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Coming soon near you in South Jersey, another Wawa

The ubiquitous convenience store chain has a fanatical following - an expert credits the hoagies - but is about to face some new competition.

New Wawa store sits along White Horse Pike in Somerdale, N.J.
New Wawa store sits along White Horse Pike in Somerdale, N.J.Read moreMARGO REED / Staff Photographer

Driving along Haddonfield Road in Cherry Hill the other day, I spotted a sign of things to come.

Wawa!

The ubiquitous convenience-store chain's seventh Cherry Hill location will be built between Route 70 and Chapel Avenue, across from the Market Place at Garden State Park and within two miles of two other Wawas that have opened in the township since 2013.

That's not counting the uber-busy Wawa at the "point" of Routes 38 and 70, just over the border in Pennsauken. Which has two other Wawas. More are planned in other local towns, including in Brooklawn, on a Route 130 site currently occupied by the Metro Diner.

But the imminent local debut of the Royal Farms chain — stores are under construction or planned in  Magnolia, Gloucester City, Bellmawr, and East Greenwich — has spawned headlines about a looming clash of these "c-store" titans in the competitive, but desirable, South Jersey market.

A market where the homegrown, folksy, 32-store Heritage's chain (older residents tend to pronounce it "Herit-Ages"), which I've long admired for its unabashed South Jersey-ness, also has a significant niche.

"We think there is room for healthy competition," Brittany Eldredge, a spokeswoman for the family-owned, Baltimore-based Royal Farms, told NJ.com.

"We feel we offer something different," she added, citing, among other amenities, Royal Farms' "fabulous fried chicken."

As for Wawa, "we've always supported a competitive marketplace," company spokeswoman Lori Bruce told me by email, adding, "We are different, and specifically in this region, we are proud to have carved out a unique space of our own."

This I discovered 40 years ago after moving from Philadelphia to Audubon, where the White Horse Pike Wawa — it's still there — pretty much kept me fed. No wonder I've been a fan of the chain ever since.

(Alas, such is not the case for every newbie; my friend Roz DeKett, a writer who grew up in the U.K. and spent 20 years living in California before moving to Philly in 2013, is "utterly mystified" by the Wawa mystique. "I'd been hearing about Wawa and went in the one on Second Street in Society Hill to get a snack," she recalled. "I walked around and thought, 'What is this place?' It's just a convenience store.")

Perhaps. Or perhaps something deeper: A 2006 New York Times essay headlined "Convenience Cult" and a lavishly illustrated "The Cult of Wawa" story on Mashable.com last year explored the fanatical devotion of some Wawa enthusiasts.

"People have a tremendous loyalty to where they buy their food," notes Carol Kaufman-Scarborough, a professor of marketing at Rutgers-Camden. "And there is an emotional connection to certain types of regional foods, such as hoagies and soft pretzels.This loyalty can be extremely difficult to break."

Hoagie-centric Wawa has become something of a nationally recognized symbol (if not synonym) for the Philadelphia region. But the company is descended from an iron-foundry business established in 1802 in Millville, Cumberland County.

That's right, Philly: You may think of Wawa as your very own and rather famous convenience store, but it's really a South Jersey thing.

After all, the first Wawa in the state opened in Vineland in 1968, a mere four years after the chain's very first store in Folsom, Pa. Counting the recent North Jersey expansion, the number of Garden State Wawas exceeds 245 — nearly one-third of the company total.

New Jersey generally and South Jersey in particular were and still are like a sprawling test kitchen for car-centric enterprises of all sorts.

Wawa, Royal Farms, and Heritage's all evolved from dairy farms that entered the emerging convenience-store business after World War II, when suburban growth constrained local agriculture but opened up opportunities for selling milk and other staples to young families on the go.

Such was true for Swiss Farms, based in Delaware County. An innovative small chain that calls itself "America's Drive-Thru Grocer," Swiss Farms nevertheless didn't catch on in South Jersey. The single Swiss Farms store that opened in Somerdale in 2010 has long since become a pizza shop under other ownership.

"South Jersey is definitely an area we want to get back into," said Scott Simon, the company's president and CEO. "It's not that the demographics didn't like us. But you can't do a one-off store. You have to grow the brand in a way that resonates with customers."

Kaufman-Scarborough noted that as brick-and-mortar retailers struggle to adapt to the rising popularity of e-commerce, convenience stores are offering apps and experimenting with on-premises dining and home delivery.

"Evolution is part of what we've been doing since we started out as a single store in Altoona in 1952," said Nick Ruffner, public relations manager for Sheetz, Another family-owned former dairy turned convenience-store powerhouse, Sheetz is Western Pennsylvania's version of Wawa, with its own distinctive personality, signature look, and fiercely loyal following.

I visited my first Sheetz on June 14 in Uniontown, Pa., and was impressed with the pizzazz (the letter "z" is a theme) as well as the energy of the store, the sheer flashiness of which might make a typical Wawa seem a tad … staid.

Ruffner said the companies are friendly and respectful competitors; there's no truth to the regional urban legend that Sheetz and Wawa have declared an unofficial DMZ somewhere around Morgantown, Pa., rendering South Jersey off-limits to an interloper from Altoona.

"While we wouldn't rule anything out," he added, "expansion to that area is not in our immediate plans."