Should I open or buy a Salad and Go franchise in 2027?

The phone call that ends the plan

Picture the sequence that plays out for almost everyone who lands on this question. You drive past a Salad and Go in Phoenix or Scottsdale at 12:15 on a Tuesday. There are eleven cars stacked in the drive-thru lane. The building is small — a modular pad, maybe 700 square feet, with no dining room, no host stand, and a crew of four visible through the window. The menu board shows salads and wraps at price points that undercut the Chipotle across the street. You do the napkin math: eleven cars times four minutes of throughput, times a two-hour lunch rush, times a check average somewhere in the low teens. It looks like the cleanest small-footprint restaurant model you have ever seen, and you want one.

So you go home and search for the franchise application. You find a half-dozen sites with names like "franchise cost calculator" and "top franchise opportunities" that publish a Salad and Go page complete with an estimated initial investment range, an implied royalty, and a "request information" form. You fill one out. Within a day you get an email from someone describing themselves as a franchise development consultant who wants a discovery call.

That call is where the plan should end, and here is why: Salad and Go does not franchise. Every location the company operates is company-owned. There is no franchise disclosure document registered for the brand, which means there is no Item 5 initial fee, no Item 7 estimated initial investment, no Item 19 financial performance representation, and no Item 20 outlet table listing franchisees you could call. Those three things — Item 7, Item 19, Item 20 — are the entire evidentiary basis on which a rational person underwrites a restaurant franchise. Without them you are not evaluating a business opportunity; you are evaluating a photograph of one.

The aggregator pages that show a Salad and Go "franchise cost" are not lying so much as generating. They model what the investment *would* cost by scraping construction and equipment comparables from adjacent brands and presenting the output as if it were disclosed. It reads as authoritative because it is formatted like an FDD summary. It is not one. The tell is simple: ask the site to name the FDD issuance date and the registration state. A real disclosure has both.

The second half of the framing scenario matters just as much. Salad and Go went through a significant contraction — the company closed a large block of stores in Texas and Oklahoma and refocused operations on its home markets in Arizona and Nevada. That happened under a leadership change, with Mike Tattersfield, formerly of Krispy Kreme, taking the chief executive role. Read that correctly. A brand that pulls out of two expansion states to consolidate around its original geography is a brand telling you that its model is geographically conditional. It works where it works. It did not travel as cleanly as the unit-level economics in Phoenix suggested it would.

That is the actual lesson buried in this question, and it survives the fact that you cannot buy the franchise. The eleven cars you counted are not a national phenomenon. They are a Sunbelt, car-commute, year-round-warm phenomenon. Anyone who wants to replicate this concept independently needs to underwrite that conditionality first and the build cost second. Most people do it in the opposite order, which is how you end up with a purpose-built drive-thru salad pad in a metro where nobody buys cold food in February.

How a franchise system actually transfers value — and what you lose without one

It helps to be precise about what you are buying when you buy a franchise, because that is exactly the list of things you forfeit if you build an independent drive-thru salad concept instead. There are five real transfers, and only one of them is the trademark.

The disclosure package. Federal rules require a franchisor to give you an FDD at least fourteen calendar days before you sign anything or pay anything. Twenty-three items. Item 7 gives you a low-high range on total initial investment broken into line items. Item 19 is optional for the franchisor, but if they make any financial performance representation at all it must live there and it must be substantiated. Item 20 gives you outlet counts by state for three years — openings, closures, transfers, terminations — plus contact information for current and former franchisees. That last list is the single most valuable document in the package and most buyers barely use it.

The operating system. Recipes, prep specs, hold times, station layouts, POS configuration, labor matrices tied to sales volume, opening and closing checklists. For a salad concept this is not trivial. Produce has a short usable life, and the difference between an operator running four to six percent food waste and one running twelve percent is almost entirely prep discipline and par-level accuracy — knowledge that takes an independent operator a year of expensive trial to build and that a franchisor hands you in a binder on day one.

Supply chain. A franchise system negotiates distribution agreements as a block. An independent single-unit operator buys produce, proteins, and packaging at the worst pricing tier available. On a salad concept where cost of goods is a large share of every dollar, that spread is not cosmetic.

