Hello!

Today we’re covering:

• How Cinnabon quietly opened more stores than almost anyone in America

• A claypot chain that would like to sell you a data center

• Plus a Taco Bell lettuce problem, a big Uber acquisition, and Zaxby's New York debut

Read on…

3 Numbers

$14.8 billion

What Uber is paying to take over Delivery Hero, the Berlin-based owner of global delivery brands Foodpanda, Glovo, Talabat, and PedidosYa, among others. It's the largest acquisition in Uber’s history, and it creates the biggest food-delivery platform outside China: 99 markets and $236 billion in combined gross bookings. Uber’s purchase comes on the heels of DoorDash’s 2025 acquisition of the British delivery giant Deliveroo, as the large platform aggregators continue to consolidate.

36%

How much total operating expenses have climbed for the average restaurant since 2019, per new National Restaurant Association data. Menu prices are up almost exactly the same amount over that stretch, which means all the discourse about customer sticker shock has bought operators exactly zero extra margin.

$50 million

Value of a new three-year contract signed by CCHH, a Nasdaq-listed Malaysian restaurant company that operates under the name Chicken Claypot. Interestingly, the contract is not to sell chicken, but to provide maintenance and support services for (/checks notes) “data center infrastructure.” The company is calling it a “dual-engine” strategy: keep the claypot business as a stable cash base, bolt on an AI-infrastructure services arm, and, ya know, see what happens.

The Big Story

I’ve been rewatching Better Call Saul and have two takeaways to share:

1. It has higher dramatic peaks, slightly better acting, and is overall a superior show to Breaking Bad (I will not take any questions on this matter).

2. It’s caused me to think a lot about Cinnabon.

Cinnabon shows up in Better Call Saul’s first scene and remains a presence throughout its 6 seasons, serving — spoiler alert — as the landing spot for Saul Goodman after he’s forced to go on the lam at the end of Breaking Bad. While the show has good fun with artful, black-and-white shots of icing lovingly smeared over rolls, in the context of the story, the Cinnabon is meant to be something of a bleak destination — a store located in a dying mall in the middle of a frostbitten Omaha.

Except, in real-life 2026, Cinnabon is kind of crushing it?

Every August, QSR Magazine unveils its list of the country’s 50 biggest chains. This year, buried in the tier just below the top 50, is a number that surprises me: Cinnabon opened a net of 308 stores in the US in 2025.

To put that in context, via QSR Magazine, the next-closest “next 50” chain in its group, Playa Bowls, added 81. Even against the giants — the 50 largest chains in the US — Cinnabon’s domestic expansion trailed only Wingstop. It out-opened legacy growth chains like Chipotle and Jersey Mike’s, as well as the restaurant hyper-scalers like 7Brew and Dutch Bros.

The climb for the four-decade-old chain has not been steady. Cinnabon added 18 stores in 2023 and 56 in 2024 before roughly 6x-ing that pace last year.

And it did this in a year when its natural home — the mall — continued to shrink.

How did this happen?

It’s not really a mall brand anymore

The Cinnabon most of us picture is a kiosk placed next to a Spencer Gifts — and if that were still the whole business, 308 new stores wouldn’t pencil out. (Dozens of US malls closed last year; zero new indoor megamalls opened.)

Cinnabon’s growth is now coming from versatile formats that go almost anywhere: convenience stores, travel plazas, co-brands with Auntie Anne’s, and tiny express bakeries that run 80 to 100 square feet and tuck into a host location like a Schlotzsky’s.

The parent company knows the playbook

Cinnabon sits inside GoTo Foods, the seven-brand platform (including Auntie Anne’s, Jamba, Moe’s, Schlotzsky’s, Carvel, McAlister’s) that's owned by Roark Capital. Roark’s other large holding company, Inspire, gets more publicity (and that will be even more true once it goes public)… but GoTo is also a growing juggernaut. Its franchisees often co-brand or pick up different GoTo brands to fill out their portfolios. Cinnabon’s tiny buildout cost and near-universally known brand make it a relatively easy sell for a Jamba or McAlister’s operator looking to diversify.

