A dairy network, a renamed family and a store bought in 1952.

Sheetz grew out of a dairy business. Mental Floss, summarising Kenneth Womack’s company history Made to Order: The Sheetz Story in an article published on 11 April 2021, says that in 1907 J.E. Harshbarger, from a farming family in nearby Bellwood, noticed that local dairy farmers were throwing away surplus milk and built a network of suppliers to deliver it to Altoona, Pennsylvania, by horse and buggy. In 1941 his son-in-law and successor, Jerry Sheetz, sensing that home milk delivery was in decline, opened a network of Sheetz Dairy Stores in the city.

The family name itself was adjusted along the way. According to the same account, Jerry was born Jerry Sheets. At a dairy-industry convention someone handed him a nametag that spelled it “Sheetz”; he wore it, kept the new spelling and travelled to Harrisburg, the state capital, to obtain a new birth certificate, explaining only that he liked it better.

The convenience business dates from 1952, when Jerry’s son G. Robert “Bob” Sheetz bought one of his father’s dairy stores in Altoona. English Wikipedia gives that year as the founding, and CSP Daily News, reporting in January 2026, described Sheetz Kwik Shopper as the retailer founded by Bob in 1952. Bob’s younger brother Steve Sheetz joined him: Mental Floss and Wikipedia both date that to 1961, while CSP said Steve had first worked part-time for the store as a boy and became supervisor and director of operations after graduating from Penn State University in 1969.

The second store, opened in 1963, traded as Sheetz Kwik Shopper, and Wikipedia says the “Kwik Shopper” was dropped from the name in the early 1980s. Mental Floss says the brothers added groceries and deli counters and installed their first gas pumps in 1973, and Wikipedia records the first Sheetz store outside Pennsylvania opening in Maryland in 1976. Wikipedia says Bob retired in 1983 and Steve became president, while CSP reported that Steve served as president and chief executive from 1984 to 1995 and as chairman of the board from 1995 to 2013.

Three generations, one family business.

Leadership has stayed in the family. Wikipedia says Bob’s son Stan Sheetz became president in 1995 and chairman in October 2013, when his cousin Joe Sheetz became president and chief executive; Joe’s brother Travis Sheetz was named president and chief operating officer in 2018 and took over as president and chief executive in January 2022. CSP Daily News, reporting in January 2026, named Travis Sheetz as president and chief executive and Joe Sheetz as chairman. Mental Floss says the company is governed by an Executive Family Leadership Council made up of Sheetzes from three generations.

Steve Sheetz died in January 2026, CSP reported on 5 January. The trade paper said that during his time as president and chief executive the chain introduced a made-to-order food programme, entered the fuel business, expanded into new states and adopted the mission “Total Customer Focus”, and that from 2013 he chaired CLI Transport, the company’s petroleum transport arm. He retired as a chain executive in 2020 and continued to chair the family committee, CSP said.

The food programme has its own origin story. Mental Floss, drawing on Womack’s book, says that in the 1980s the chain tried in-store concepts such as the Sandwich Saloon, which separated the food counter behind western-style swinging doors, and Charlie Chicken, a fried-chicken idea with a mustached chicken mascot meant for window displays. Then Earl Springer, who managed a Sheetz in Williamsport, Maryland, proposed made-to-order sandwich stations at which customers filled out cards listing exactly what they wanted. The stations spread to every store and were promoted with the campaign “I Want My M.T.O.”, a play on the “I Want My MTV” slogan of the time; M.T.O. became the name for the chain’s ordered food. In 1994, the magazine says, Sheetz installed a touchscreen ordering computer in an Altoona store, replacing the cards and pencils, and then made touchscreens standard.

Wikipedia adds that the company opened its own commissary, Sheetz Bros. Kitchen, in 2008, and lists other brand moments: a private-label soft drink called It! Cola, sold in cans, bottles and at the fountain until the mid-1990s; a 2011 sponsorship of Morgan Spurlock’s film POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold, during which Altoona took the film’s title as a ceremonial name; and a June 2024 deal that put the Sheetz logo on the sleeves of Pittsburgh Pirates jerseys. The Pirates’ Double-A affiliate, the Altoona Curve, plays in the company’s home city.

Design and documentation.

A convenience-store chain carries its identity across a wide range of surfaces. The fascia above the door, the tall pole sign at the roadside, the fuel canopy and the price board on the forecourt all repeat the same name and colours, and each has to read from a moving car as well as from the pavement. Inside, the same marks return on cups, bags, shelf strips, uniforms and the menu boards behind the counter.

Some chains build that identity around a letterform or a simple shape; others lean on a drawn character or a building silhouette that doubles as a logo, and some keep a compact symbol that can stand alone on a small surface such as an app icon or a cup lid. Because a fascia and a canopy are expensive to change, a new logo usually arrives store by store over several years, so old and new versions can stand side by side for a long time.

Each guide below sets out who started the chain, who owns it now and how its name, logo and signage came about, separating what independent sources record from what the company says about itself.

A z on the sign and on the menu.

The letter z is a constant habit of the brand, and it begins with the family name: the Sheetz spelling dates from Jerry Sheets’s nametag, as told in Womack’s book. Mental Floss notes that Sheetz swaps s for z on signage, on social media and in menu names such as “burgerz”, “fryz” and “totz”, though not consistently, and uses it more deliberately for charitable programmes such as Sheetz for Kidz toy drives and Kidz Meal Bagz lunches.

The magazine described the stores themselves as red-roofed, and the made-to-order counter as the centre of the Sheetz visit, with an M.T.O. menu that it said had grown from sandwiches to nachos, hot dogs, burgers, tacos and wraps, varying by location. It also noted the chain’s house brands of the early 1990s, among them the cola It!, written with its own exclamation mark, and a fan podcast, Freakz in the Sheetz, recorded by two Pittsburgh hosts since October 2018.

Mental Floss also described a long-running argument among Pennsylvanians over Sheetz and Wawa, whose territories meet in only a few areas; English Wikipedia uses the word rivalry in quotation marks for the same customer debate. Both sources describe the companies themselves as on friendly terms. Ryan Sheetz, then the company’s director of brand strategy, told Thrillist, as quoted by Mental Floss, that the families “started out as really good friends” and that the two chains had shared ideas; Mental Floss says Steve Sheetz served on Wawa’s board while a member of the Wood family served on the Sheetz board.

The surname also anchors the company’s community work. CSP reported in January 2026 that Steve Sheetz and his wife, Nancy, founded the Sheetz Fellows Program for student leaders at Penn State Altoona and the Sheetz Center for Entrepreneurial Excellence in downtown Altoona, and that Penn State named the couple its Philanthropists of the Year in 2010.

For a design guide, Sheetz shows how a spelling accident can become a house style, carried from a surname onto a roofline sign, a made-to-order menu and a charity drive. Compare it with Wawa, the Philadelphia-area chain with which it shares a customer debate and a history of board seats, and with 7-Eleven. For this guide we use roof red, charcoal and counter white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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