Site and real estate discipline. Franchisors approve sites, and the good ones say no. They have trade-area criteria calibrated on actual performance across their existing units. An independent operator has a broker who gets paid when a lease is signed, which is a materially different incentive.

Brand recall. Worth the least of the five for a regional fast-casual concept and worth the most in the buyer's imagination. Nobody drives across town for a salad brand. They buy the salad that is on the way.

Against those five transfers you pay: an initial franchise fee, a continuing royalty on gross sales, an advertising fund contribution, and a loss of operating autonomy that is genuinely constraining — you cannot change the menu, the pricing structure, the vendors, or the hours without approval.

The mechanism diagram below traces where a prospective Salad and Go buyer actually ends up once the no-franchise fact is established.

Notice what the diagram does not contain: any node where you acquire a Salad and Go. There is no such node. If a broker tells you otherwise, ask for the FDD and the state registration number, and end the conversation when neither arrives.

One more mechanical point that catches people. Some prospective buyers hear "company-owned" and pivot to "then I will buy an existing location as a business acquisition." That is not available either. Company-owned units are not individually salable assets in the way an independent restaurant is; the company operates them as part of a portfolio, and a divestiture of individual stores to owner-operators would itself constitute franchising and require the disclosure apparatus the company does not maintain. What *did* become available during the Texas and Oklahoma contraction was real estate — closed drive-thru pads, already permitted, already fitted for a small-footprint quick-service operation. That is a genuine opportunity and it is discussed further down, but it is a lease negotiation with a landlord, not a brand acquisition.

The numbers you can actually verify

Here is the discipline that separates a real underwriting exercise from a daydream: only cite numbers you can trace to a document. For franchised concepts that document is the FDD. For an independent build it is contractor bids and equipment quotes with your name on them. Everything else is a guess wearing a suit.

Initial franchise fee. For fast-casual salad and bowl concepts this typically lands in the tens of thousands for a single unit, with area development agreements pricing multiple units at a discount to the single-unit rate. It is paid at signing and it is almost never refundable. Confirm the exact figure in Item 5 of the specific FDD you are handed — not a summary of it, not last year's version.

Total initial investment. This is Item 7, and it is a range, not a number. The spread between the low and high end of a fast-casual Item 7 is usually enormous, and the reason is almost entirely real estate condition. A second-generation restaurant space that already has a functioning hood, grease interceptor, adequate electrical service, and restrooms that meet accessibility code can cut a very large amount off a build. A raw shell or ground-up pad with no existing infrastructure sits at the top of the range or above it. When you read an Item 7, find the line for leasehold improvements and assume you land in the upper half unless you have a signed contractor bid saying otherwise.

For an independent drive-thru salad concept — the closest thing to replicating what you saw in that Phoenix parking lot — the honest way to build the number is bottom-up, not by copying somebody's franchise range:

• Building shell or modular structure. A small drive-thru-only footprint is the cheapest restaurant building type there is, but it is not cheap. Modular units, site work, utility runs, and the drive lane itself all price separately.
• Kitchen equipment. A salad concept skips the expensive line — no fryers, no charbroiler, often no hood at all if you are not cooking proteins on-site. That is a real structural cost advantage. You need substantial refrigeration, prep tables, a walk-in cooler, and cold-holding capacity, and you need more of it than a comparable hot-food concept because your inventory is perishable and your par levels are high.
• Drive-thru technology. Menu boards, order confirmation display, headsets, timing system, and the POS integration to run it. This is a line item people forget entirely and it is not small.
• Site work and permitting. Drive lanes trigger traffic review in many jurisdictions. Stacking requirements, curb cuts, and queue length minimums vary by municipality and can kill a site outright after you have spent money on it.
• Working capital. Three months minimum, and for a concept building trial from zero brand recognition, six is more defensible. Underfunded working capital is the most common cause of first-year restaurant failure and it has nothing to do with whether the concept was good.

Royalty and advertising. Franchised fast-casual concepts commonly charge a continuing royalty as a percentage of gross sales — mid-single digits is typical for the segment — plus a separate advertising fund contribution, usually a smaller percentage, and often a local marketing spend requirement on top. Read all three as one combined number, because that is how it hits your P&L. Note also that royalty is on *gross* sales, not net and certainly not profit. A bad month still owes royalty.

