Innholdsfortegnelse for Summer 2022 i Entrepreneur's Startups

McDonald’s, Taco Bell, and other major food brands have been investing heavily in their loyalty programs, and with good reason: Every profitable venture is built on the love of its loyal customers, and these kinds of programs make loyalty a priority. After all, it’s much easier to serve an existing customer than it is to find a new one. Think of a loyalty program this way: It’s a wholesome club that feels exclusive enough to make membership desirable, while also collective enough to make everyone feel like they’re part of something bigger. In a loyalty program, your brand is the host of the party—and its biggest star. Your customers are there because, so long as you treat them right, they have every intention of coming back. The longer a loyalty…

As host of the television show Bar Rescue, Jon Taffer fixes other people’s restaurants. But when he looked at the casual-dining sector more broadly, he saw signs of trouble: “They’re dinosaurs,” he says of many brands that have been around for decades, “and I think they’re facing extinction. All the Uber Eats in the world can’t bail them out.” It’s why he created a franchise concept called Taffer’s Tavern, which is designed for durability. The pandemic was, of course, a massive disruption for the restaurant industry, but Taffer says the problems go far beyond that. Labor has always been expensive and difficult. ⊲ Consumers want lower-cost meals, even as supply costs are uncontrollable. Taffer’s Tavern addresses them all with minimally staffed, robotic kitchens cooking vacuum-sealed food, and data-driven decisions everywhere.…

As much as the franchise industry has evolved, food franchises still reign supreme in most people’s minds—with good reason. Food is often the most visible category in the industry, with a mix of legacy brands and innovative upstarts. In fact, more than a quarter of all brands that applied for the 2022 edition of Entrepreneur’s annual Franchise 500 ranking were food-related franchises. From that group of applicants, we’ve gathered the top 200 restaurants and retail food franchises here, ranked within their respective categories, from acai bowls and Asian food to sports bars and tea shops. They are ranked based on the scores they received in the 2022 Franchise 500 evaluation process, which examines each brand based on 150-plus data points in the areas of costs and fees, size and growth,…

Retirement. The word means different things to different people. For some, it’s an idyllic lifestyle at the end of a long career. But for others, it’s increasingly becoming a chance to hit refresh and try something new—without necessarily leaving the working world. That second group is showing up in a big way. The U.S. Government’s 2020-2021 Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households found that 45% of people retired because they reached normal retirement age, and an even larger percentage—48%—retired because they wanted to do other things. Where are many of them going? “We are seeing an increasing number of baby boomers looking strongly at food franchises,” says Robin Gagnon, cofounder of We Sell Restaurants, a brokerage that specializes in food brands. Gagnon says there are many reasons that…

Last summer, while Subway was taking heat for the allegedly mysterious contents of its tuna sandwiches, Long John Silver’s used the moment to soft-launch its new, intentionally fish-free items. The fast-food seafood chain partnered with Good Catch, a plant based fish alternative brand, to sell fish-free filets and crab-free cakes at select locations. Good Catch’s marketing was aggressive. Last July, it parked vans and trucks in front of Subway locations in the U.S. and U.K. and offered free fishless sandwiches. They were made with Good Catch’s flaky but fishless tuna, created from a blend of legumes. The clear message was: Here’s food you can trust. But this was much more than just a fish fight. It was a very public example of a shift that’s taking place in the…

Family comes first at Cousins Maine Lobster—where the team actually is family, or just wants everyone to feel like family. The brand began a decade ago, when Jim Tselikis, who was living in Boston, went to visit his cousin Sabin Lomac in Los Angeles to catch up. “When we were reminiscing,” Tselikis says, “we realized that every time we were with our family, we would have lobster—live lobster, lobster rolls, lobster mac and cheese.” Tselikis was in sales and had no prior food or restaurant experience. Lomac had worked in more than 20 restaurants but was in real estate at the time. Nevertheless, they started to imagine a business in which they’d bring their cherished experience to people across the nation. Out of that, Cousins Maine Lobster was born. The…

Let’s say you go onto Grubhub, see that there’s a new franchise in town called The Captain’s Boil, and order a shrimp basket for delivery. Score! But here’s what you don’t see: Your lunch was actually made inside a Nathan’s Famous. This is the magic of Franklin Junction, which bills itself as a mixture of Airbnb and Match.com—but for restaurants. The platform finds kitchens with extra capacity and matches them with brands that want to expand into new locations. It was conceived by Aziz Hashim, founder and managing partner of NRD Capital, which owns several restaurant brands including The Captain’s Boil and Fuzzy’s Taco Shop. Hashim originally intended Franklin Junction for his own stores—but once COVID hit, he opened it up to any brand. Today, CEO Rishi Nigam says, the…

