The Company-Owned Advantage: Why Fast-Casual's Biggest Winners Are Rejecting Franchising

The most financially successful fast-casual brands of the past decade share an unusual trait: they don't franchise. Chipotle's 3,600-plus locations, every CAVA bowl served, every Sweetgreen salad assembled in a company kitchen, all of it owned and operated by the parent company. No franchisees collecting royalties, no multi-unit operators setting their own labor practices, no brand drift at the unit level.

This is not an accident. It is a deliberate structural choice, and the financial results increasingly validate it.

Now one prominent exception is emerging. Shake Shack, which built its identity and premium positioning largely through company-owned units, announced plans to launch franchising in 2026. The company targets 1,500 company-owned locations domestically and is opening up to 60 new restaurants this year, but the franchise signal is clear: even Shake Shack is testing whether the growth math works better with outside capital.

The contrast sets up the defining strategic question in fast-casual right now: does company ownership create competitive advantage, or is it simply a growth constraint that successful brands eventually outgrow?

CAVA's Numbers Make the Case

If you want to understand why company ownership can work at scale, look at CAVA's Q1 2026 results. Revenue hit $331.8 million, up 28.1% year over year. Same-store sales grew 10.8%. The chain opened 73 net new restaurants in the quarter alone, a pace that would put most franchise systems to shame. The store base expanded 16.7% year over year.

Every one of those restaurants is company-owned. Every dollar of that same-store sales growth flows directly to CAVA's income statement. There are no royalty caps, no franchise agreement complications, no misaligned incentives between the brand and the operator of the unit.

CAVA's ability to iterate quickly on its menu, its digital ordering experience, and its labor model stems directly from this structure. When the brand decides to test a new protein or change its throughput protocols, the rollout is a corporate directive, not a negotiation with thousands of independent franchisees.

CAVA's overall revenue grew 20% over the comparable period, with comps growth of 2.1% in a broader context of flat-to-declining traffic at most QSR and fast-casual competitors. The performance gap between CAVA and the broader industry is not explained entirely by company ownership, but company ownership is a significant enabler of the consistency that drives repeat visits.

Chipotle's Scale Proof Point

Skeptics of the company-owned model often argue it cannot scale beyond a certain point. The capital intensity becomes prohibitive. The corporate overhead grows faster than revenue. You need outside capital to build thousands of locations quickly.

Chipotle's 3,600-plus locations disprove that theory at a meaningful scale. The chain generated $2.88 billion in revenue in Q1 2026, up 6.4% year over year, though it missed analyst estimates by 2.1%. That shortfall has triggered real concern about traffic trends, but it does not undermine the structural point: Chipotle built a massive system, entirely company-owned, and generates the cash flows to fund continued expansion without franchise capital.

What company ownership bought Chipotle was the ability to execute its "best burger" analogue: the "best burrito" quality standards program, the Chipotlane drive-through format rollout, and most recently its robotic makeline partnership with Hyphen, all deployed system-wide without franchisee consent battles. When the brand identified a throughput problem, it could mandate "four pillars" training at every location immediately. No franchise disclosure documents, no change-in-system-standards fights.

That kind of operational agility has real dollar value. In a segment where speed of execution on a new format or a new menu item can mean months of competitive advantage, moving the entire system at once matters.

Sweetgreen and the Selective Growth Trade-off

Sweetgreen is the counterpoint that shows the model's limits. The brand is all company-owned, expanding into Nashville and Salt Lake City in 2026, but also closing "a handful" of underperforming locations. Fifteen new openings this year is a cautious number for a brand of Sweetgreen's profile.

The closures and the modest growth plan reflect the capital constraint that comes with company ownership: every new restaurant requires corporate balance sheet funding. There is no franchisee writing a check to open a location in a new market. Sweetgreen's expansion speed is directly limited by its own capital position and risk appetite.

This is the honest trade-off. Company ownership gives you control and margin capture, but it gates growth to what the parent company can fund and absorb. For a brand like Sweetgreen that is still working toward consistent profitability across its portfolio, that means slower expansion than the brand's awareness might suggest is possible.