Cost of goods. Salad concepts run a higher food cost percentage than most quick-service formats. Produce is expensive per calorie delivered, it has a short shelf life, and yield loss during prep is real — you are paying for the outer leaves and the cores you throw away. Protein toppings, particularly chicken, drive the number further up. The offsetting advantage is that you are not paying for a cook line, cooking energy, or the labor to run one.

Labor. This is the binding constraint in the current environment and it is worth being specific about the wage floors in the two states Salad and Go retrenched into, because they are the markets where the model is proven. Arizona's minimum wage adjusts annually with inflation and sits well above the federal floor. Nevada moved to a single statewide minimum wage of $12.00 per hour in July 2024 — the state eliminated its previous two-tier system and does not permit a tip credit, so every employee, tipped or not, is on that same floor. Neither state gives you a cheap labor pool. Your fully loaded crew cost — wage plus payroll taxes, workers' compensation, and any benefits — runs meaningfully above the posted minimum, and you should model it that way rather than plugging the headline rate into your pro forma.

Occupancy. Rent plus common area maintenance plus insurance plus taxes, expressed as a percentage of sales, is the swing factor that decides whether a marginal unit works. A small-footprint drive-thru pad has low absolute rent but you are paying for land, not square footage, at a high-visibility corner. Owning the pad rather than leasing it changes the entire economics of the concept and is the single largest lever available to an independent operator with capital.

What a franchisor will require of you before you sign. Fast-casual franchisors screen on liquid capital and net worth, and the thresholds are not negotiable in the way buyers hope. Expect a meaningful liquidity requirement in cash — not equity in your house, not retirement accounts — plus a net worth floor several multiples above it. Multi-unit development agreements raise both. If you do not clear the single-unit threshold comfortably, you are not underfunded for the application; you are underfunded for the business.

Financing. SBA 7(a) is the default instrument for a first restaurant and franchised concepts on the SBA Franchise Directory move faster through underwriting than independent concepts, which have to document projections from scratch. Expect a substantial equity injection requirement, a personal guaranty, and a lien on available collateral including, commonly, your home. Rates float against prime with a spread set by the lender. The loan is a ten-year term for working capital and equipment, longer if real estate is included, which materially changes your debt service and is worth structuring for.

What you give up on each path — and the pad-conversion play

Three genuinely distinct routes exist, and the trade-offs run in different directions.

Franchise an established salad concept. You get the disclosure package, the operating system, the supply agreements, and site approval discipline. You give up roughly a tenth of every dollar of gross revenue to royalty and ad fund combined, forever, and you give up menu and pricing autonomy. The critical evaluation step here is Item 20. Pull the three-year outlet table and compute the net change and, separately, the closure and termination counts. A system opening units while quietly terminating a comparable number is a system where franchisees are failing and being replaced. That pattern is visible in Item 20 and nowhere else, and it is the most reliable early warning signal available to a buyer. Then call franchisees from the Item 20 list — a dozen of them, deliberately split between the newest cohort and the oldest. Ask five questions and nothing else: what were your actual first-year sales, what is your actual food cost percentage, what is your actual labor percentage, what is your occupancy cost, and would you do it again. The last question, asked of a dozen people, is a better predictor than any pro forma.

Buy a franchise resale. An existing unit with a trailing twelve months of real P&L is a fundamentally different risk profile than a new build. You are buying demonstrated revenue in a demonstrated trade area, you skip the construction timeline entirely, and you often pay below replacement cost. Restaurant resales are typically priced as a multiple of seller's discretionary earnings, and the multiple is low for single-unit operations because the buyer pool is small and the earnings are owner-dependent. The trade-off: you inherit whatever is wrong. A unit selling at an attractive multiple is frequently selling because sales are declining, the lease is short with no renewal options, deferred maintenance is stacked up, or the trade area has shifted. Demand the tax returns, not just the P&L, and read the lease before you read anything else. A great restaurant with two years left on a lease and no options is not an asset, it is a two-year annuity.

Build independent. This is the only route that lets you actually copy the Salad and Go format, because no salad franchisor is selling dedicated drive-thru-only pad development as a standard package. You keep every dollar of gross — no royalty, no ad fund, no approval process. You also build everything yourself: recipes, prep specs, vendor relationships, hiring, training, marketing from zero brand recognition. Budget more for local marketing in the first eighteen months than any franchise agreement would require of you, because trial has to be bought and nobody has heard of you.

