Wendy’s wants $7.99 for a Dave’s Single Combo, while the investors trying to buy the company are offering $7.35 per share. The economics of selling burgers have gotten a little ugly lately. Beef costs are way up, and higher menu prices have squeezed a lot of lower-income customers. Wendy’s closed 240 locations in 2024. Earlier this year, it outlined plans to close up to 358 more. Flynn Group is among the bidders seeking to take Wendy’s private. (For context, Flynn already operates more than 340 Wendy’s restaurants) Private ownership could give Wendy’s more time to overhaul the business without reporting every quarter to public shareholders, but I guess we'll see what happens. Have any of you guys been to a Wendy's lately?

On October 13th, Wingstop announced Sour Patch Kids Wicked Punch: a sour-then-sweet redberry glaze finished with actual candy bits. Yep, you read that right...Sour Patch Kids on chicken wings. As much as I REALLY want to talk about my visceral reaction to the announcement, I will set that aside to paint a bigger picture: Wingstop started in Garland, Texas, in 1994. When it went public in 2015, it had 785 locations. By the end of 2025, it had 3,056 worldwide. Its annual U.S. openings climbed from 205 in 2023 to 278 in 2024, then 382 in 2025, putting it ahead of every other U.S. restaurant chain for new domestic locations. That’s the backdrop for these egregious candy wings: an enormous, expanding restaurant system giving people another reason to talk about chicken. (Roughly 98% of Wingstop restaurants are owned by franchise partners.) The flavor disappears after November 5th, while supplies last at participating locations. I understand the angle here, though. Franchise brands chasing virality have figured out that ragebait can travel remarkably well. It invites someone to film the first bite, send the picture to a friend, write about it like I'm doing now, and ultimately, argue about whether this should even exist at all. A normal wing gets eaten without a second thought, while a candy-covered wing gets interrogated by people who weren’t thinking about Wingstop five minutes ago. If a menu item makes you say WTF…how much does the brand need you to actually like it? I don't know, but these will deff be wings that I skip. Lol

Chick-fil-A is drawing the line and saying no to AI.🚫 The chain generated nearly $23.9B in sales in 2025. Now CEO Andrew Cathy says human beings will keep taking your drive-thru order. To understand that decision, rewind to 1967 real quick: The first Chick-fil-A opened inside Atlanta’s Greenbriar Mall. It occupied just 384 square feet, roughly the size of a two-car garage. (A chicken sandwich cost just 59 cents!) That tiny mall restaurant eventually grew into a business large enough to experiment with putting an entire kitchen above traffic, and it has spent decades tinkering with how customers get their food. Its first drive-thru-only restaurant opened in 1993. Employees later moved outside with tablets, taking orders before cars reached the window. Other workers brought meals directly to vehicles, allowing multiple customers to receive food at once. They've always been intentional about their human touch, and it may serve them even better now that competitors are working on the next step and implementing AI. McDonald’s plans to test Archy, a voice AI system that takes orders in English and Spanish. Wendy’s has been deploying FreshAI, developed with Google Cloud. Chick-fil-A’s answer: just keep the conversation human. As more chains automate ordering, could a conversation with a real person become something customers specifically choose a restaurant for? Either way, it seems like good, easy PR for them.

Crumbl became a billion-dollar cookie brand in six years. Now they may have hit a snag, with stores closing, and the product meant to help revive sales delivered what its CEO called the worst week in company history. Back in 2017, cousins Jason McGowan and Sawyer Hemsley opened their first cookie shop in a brown shack in Utah. The formula worked pretty well: oversized cookies, weekly flavor drops, and pink boxes built for social media virality. During the pandemic recovery, Crumbl became one of the hottest franchises in America. Average store sales reached $1.84 million in 2022. The footprint grew from 55 locations in 2019 to more than 1,000 by 2024. Along the way, Crumbl became the country’s largest cookie chain. But keeping customers curious also meant keeping operators busy. Recipes arrived Wednesday for Monday’s menu. Stores were closed Sundays, leaving three working days to prepare. By 2025, average store sales were down to $1.1 million. Crumbl’s next bet was dirty soda: soft drinks mixed with cream and flavorings. Franchisees were asked to spend $30,000–$50,000 on equipment, and management presented projections for a 20% sales lift. Instead, a 32-ounce drink containing 186 GRAMS OF SUGAR became a controversy. “Dirty Soda Week” became the chain’s worst week ever, according to McGowan. Restaurant Business reported that August sales were 70% below two years earlier, citing an internal document. At least 57 locations have closed this year. Operators seeking to close without approval can face charges for up to three years of future royalties and marketing fees. There are signs of a reset on the horizon, between a new CEO, and a revamp around flavor launches. September’s Minecraft promotion helped lift sales. What's your opinion on Crumbl at the moment?