If you want to glimpse Taco Bell’s vision of tomorrow, head to the frozen tundra of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. There, just after the snow melts this spring, a sleek new building called Defy is expected to open—but consumers won’t be coming in. The place features no dining room; instead, it will hover over four drive-thru lanes like a spacecraft. Up inside, team servers will cook up tasty Gorditas, Chalupas, and Burrito Supremes and send them down to customers through an innovative food lift system, Jetsons-style. “The Defy building will be the first one in the U.S. where you actually see the future of what the category will probably look like,” says Mike Grams, Taco Bell’s president and global COO. “And it was not a corporate idea. It came from one…

Remember when “inbox zero” was everyone’s goal? The idea was that, someway and some-how, it was possible to clear your thoughts by clearing your inbox. As I write this, I have 131 unopened emails waiting for me. Inbox zero is a fantasy, and I accept that. I have come to believe that we should not define our success by (or tie our sanity to) things we cannot control ourselves. If anyone can email us—you could email me right now!—then the number of emails in our inbox at any given moment is out of our control. So instead of shooting for inbox zero, I have shifted my goal to something that is within my grasp. It’s called “Calendar Zero.” This is my term for a day without meetings. It is a…

If you look at how burger franchises developed, there were two big waves. First was the McDonald’s and Burger King wave, with a business model that helped parents get burgers with their kids at an affordable price. Then came the gourmet burger wave, with brands such as Five Guys and Burger 21 adding toppings like garlic aioli and cilantro cream. Experts say that same business pattern is now repeating with chicken. Whereas brands such as KFC, Popeyes, and Church’s Chicken are long-established and beloved, a new wave of franchises like Pollo Campero, El Pollo Loco, and the Shaquille O’Neal–backed Big Chicken are offering sandwiches with smashed avocado and low-calorie, fire grilled chicken breast dinners. “We call it the better chicken category,” says Sam Rothschild, chief operating officer at Slim Chickens,…

Some franchisees own only one location. Some own a handful. Others own dozens, maybe even hundreds or thousands—and those owners can be especially popular with food brands. To be clear, food brands aren’t the only kind of franchisors who love multi-unit franchisees. But these companies—and particularly the ones with retail locations and full kitchens—have some unique reasons why. Restaurants are expensive to build and complicated to run. There are countless moving pieces, including staff, food, and often a lot of menu items that must be recreated to perfection each time. If someone owns dozens or hundreds of restaurants already, it’s likely because they’ve already figured out how to maximize these systems—and they have the financing available to build out multiple new units at once. But there are other reasons,…

When Dog Haus launched in 2010, its concept made a lot of sense…for the year 2010. Its mission was to elevate stadium food into culinary masterwork, and it did so by selling hot dogs and sausages decorated with ingredients such as bacon, pastrami, caramelized onions, and arugula. The three founders, Hagop Giragossian, Quasim Riaz, and André Vener, dubbed their concept “craft casual,” and they built fun, large, airy venues to serve customers. It has grown to 50-plus locations since franchising. But in the decade since, much has changed about how Americans eat. People increasingly order food through Grubhub or Uber Eats. Dog Haus responded by expanding its reach through ghost kitchens—delivery-only facilities with no seating, parking, or signs. Then, when the pandemic hit, foot traffic dropped even more—and the ghost…

What American fast-food connoisseur wouldn’t love a massive tortilla pouch packed with meat, oozy cheese, and fistfuls of fries? Overseas, “French tacos” are all the rage. The category is now one of the fastest-growing across all delivery platforms in France, where Paris-based O’Tacos is gobbling up more than its share of the quick-service restaurant market. Introduced in 2011 by two brothers in Bordeaux who were soon joined by a drywaller from Grenoble, O’Tacos has grown to 307 units across France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Spain, Italy, and Germany, with annual revenue surpassing $263 million. O’Tacos grand openings—often celebratory events featuring French rap stars and Instagram influencers—are reportedly occurring in France at a faster rate than McDonald’s. Fans line up for hours to get their hands on the beefed-up poutine in…