This is also where the pad-conversion play lives, and it is the most underrated option on the list. The Texas and Oklahoma closures left behind purpose-built drive-thru structures fitted for exactly this kind of operation — small footprint, cold-focused kitchen, drive lane already permitted and built to municipal stacking requirements. A landlord holding a dark single-tenant pad with a specialized use is in a weak negotiating position. Their alternative tenant pool is narrow. You may be able to negotiate free rent during buildout, a tenant improvement allowance, and a below-market base rate with escalators you control. And you get something no site-selection software provides: a trade area where a directly comparable concept already operated, so you know what the daypart pattern and the car counts actually produced rather than what a model predicted they would.

The caution attached to that play is the same conditionality noted earlier. Those pads went dark for a reason. Some of it was portfolio-level strategy — a company consolidating around home markets under new leadership — and some of it was site-level performance. Your job is to figure out which applied at the specific address you are looking at, and the way you do that is by sitting in the parking lot across the street at 11:30 on a weekday with a clicker, three separate days, and comparing what you count against the daytime population and traffic data for the intersection.

The mistakes that sink this specific deal

Paying a broker for access to a franchise that does not exist. Never wire money to anyone representing themselves as a Salad and Go area developer or master franchisee. Those roles do not exist for this brand. The general rule applies broadly: before any money moves, you receive a copy of the FDD, you note the issuance date and the state registration, and you wait the required period. A broker who pressures you to move faster than the disclosure timeline is telling you something important about the deal.

Treating an aggregator's "estimated investment" as a disclosed figure. If a number is not in an Item 7 you were handed directly by the franchisor, it is an estimate produced by someone with no obligation to be accurate and often an incentive to be optimistic. Underwrite from documents.

Ignoring the seasonality of cold food in a drive-thru-only format. A concept with no dining room has no cushion. In a metro with a real winter, cold-food demand drops meaningfully for months, and a format that cannot pivot to hot items or capture dine-in traffic eats that drop directly. Model your slow season explicitly — do not average it into an annual number that hides it. Then check whether your debt service is covered in the worst month, not the average month.

Underestimating produce waste. Every point of food cost above your model comes straight out of the same line as your owner compensation. Salad concepts fail on par-level discipline more than on sales. Build a prep sheet driven by a rolling sales forecast from day one, count waste daily, and treat a waste number above the mid single digits as a five-alarm operational problem rather than a cost of doing business.

Scaling to multiple units without back-of-house infrastructure. The structural advantage behind the Salad and Go model is centralized production — a commissary doing the volume prep and distributing to small-footprint stores that mostly assemble. Independent operators who open a fourth and fifth unit while still prepping everything in each store discover that their food cost and labor cost both climb with every location instead of falling. If your growth plan involves more than three units, the commissary is a capital line in the plan from the start, not a problem you solve later.

Signing a personal guaranty without a release provision. Franchise agreements and SBA loans both come with personal guaranties, and buyers accept them as unavoidable. The guaranty is unavoidable; its permanence is not. A franchise attorney — and hire one, this is not a place to save money — will push for a release conditioned on sustained performance and a net worth threshold. Some franchisors grant it. None offer it unprompted.

Skipping the franchisee calls because the Item 19 looks strong. An Item 19 is a real disclosure with real substantiation behind it, but it is also a curated presentation. It may report a subset of units, a top quartile, or a specific cohort, and the footnotes tell you which. Read the footnotes, then verify against operators. The gap between a system's reported averages and what a dozen franchisees tell you on the phone is the single most informative number you will generate in the whole process.

Confusing revenue with profit at the unit level. Impressive average unit volumes circulate constantly in fast-casual discussion. A high AUV in a dense urban market carries an occupancy cost and a build cost that a suburban pad does not. Judge concepts on the relationship between total invested capital and unit-level cash flow, not on the top-line number in a press release.

Applying a RevOps mindset only to the deal and not to the operation. Whatever discipline you brought to underwriting this — instrumented assumptions, tracked variance against forecast, a defined hurdle rate — is exactly the discipline that keeps the unit alive after it opens. Daily sales against forecast, food and labor as a percentage of sales reviewed weekly rather than monthly, and a single owner-level dashboard that tells you within a week when something has drifted. Restaurants do not usually fail suddenly; they fail slowly while nobody is measuring.