McDonald’s is putting up to $8.5 billion behind its next comeback. The strategy is called NEXT. Through 2036, McDonald’s plans to invest in restaurant upgrades, technology, menu innovation, and smoother operations. About $5 billion of that spending is slated for the years through 2030. Then there’s the menu: McDonald’s wants to gain 1.5 percentage points of market share in chicken and another 1.5 points in beverages by 2030, while holding its lead in beef. The burger giant is making a bigger play for what people order alongside, or instead of, a burger. They've laid out a detailed case for better restaurant economics, but from the customer side, the reaction I keep seeing is way simpler, which is just lowering the cost of eating there. Most people care more about a cheaper menu than a nicer restaurant. If the person at the register still thinks food costs too much, how impactful will these other changes be? I guess time will tell.

But what about old recipes?

In 1992, @littlecaesars sold a bucket containing THREE AND A HALF POUNDS of spaghetti for only $7.99. The Big! Big! Bucket was essentially a family dinner or emergency food reserve packed into one orange container. More than three decades later, Little Caesars brought the “Big! Big!” philosophy back. This time, the new Big! Big! Blind Box is Little Caesars’ entrance into the mystery-merchandise economy: a $19.99 box containing more than $200 worth of branded items. Each box holds a different combination: One person might open a Pretzel Crust rug, and another gets apparel, holiday ornaments, novelty collectibles, or a grill spatula bearing the branding of America’s third-largest pizza chain. No two assortments are supposed to be identical. The boxes launched in May and disappeared when supplies ran out. Blind boxes convert merchandise into what I would call gambling’s friendlier cousin, since you’re buying the moment before you know which object you own. It's the same concept as Pokémon cards, Labubus, etc. This one promises roughly ten times its purchase price in merchandise, then makes the surprise physically larger than competing boxes because apparently even brand nostalgia needs portion inflation. What if they brought this back again with large portions of food, though? Do you think this would be a hit?

Wingstop is selling roughly $500 worth of wings for $27.99, and only 100 people can buy it. Here’s what’s going on: Wingstop just launched its first-ever Wing Pass for the NFL season. The pass costs $27.99 and unlocks one Watch Party Bundle every Sunday for all 18 weeks of the regular season. Each bundle comes with: 20 classic wings Up to four flavors Large fries Large ranch Aside from being a heavily discounted meal, it’s creating 18 separate reasons to open the app, visit the brand, organize Sunday around Wingstop, and potentially add more food to the order. I think the timing matters too. Club Wingstop launched in May as the chain’s new loyalty program, but management has said it wants to move beyond the usual points-and-coupons treadmill. Early members received curated Club in a Box packages. Even the Wing Pass feels more like a collectible drop than a restaurant promotion. There are only 100, it releases at a specific time, and the reward unfolds weekly for nearly five months. Wingstop could have offered 20% off and disappeared into the coupon graveyard, but instead, it turned football season into an 18-week customer ritual. My initial takeaway is that the most valuable programs may stop rewarding transactions and start manufacturing traditions. When a franchise brand owns what your family eats every Sunday, does it still need to discount the other six days? I can't remember the last time I ate at a Wingstop, but I deff think this is good PR for them.

Wendy’s spent decades telling America that quality was its recipe. In 2026, its new CEO effectively admitted the company had been changing the ingredients. The brand built its reputation by zigging while McDonald’s zagged. E.g. square burgers and “fresh, never frozen” beef. Quality was Wendy’s entire position in the burger wars, then came all the tiny compromises. Less bacon on a burger literally named the Baconator. Whole lettuce leaves replaced with shredded lettuce. Burgers served so overcooked that one Reddit user called them crunchy. Each decision probably looked reasonable somewhere on a spreadsheet. Eventually, Wendy’s posted six straight quarters of declining same-store sales and fell behind Burger King, becoming America’s third-largest burger chain. That’s when new CEO Bob Wright acknowledged that decisions made for efficiency and cost savings had damaged quality and eroded the brand’s value equation. Wendy’s is now closing hundreds of restaurants while trying to repair the quality proposition that once separated it from everyone else. For franchisees, this is where brand-level cost-cutting becomes painfully local. Corporate captures the efficiency, while operators inherit the disappointed customers and the negative reviews. You can cut quality by 1% over and over without creating one dramatic breaking point, then one day...the customer stops coming. How many small efficiencies can a franchise system make before it accidentally cuts away the reason customers chose it?

