Wawa: The Defector Review

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Prior to last week, I had never eaten at a Wawa. I knew of Wawa’s food offerings, because Defector Media has a sizable, and vocal, Philadelphia contingent. The most vocal among that contingent was the late Dan McQuade. McQuade was so intensely Philadelphian that I thought of him any time I encountered anything related to that city, and I still do. This goes especially for Wawa, and especially for its sandwiches. I’d pumped gas at a Wawa before, but you and I know that doesn’t make for a full Wawa experience. It’s like saying you’ve been to a city because you had a layover there. No, in order to evaluate Wawa correctly, I had to avail myself of all it had to offer. I have now done just that.

A bit of background here: Motorists in 2026 might think of Wawa mainly as a service station that also happens to sell food. But that’s putting the cart before the hoagie, because Wawa was founded in the early 20th century as a dairy farm, and a dairy farm only. The name “Wawa” itself has a layered meaning. It refers to both the Lenape tribe’s word for the Canada goose (hence a Canada goose in its logo), and to the area of Delaware County that those same geese used as a favored rest stop while migrating. According to this 1989 writeup in the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Wawa area of Delco still very much exists, although only in somewhat romantic terms: