Why New Brands Are Franchising At Break-Neck Speed

QSR Magazine:

Franchised restaurants have scores of ways to measure speed.

One tally might be how many seconds - or, gasp, minutes - a car spends in the drive-thru loop. Another benchmark might be the time it takes a new-fangled fryer to get potatoes from freezer to front counter. Or how long it takes a pot of coffee to lose its freshness.

As the first quarter of 2007 draws to a close, a new measurement of speed is how fast and aggressive a new brand goes from a handful of stores, or even a single store, to a franchise agreement.

‘In the 2007 marketplace, what’s driving concepts into franchising is the speed of the market,’ says Darrell Johnson of FRANDATA, a company specializing in compiling and analyzing information about the franchising market.

In the restaurant industry, which sees the public’s reliance on it grow exponentially each year, the speedy marketplace increases the opportunity for emerging and even infant restaurant ideas to go immediately to franchising as a growth model.

‘As the market becomes more developed, becomes more crowded, it’s all about getting there first,’ says Darren Tristano, executive vice president of Technomic, which tracks the foodservice industry and its trends.