Cheetos have found their way into a handful of desserts, and Crumbl is adding its brand to the list. In 2021, Marble Slab Creamery dropped a limited-run Flamin' Hot Cheetos ice cream and shake. In 2023, Cheetos turned 75. To celebrate, it partnered with Milk Bar. Christina Tosi (the woman behind Momofuku's dessert empire) built a funfetti birthday cake studded with Cheetos...for $62. Cheetos even published its own official recipe: Cheetos-infused triple chocolate chunk cookies. The top-rated review on Crumbl's own site calls the new cookie "disgusting." The reviewer says they had to chase it with chocolate milk because they thought they were going to throw up. Mind you, Crumbl just recently went viral for its dirty soda line that has enough sugar and calories to make you think that it's a prank. My questions: 1. Is there even a market for this kinda stuff, or is it more of a shock factor that generates free PR? 2. Would YOU try this thing?

McDonald's is rolling out a new Honey Brown Butter Bacon Egg & Cheese Biscuit nationwide on July 21. It's only available at participating restaurants and is limited-time only. The limited-time only aspect of this is interesting to me, and this is why: Honey brown butter is by no means a complicated ingredient. It's browned butter, honey, folded together, dropped onto a sandwich that already exists in some form on every fast food breakfast menu in America. McDonald's could sell this year-round without blinking, if they wanted. Instead, it's positioned as something you need to try before it disappears, and that demand engineering always has a way of motivating people to try a product before FOMO kicks in. Breakfast has always been McDonald's most defensible daypart, in my opinion. Competitors can copy a burger or fries, but nobody has cracked breakfast the way McDonald's has, because breakfast loyalty is built on habit, and habits are extremely hard to break once they're formed. Every limited-time biscuit variant exists to interrupt that habit just enough to generate a visit, without ever risking the core routine that keeps people coming back at 7 am on a Tuesday. McDonald's doesn't even need this biscuit to succeed on its own merits, either. It needs it to succeed as a headline. A new item drives app opens, app opens drive loyalty engagement, loyalty engagement drives the personalized offers that actually move the sales needle. In a way, the biscuit is the bait. So next time a "limited-time" breakfast item drops nationwide with vague availability and an app recommendation attached, ask yourself what's actually being sold. Does anybody else come to mind besides McDonald's that dominates the fast food breakfast category?

Jersey Mike's just ended Chick-fil-A's 11-year reign as the top-rated fast food chain in America. I want to give some brief context on how absurd that is: The American Customer Satisfaction Index has been running since 1994. Chick-fil-A first claimed the #1 QSR spot in 2015 and held it every single year since. Through recessions, the pandemic, the chicken sandwich wars, and 9 competitors trying to out-service them, they held. Jersey Mike's dethroned them with an 84. Chick-fil-A scored an 83. ONE POINT. Here's what makes Jersey Mike's an interesting case study to me...The brand was founded in 1956 in Point Pleasant, New Jersey as a single sub shop called Mike's Subs. It didn't become Jersey Mike's until 1987. It took another 30 years after that before the franchise really started scaling aggressively. They have no drive-thrus or kids' meals. The entire value proposition is: we slice the meat in front of you, we make it fresh, and we've done it the same way since Eisenhower was president. While every other QSR chain was pivoting to digital kiosks, ghost kitchens, and loyalty app gamification, Jersey Mike's was still standing behind a deli counter slicing cold cuts. And now they have $4.2 billion in systemwide sales, 238 net new locations opened in 2025 alone, and the highest customer satisfaction score in the country. The ACSI researchers said it themselves: "Price still matters, but it's no longer enough on its own. Consistency across the full experience is what separates the leaders." Jersey Mike's isn't competing on price or tech, but they still succeed on a 70-year-old operating model that never tried to be anything other than what it was. Knowing when to change and when to stay the same can be a difficult choice in franchising, but I'm curious how your personal experiences have been with this brand.

Little Caesars just opened two fully self-serve locations, and I'm starting to wonder if that was always their goal. Little Caesars invented Hot-N-Ready in 1997, and the whole concept was built around speed and simplicity: walk in, grab a pizza off the shelf, pay, and leave. What they just launched in Rockford, Illinois and Dearborn Heights, Michigan is Hot-N-Ready taken to its logical extreme. You order on the app or at a kiosk, then employees make your pizza in the back, then you pull it from a locker. That's the entire experience. The Rockford location employs around 30 people, but they're all in the kitchen. From a unit economics standpoint, front-of-house labor is typically one of the most expensive costs in QSR. You're accounting for turnover and training people who interact directly with customers during their most frustrated moments. Once you strip that out entirely, your cost structure changes dramatically. The obvious counterargument is that people hate it. Social media comment sections aren't exactly a scientific sample, but the sentiment is consistent: customers feel like they're being handed less while the company takes more. Which is a completely fair read Little Caesars isn't Shake Shack. Its entire brand identity is built on being the cheapest, fastest, most frictionless pizza on the market. If any pizza chain was going to test full self-service, it was always going to be them. What do you think? Does this make sense for them to implement or nah?