Related questions

Can I buy an existing Salad and Go location as a business acquisition?

No. Company-owned units are operated as part of the company's portfolio and are not sold to individual operators — selling them to owner-operators would itself constitute franchising. What became available during the Texas and Oklahoma closures was leasable drive-thru real estate, negotiated with landlords rather than with the brand.

Why did Salad and Go close stores in Texas and Oklahoma?

The company closed a substantial block of locations in those two states to consolidate around its core Arizona and Nevada markets, under a leadership change that brought in Mike Tattersfield as chief executive. Read it as evidence the drive-thru-only format is geographically conditional rather than universally portable.

What is the minimum capital to open a drive-thru salad concept?

There is no single figure, and any source giving you one without a signed contractor bid or an Item 7 is estimating. The honest approach is bottom-up: building, equipment, drive-thru technology, site work and permitting, plus at least three months of working capital and preferably six.

Is an independent concept better than franchising for this format?

For a drive-thru-only salad pad specifically, independent is the only route that produces the format, since no salad franchisor packages dedicated drive-thru development. You trade the operating system, supply chain, and disclosure package for full autonomy and no royalty. It is the harder path with the higher ceiling.

How do I verify a franchise opportunity is legitimate?

Ask for the FDD and the state registration number. A legitimate franchisor provides it and observes the fourteen-day waiting period before accepting money or signatures. Then read Item 20's three-year outlet table and call franchisees from the contact list it is required to include.

FAQ

Does Salad and Go franchise in 2027?

No. The brand operates entirely company-owned locations and has never offered franchises. There is no franchise disclosure document, no initial fee, no royalty structure, and no franchise application process. Any website presenting a Salad and Go "franchise cost" is publishing a modeled estimate, not a disclosed figure, and any person offering to sell you an area development agreement for the brand should be treated as a red flag rather than an opportunity.

What are the closest concepts I could actually franchise instead?

Saladworks and Just Salad are the established salads-first fast-casual systems that franchise, though Just Salad has historically been selective about awarding units. Both will hand you a full FDD with Item 7 investment ranges, Item 19 financial performance representations if they choose to make one, and an Item 20 franchisee contact list. Request the current year's document directly from the franchisor rather than relying on any summary.

What does the fourteen-day rule actually require?

Federal franchise rules require the franchisor to give you the complete FDD at least fourteen calendar days before you sign any binding agreement or pay any money connected to the sale. The clock starts when you receive the document, not when you request it. Use the full period. If you also negotiate changes to the agreement, a separate waiting period applies to the revised version.

How much of my gross sales goes to the franchisor?

Combined royalty and advertising fund contributions for fast-casual concepts typically land in the high single digits as a percentage of gross sales, sometimes with an additional required local marketing spend on top. Read all components together, and note that it is assessed on gross revenue — a month where you lose money still owes the full amount. Item 6 of the FDD lists every recurring fee the system charges.

Is a franchise resale a safer entry than a new build?

Often, yes, because you are underwriting demonstrated performance in a proven trade area rather than a projection, and you skip a construction timeline that routinely runs longer than planned. The offset is that you inherit the unit's problems. Read the lease and its remaining term and options before anything else, demand tax returns alongside the P&L, and find out specifically why the seller is selling.

What should I model for the slow season in a drive-thru-only format?

Model it explicitly rather than folding it into an annual average. Cold-food concepts see real demand softening in winter months, and a format with no dining room has no offsetting traffic to absorb it. The test that matters: does your worst forecast month still cover debt service, occupancy, and minimum viable labor? If it only clears on the annual average, you are underfunded.

Sources

• Franchise Rule Compliance Guide — Federal Trade Commission
• A Consumer's Guide to Buying a Franchise — Federal Trade Commission
• SBA 7(a) Loan Program
• SBA Franchise Directory
• Salad and Go — Wikipedia
• Consolidated Minimum Wage Table — U.S. Department of Labor
• Nevada Minimum Wage — Nevada Office of the Labor Commissioner
• Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics — U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
• USDA Agricultural Marketing Service — Market News
• Saladworks Franchising — Investment and Financials

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