The sale of whole pizzas, bakery items and non-alcoholic beverages as well as fuel helped boost income and earnings in the first quarter for Casey’s General Stores Inc., the Ankeny-based company’s earnings report shows.

Darren Rebelez, Casey’s chairman, CEO and president, described the first quarter results as “outstanding” during an earnings call on Tuesday.

“We started our fiscal year off strong and are doing an excellent job on executing on the three-year strategic plan,” Rebelez said. The effort by Casey’s employees “resulted in positive traffic to our stores and strong performance across the entire business.”

For the quarter that ended on July 31, the convenience store retailer reported net income of $215.4 million, up 19.5% from the same period a year ago when net income was $180.2 million. Casey’s diluted earnings per share in the first quarter increased 19.5% to $5.77 from $4.83 in the same period a year ago.

Other highlights from Casey’s first-quarter earnings report include:

• Total revenue of $4.56 billion, an 11.4% increase from the same period a year ago when total revenue was $4.09 billion.
• A 14.2% increase of total inside same-store sales from a year ago to $1.68 billion from $1.47 billion in the same period a year ago. Grocery and general merchandise same-store sales increased 3.8% from a year ago and prepared food and dispensed beverage same-store sales increased 5.6%.
• Over 911.7 million gallons of fuel were sold during the first quarter, an 18% increase from the 772.5 million gallons sold during the same period a year ago. Part of the increase in the amount of fuel sold during the first quarter was due to Casey’s having more stores than it did a year ago, Rebelez said. The increase was also due to competitive pricing, he said. “I credit our fuel team. Over the last number of years, they’ve been able to very consistently execute our pricing strategy, and so over time, build confidence [among consumers] that we’re always going to be competitively priced.”

During the first quarter, Casey’s repurchased about $31 million of shares. It has about $264 million remaining under its existing share repurchase authorization, according to a news release.
At its September meeting, Casey’s board of directors approved a quarterly dividend of 57 cents per share, payable Nov. 14 to shareholders of record on Nov. 1.

Casey’s, the third largest convenience store chain in the U.S., has 2,895 stores in 19 states.

To read the news release about Casey’s first-quarter results, click here.