Not gonna lie, I've been thinking about this drink from Crumbl all week. A dirty soda with a whopping 186 grams of sugar. That's nearly half a pound in one cup. For context: the American Heart Association recommends 36 grams of added sugar per day for men. This drink delivers nearly 5x that amount! It's called the Crazy Cousins, and contains Red Bull, Mountain Dew, pineapple, strawberry puree, and coconut cream. 840 calories of pure chaos served in a plastic cup. Dirty sodas themselves aren't a new idea. They were born in Utah's Mormon communities in the early 2010s as a caffeine-friendly indulgence for a culture that doesn't drink alcohol. Basically, you load up a fountain soda with cream, flavored syrups, fruit purees, and so on. It scratches the "treat yourself" itch without violating religious code. Small regional chains like Swig and Sodalicious built entire businesses around it, and it was a hyperlocal phenomenon for almost a decade. Now Crumbl is throwing its hat in the ring. Crumbl already cracked the code on selling $5 cookies in a pink box and making it feel like a cultural event with weekly rotating flavors and a fanbase that posts unboxing videos. The health outrage is free PR, although I wonder how this translates to revenue for franchisees. Is selling half a pound of sugar in a cup going to be a popular choice for them? I guess time will tell.

Hooters filed for bankruptcy in April 2025. 140 of its ~200 U.S. locations got acquired by the chain's original founding group months later, and their first major move? Declare that Hooters was always a family restaurant. 🤔 Here's some helpful lore: Hooters opened in 1983 in Clearwater, Florida between six guys, one of whom was terrified of owls. The concept was always "beach bar casual," which meant wings, beer, and the Hooters Girls to add to the vibe. For 40 years, that positioning worked well enough to build a brand recognized in nearly every country on earth. Then the franchisees got creative. The operators running Hooters of America (a separate entity from the founding group) started pushing the concept further. This turned into stuff like bikini nights and thong-adjacent uniforms. The brand drifted from "neighborhood sports bar with a gimmick" toward something that made families actively opt out. The customer base is aging. Gen Z didn't grow up with Hooters as a cultural touchstone the way millennials did. So naturally, traffic fell. margins got squeezed. and bankruptcy followed. The founders bought it back and are now saying the quiet part out loud: the provocative direction wasn't theirs. CEO Neil Kiefer told People the uniforms had turned into "almost what appeared to be a thong." He said that was never the intention. Do you think Hooters has any chance at all of rebranding into something more family-friendly? Or is their current branding solidified?

For better or worse, Subway continues to be one of the most interesting franchises to talk about. They just launched their first-ever value menu (15 items under $5) and I'm genuinely curious what kind of impact this will have. Some of us still haven't forgotten the $5 footlong jingle...but we'll save that for another day. They've had a list of obstacles to bounce back from: From 2012–2020, they closed 7,000+ US locations. Then came the tuna lawsuit, the Jared era, "Subway bread is legally cake" in Ireland, and years of same-store sales bleeding out. Now we've got $3.99 Deli Faves, $4.99 6-inch Sub of the Day, and Protein Pockets with 20g+ protein. Whether it's any sort of brand resurrection or corporate hail mary that burns operators, I don't know yet, but I'm watching. What do you guys think about this? Will their first-ever value menu make any difference to you, or nah?

McDonald's plans to remove self-serve drink stations from its US dining rooms by 2032. They operate ~ 14,000 US restaurants, and roughly 95% of them are owned and operated by independent franchisees. When they move, they move deliberately, so what influenced this decision? Probably the fact that 40% of their revenue is now digital. That means fewer dine-in customers are touching those machines, but franchisees are still paying to maintain them. When their staff pours drinks instead, you're also getting consistent pour sizes, which translates to lower waste and cleaner ops in the long run. Ultimately, they're deprioritizing the dine-in experience in favor of a throughput model, so think: Drive-thru, delivery, digital. That's the lane they're building for. Additionally, they're launching six specialty beverages nationally that came from their now-closed CosMc's experimental locations. These were just a handful of restaurants that shut last year after the company used them to test the specialty drinks market. Ultimately, I don't think any of these changes will have a negative impact.

The playbook is always the same. PE firm buys a beloved restaurant chain, loads it with debt, cuts ingredient quality, raises prices, squeezes franchisees, and calls it operational efficiency. Rinse, repeat, exit in 5 years with a check while the brand slowly dies. Have you noticed how many restaurant buildings have lost their personality over the years? They're easier to sell when they look bland enough to transform into the next thing. Subway, Red Lobster, TGI Fridays, Pizza Hut, and so on. All private equity horror stories in different stages of completion. Red Lobster literally filed for bankruptcy after selling its own real estate to fund a never-ending shrimp promotion. That's what happens when financial engineers run restaurant companies. The food got worse because worse food is cheaper. The prices went up because someone has to service the debt. And when it all falls apart, the PE firm is already gone and the workers, franchisees, and customers are the ones left holding the check.