Bay Area's pioneering vegan convenience store sold in multimillion-dollar deal

At least twice a month, Tyler MacNiven of Sunnyvale and his family drive 20 minutes out of their way to go to a gas station.

"Oh, there she is," MacNiven said as the family approached their destination on El Camino Real in San Bruno.

It's not because of the price at the pump. In fact, the MacNivens don't buy gas at all.

"I think it's hilarious that even though we only have electric cars, we still end up going to the gas station," MacNiven said.

That's because the real draw here isn't outside. It's on the shelves.

Welcome to Hangry Planet, billed as North America's first fully plant-based gas-station convenience store, where the usual road-trip indulgences, hot dogs, chips, breakfast sandwiches, even soft serve, come without meat or dairy.

"A gas station convenience store that is entirely plant based, you just don't ever hear that marriage happening, and you might not expect that," MacNiven said. "It really works out. I got to say, the baby is beautiful."

What began as an experiment is now part of a much bigger appetite. Americans spent $7.9 billion on plant-based foods in 2025, about twice the $3.9 billion spent in 2017, according to the Good Food Institute.

Hangry Planet was the brainchild of entrepreneur Bobak Bakhtiari, who believed the bigger opportunity wasn't simply serving people already looking for vegan food. It was reaching everyone else.

"I felt like, with a high-traffic, junk-food milieu of convenience stores, it's the perfect environment to help educate and transform people's habits," Bakhtiari said.

The transformation wasn't painless. Bakhtiari said sales initially fell about 20% after the store went fully plant-based, leaving him wondering whether he had made a costly mistake.

Then customers started finding it. Instead of simply stopping in because Hangry Planet happened to be along the way, plant-based shoppers began going out of their way to get there.

Bakhtiari said sales eventually climbed about 30%.

This year, Bakhtiari sold the San Bruno property and business. He said the deal topped $12 million, millions more than he once thought the site would fetch.

For Bakhtiari, the sale offered something more valuable than a big payday: evidence that an unconventional idea could also make business sense.

For the MacNivens, the calculation is more personal.

Tyler and his wife, Kelly, eat mostly plant-based, while their three young children still eat meat. They aren't trying to dictate what their kids eat. Instead, they want them to grow up knowing there are other choices — choices they believe can be better for animals and the planet.

That includes some decidedly unconventional convenience-store fare, including jerky made from mushrooms.

Kelly MacNiven said that even though plant-based doesn't automatically mean unprocessed, when weighing those concerns against conventional meat, she sees a different set of tradeoffs.

"I'm more concerned about the idea that they'd be coming from a cow that has also had a lot of processing happening and a lot of antibiotics, and what that does to the world," she said.