It’s innovating on beverage

In May, Cinnabon began rolling out a new coffee program across its system, using the Seattle’s Best brand and running it through the drip equipment stores already own. (Wild full circle moment: AFC Enterprises sold Seattle's Best Coffee to Starbucks in 2003 and sold Cinnabon for $30.3 million the year after. Cinnabon and Seattle's Best were stablemates under the same parent, got split up in consecutive years, and now, twenty-odd years later, Cinnabon is building its beverage program on Seattle's Best.)

Cinnabon also ran a dirty soda line this spring, and its Harry Potter Butterbeer tie-in was the kind of culturally relevant limited-time offer every chain wants.

And 2025’s growth isn’t a fluke: Around 350 franchise deals are already on the books, with more on the way.

In the Headlines

• The 60-unit Hardee’s franchisee Superior Star filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, citing unexpected costs on a batch of stores the company acquired in 2023.

• And Papa Murphy’s tough stretch continues — it’s closing another 45 to 50 stores.

• More than 1,600 people have been sickened in a multistate cyclosporiasis outbreak that federal health officials have now linked to shredded iceberg lettuce served at Taco Bell locations across five states. Investigators traced it to a single supplier's lettuce grown in Mexico, and Taco Bell says it proactively pulled the affected ingredient from its supply chain nationwide. (Check the strikingly positive comments on Taco Bell’s LinkedIn post. A master class in corporate communications.)

• The Takeout ran a lovely eulogy for the great discontinued fast food items of the ‘90s: the BK Broiler, Wendy’s SuperBar, McDonald’s Arch Deluxe, and the McPizza.

• Olive Garden brought back the Never-Ending Pasta Pass on Thursday for the first time since 2019: 13 weeks of unlimited pasta for $100, 10,000 passes (… and they’re gone).

• Zaxby’s opened its first New York City store in the Bronx, with a Manhattan location on the way. The 1,000-unit Southern chicken chain is pushing hard into both the Northeast and the Southwest — its first Arizona unit opened last year.

• Long a holdout, Texas Roadhouse is quietly testing delivery, albeit on a “micro” scale. (To-go pickup orders now run 14.6% of weekly sales for the chain.)

• Burger King’s long operations grind is beginning to pay off: 41% of customers now rate their most recent visit “excellent,” up from 35% a year ago, per Technomic.

• The World Cup gave host-city bars and restaurants a real sales lift, although non-hosting cities saw little impact.

• Football may not be coming home, but Chipotle’s burrito is.

• Bojangles-branded EV chargers.

Name That Chain!

You’ve got three clues to name this issue’s chain:

• A burger and dairy chain that first opened in Oklahoma City in 1968 and put up 24 stores in its first year. It has never sold stock, never sold a franchise, and is still owned by the same family.

• It’s vertically integrated to an almost eccentric degree: the chain owns the feed mill, the cow herd, eight farms and ranches across 40,000 acres, the processing plant, the bakery, the trucks, and the stores. It’s the only major ice cream maker in the country that still milks its own cows.

• No store may open more than 300 miles from the farm in Tuttle, Oklahoma, which is why there are a bit over 300 of them across Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas, and nowhere else.

Find the answer at the bottom of the email…

Power Moves

Here are some notable recent C-suite moves:

• McDonald’s hired a Nike veteran as its new Chief Strategy Officer.

• &pizza’s parent, Latitude Food Group, named James O’Reilly as its new CEO, ending a monthslong search.

What’s New at FS Supply

Remember that 36% number up top? The average restaurant’s costs have jumped by more than a third since 2019, and menu prices have already been stretched as far as diners will tolerate. Which means the profit has to come from somewhere other than charging guests more — it has to come out of costs.

That’s the entire premise of what we do at FS Supply: branded packaging programs, priced fairly, always in stock, distributed through 10+ partners including Sysco, US Foods, GFS, and PFG.

We handle the unglamorous — yet necessary! — work of taking a line item, re-sourcing it, tightening the freight, and handing an operator back actual margin on packaging that also happens to perform great.

Thanks for reading! I’ll see you again next week.

NAME THAT CHAIN ANSWER: Braum’s