The underrated bakery giant building a $200M plant in Texas

Author

Andy Moore
June 05, 2026

Hello!

This week we’re covering:

  • Pizza Hut may be gearing up for a sale

  • A steakhouse now serving THC cocktails (no, you can't get a beer with it)

  • And someone stealing a full truckload of Shake Shack's baby back ribs

Read on…

3 Numbers

$200 million

Possible valuation of Salt & Straw, which has engaged the investment bank Piper Sandler to explore a sale of the company. The 15-year-old ice cream concept — which has around 60 locations nationwide — earns more than $100 million in annual revenue.

14

Logan’s Roadhouse locations that are getting THC-infused cocktails. The drinks contain 5 milligrams of hemp-derived THC and are not allowed to be ordered alongside alcohol. (Seriously.)

1,000

Racks of boneless baby back ribs that were stolen from Shake Shack. The theft — representing a full truckload of 3,000 cases — left the chain working overtime to source enough ribs to meet demand for its BBQ Boneless Baby Back Rib Sandwich. Said CEO Rob Lynch, “I mean, you can’t make this up.”

The Big Story

In Burleson, Texas — about 30 minutes from where I write this — rises a new $200 million, 267,000 square foot manufacturing facility. The plant, which will produce fresh dough and employ 450 people, may be a bit ambitious for a concept with “just” 400 North American locations. In reality, it’s Paris Baguette’s bet on the future.

And after diving into the concept a bit more this week, I believe theirs is a deeply underappreciated expansion story that’s set to roil the bakery-café category.

Most people who walk past a Paris Baguette assume it’s a French boutique, or maybe a retiree’s dream business that’s set up shop in a nice strip center. It’s neither. The bakery-café with the croissants in the window is the American operation of one of the largest food companies on earth — SPC Group, a South Korean food conglomerate built over eight decades — with plans to grow its North American system size this year by nearly 40%, opening 150 stores in the continent in 2026 alone.

The brand is riding the momentum of five consecutive years of positive comparable sales; it signs hundreds of franchise agreements each year. Its management has been open about its current goal: more than 1,000 North American cafés by 2030.

The dough behind the dough

Paris Baguette’s parent company, SPC, runs roughly 6,500 stores across Korea, including the country's Baskin-Robbins and Dunkin' operations, and turns somewhere in the neighborhood of $5.7 billion in revenue annually. Paris Baguette by itself operates around 4,000 locations worldwide.

SPC’s multi-billion dollar balance sheet can fund growth through any macro environment, and its capital is patient: Paris Baguette’s first American location opened in LA in 2005, and it didn’t begin franchising until 2015. It steadily added locations year-over-year, until the numbers began to really start jumping post-pandemic. I read the most recent FDD in preparing for this piece; the following chart is pulled straight from the 2026 edition:

The net-change column is the easy part to admire. The more telling number is the one that table doesn't show: across that entire stretch, the system barely closed a café.

Terminations, non-renewals, and franchisor buy-backs run nearly all zeros down the full outlet roster. Even the corporate shrinkage, from 20 cafés down to 8, is deliberate — SPC has been quietly refranchising its own locations, converting company-run stores into franchisee-run ones (and, as we'll soon see, into dough customers).

The units are productive, too. The average franchised café did $3.05 million in sales in 2025, the top 15% averaged $4.57 million, and the single best location rang up just over $7 million. Comparable-store sales have risen for 5 straight years, meaning the seasoned cafés keep growing even as new ones flood in.

The supply chain piece

Then, there’s the manufacturing facility, which, for those of us who think about supply chains for a living, is more or less the entire story. Paris Baguette is making a vertical-integration bet with conviction, and with a parent willing to write the check. It’s placing its facility in the middle of the country, close to freight lanes and with (presumably) enough extra capacity to make its ambitious growth plans doable.

Owning your upstream is expensive, slow, and ties up a lot of capital that could be more efficiently employed in opening stores that generate cash quickly. It’s also a hell of a moat — it gives Paris Baguette a quality advantage by guaranteeing its stores have fresh product, and it’s excellent business for the franchisor.

In 2025, the franchisor entity booked $97.6 million selling required products and services to its own franchisees. That was 72.8% of its total $134 million in revenue, which means the bulk of franchisor revenue flows from being the supplier rather than from collecting the royalty fee.

So every new café compounds twice: once as a royalty stream, and again, much larger, as a recurring dough-and-supply account for the parent. The new manufacturing facility protects product quality, and it feeds the highest-margin engine in the whole enterprise.

(Paris Baguette isn't even the only Korean-owned bakery-café running this play. Its archrival back home, Tous les Jours — this one under the massive conglomerate CJ Group — beat it into the US in 2004, is chasing the same 1,000-store target by 2030, and is building its own dough plant in Gainesville, Georgia to feed its growth.)

Meanwhile, Panera — which more or less invented the American bakery-café in the late 1990s — saw its system sales drop more than 6% in 2024, and recently announced it’d close all nine of its remaining fresh dough facilities, shifting instead to a par-baked model supplied by outside bakers. Competitors rarely hand you an opening that clean.

The bigger reversal

Zoom out a bit from just Paris Baguette and we see another interesting piece to this story: for decades, American concepts took over the world, with McDonald's, Starbucks, KFC, and Domino's planting the Stars and Stripes in every market that would have them.

That current isn’t necessarily reversing, but the waters are swirling a bit: some of the largest restaurant brands on the planet (many out of East Asia), are now making concerted pushes into the United States. China's Mixue and Luckin Coffee both recently opened their first US locations, Gong cha just bought 170 American stores from a master franchisee, and Din Tai Fung and Jollibee have been putting up massive numbers here for years. Paris Baguette is the bakery chapter of that same book.

In the Headlines

Name That Chain!

You’ve got three guesses to name this week’s chain:

  • By one measure it's a top-five pizza chain in the United States, ahead of names you'd assume dwarf it.

  • Despite its handmade pizza, it doesn’t consider itself a restaurant as its business also consists of fuel, groceries, and a retail-media ad network.

  • It opens often in small towns where it’s the only hot food for miles, with roughly 2,900 locations across 20 mostly-Midwestern states.

Find the answer at the bottom of the email…

Power Moves

Here are some notable C-suite moves from the past week:

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

NAME THAT CHAIN ANSWER: Casey’s General Stores

Reply

or to participate.