Atlanta — Focus Brands®, the parent company of Auntie Anne’s®, Carvel®, Cinnabon®, Jamba®, McAlister’s Deli®, Moe’s Southwest Grill® and Schlotzsky’s®, has closed out fiscal year 2022 exceeding $3.9 billion in system-wide sales for the first time in its history. Nearly 650 new franchise deals were signed, and 400-plus stores opened globally.
Key to Focus Brands’ growth strategy has been its transformation into a platform company. Finding portfolio-wide synergies and cost savings adds more fuel to the company’s individual brands. In 2023, Focus Brands is prioritizing the ‘Power of the Portfolio,’ harmonizing across brands to create efficiencies, shared resources, menu diversity and more — in turn, driving long term results.
Notably, 2022 marked the first full year with the company’s reimaged Focus Brands Supply Chain organization. The company’s multimillion-dollar investment brought the purchasing arm of the supply chain function back in-house, and rationalized hundreds of SKUs across its seven brands. Bringing supply chain in-house allows Focus Brands to fully leverage the power of seven brands across one portfolio to maximize the value chain.
Additionally, Focus Brands is also investing heavily in technology, making major improvements across loyalty programs and digital channels to help drive business and increase sales for franchisees. Last year, Focus Brands successfully unlocked incremental sales by building and launching a unified front-end offer engine and suggestive selling. The best-in-class digital platform can be replicated across all seven chains, which will be a primary focus in 2023. In the common platform, consumers get better digital ordering experiences and owners experience higher conversion rates. Focus Brands has set a goal to have its digital and loyalty sales mix comprise 50% of the business within the next 5 years.
Alongside strong sales performance, Focus Brands continues to see development surge across its portfolio of brands. While Focus Brands will continue to develop single brand-specific traditional and non-traditional retail locations, there is a large appetite when it comes to the vast opportunity in a multi-brand development strategy as the future of QSR. By integrating unique brands into a single retail space, the company’s brands are able to meet consumer demand in new and innovative ways while giving brand franchisees the opportunity to increase average volume and bottom-line profitability. Currently Focus Brands boasts more than 1,100 branded units that are co-located or co-branded with another brand in the portfolio, with even more in various stages of development.
Jim Holthauser, Focus Brands
“Our brands have so much runway in both the U.S. and around the world,” says Jim Holthouser, chief executive officer of Focus Brands. “In the U.S., many of our brands are still very regional and have the opportunity to expand outside of their core areas with the backing of the Focus Brands portfolio. Internationally, our brands have 1,900-plus locations and we are hard at work growing our brands in these markets. The key to our growth strategy will be synergies across our portfolio, bringing supply chain in-house, heavy investments in technology innovations, and growth via M&A as we expand with concepts that complement our existing brands and allow us to continue to grow in new markets.”
Atlanta-based Focus Brands® is a leading developer of global multi-channel foodservice brands. Focus Brands, through its affiliate brands, is the franchisor and operator of more than 6,600 locations in all 50 states and in 60 countries and territories. For more information, visit www.focusbrands.com.
SOURCE: Focus Brands®