Operators evaluating fast-casual concepts should read Sweetgreen's situation clearly: the company-owned model is not a guaranteed path to fast growth. It is a path to controlled growth, with the brand governing every unit, at a pace the balance sheet can sustain.

The QSR Contrast

The fast-casual company-owned discipline looks even sharper when you compare it to the traditional QSR franchise model. McDonald's operates approximately 95% of its locations through franchisees. Burger King is nearly 100% franchised. These brands collect royalties and fees on enormous system sales volumes without deploying capital against every unit.

The franchise model made sense for the asset-light growth era. It allowed brands to achieve global scale quickly using franchisee capital, distributing operating risk across thousands of independent operators. The tradeoff was reduced per-unit margin capture, brand consistency challenges, and the constant friction of franchisor-franchisee negotiations over capital investment requirements.

Traditional QSR brands are now spending years and billions trying to fix what company-owned fast-casual built in from the beginning: consistent unit economics, modern equipment, digital integration, and brand standards that don't depend on whether a given franchisee decided to invest in a remodel. McDonald's "best burger" program, for instance, required years of negotiation and incentive structures to push through its franchised system. Chipotle made similar quality upgrades across its entire system operationally, without that friction.

This is not an argument that franchising is a failed model at scale. McDonald's generates enormous returns from its franchise structure. But it does illustrate that the comparison between a 95%-franchised QSR giant and a 100%-company-owned fast-casual brand is a comparison between two fundamentally different businesses, even if they are both classified as restaurants.

Why Shake Shack's Move Is Significant

Shake Shack's decision to launch franchising signals something important: even brands that built their identity and pricing power on company-owned operations can reach a point where growth speed outweighs the control advantage.

The company is not abandoning company ownership. Its domestic ambitions remain anchored to company-operated units, targeting 1,500 domestically, and the 2026 class of up to 60 new restaurants will be primarily company-owned. But the franchise announcement signals that Shake Shack's management believes franchise capital can fund expansion in markets or geographies where the company balance sheet faces constraints, without sacrificing the core domestic brand experience.

Whether that judgment proves correct will depend heavily on execution. The risk is brand drift: a franchised Shake Shack that cuts corners on ingredient quality or staffing levels creates a consumer experience inconsistent with the brand premium that justifies $15 burgers. Operators and investors watching this play out should track unit-level metrics closely in franchised locations once they open.

For now, Shake Shack's move is best understood as a test of a hybrid theory: that a brand can preserve company-owned discipline at home while using franchise capital to expand at the edges. It is a theory that has not been proven in premium fast-casual.

What Operators Should Take From This

The company-owned model is not inherently superior to franchising. It is a strategic choice that comes with specific tradeoffs, and the results depend entirely on whether the brand executes consistently at the unit level.

What the CAVA and Chipotle track records demonstrate is that company ownership, when combined with strong unit economics and disciplined real estate selection, enables a type of operational velocity and brand consistency that franchise systems struggle to match. The ability to change anything about the product, the experience, or the technology at every location simultaneously is genuinely valuable, and it is structurally unavailable to a brand operating through thousands of independent franchisees.

The capital constraint is real. Sweetgreen's slower growth relative to CAVA is partly explained by balance sheet differences, not just brand strength differences. But the answer to capital constraints is not automatically "franchise it." It may be "raise more equity," "slow down growth," or "build stronger unit economics before expanding."

What CAVA's Q1 2026 results illustrate most clearly is that the market rewards operators who can demonstrate both growth and quality at scale. A 28.1% revenue increase with 10.8% same-store sales growth, all from company-owned units, is the kind of performance that makes the company-owned model look like strategy, not constraint.

The franchise question in fast-casual is not settled. But the brands currently winning the segment have made their answer clear.

QSR Pro covers the business of quick service and fast-casual restaurants. Industry data referenced includes publicly reported Q1 2026 earnings and company disclosures.