmerica

SuperAmerica is a chain of gasoline stations in the upper midwest.

History

SuperAmerica convenience stores began in the 1960s in St. Paul by Northwestern Refining of St. Paul Park, Minnesota. It was centered on the upper midwest and Florida.

Ashland Petroleum was a refiner based in Ashland, Kentucky. It marketed full-service stations under its own "Ashland" brand. As self-service was legalized, it used the brands "Solo", "Save Mart", "Save More", and "Rich", along with others.

Ashland purchased Northwestern Refining and the SuperAmerica chain in the 1970s. It converted most of its outlets in its core territory to "SuperAmerica", while withdrawing from Florida. It maintained a few outlets under its other brand names to keep the trademarks valid.

In 1997, Marathon and Ashland Petroleum formed Marathon Ashland Petroleum LLC (MAP), a joint venture combining the companies’ refining, marketing and transportation businesses, with Marathon owning 62% of the operations while Ashland owned 38%. In the process, Ashland's SuperAmerica and Marathon's Speedway convenience store chains were merged together to form Speedway SuperAmerica LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of MAP.

In 2004 Marathon bought out Ashland's share and then Marathon sold SuperAmerica to Northern Tier Energy, a newly formed company backed by the private equity firms ACON Investments and TPG Capital, in February 2011. Today Speedway and SuperAmerica are unrelated chains. SuperAmerica does business only in the upper midwest.