Global foodservice intelligence
Data-backed intelligence on how restaurant, coffee, and tea chains grow, franchise, and expand across markets — every figure tied to a source.
FoodBud's 12-part translated and annotated edition of Zhang Hongfu's Mixue founder-history memoir, with the source text kept separate from FoodBud analysis and notes.
(opens in new tab)A visible cluster of U.S. franchisee bankruptcy filings shows the franchisor gap's other side: royalty and supply-chain revenue can hold up while franchisees absorb rent, labour, food inflation and debt at the store level. Four cases, read on their own basis.
(opens in new tab)Domino's Q2 looked contradictory: U.S. same-store sales barely rose, international comps slipped, but revenue still grew. The answer is the model. Domino's is a franchisor with a supply-chain engine, and Q2 was a logistics quarter hiding inside a pizza headline.
(opens in new tab)Jersey Mike's filed to list on the NYSE as JMKE. Read it as a franchisor, not a sandwich chain: ~$4.2B of 2025 systemwide sales, ~$724M of fiscal 2025 revenue, ~99% franchised — and an implied equity value that is a valuation output, not operating scale.
(opens in new tab)Mixue has more stores than McDonald's or Starbucks, but that does not make it the world's largest restaurant company by sales. It is a franchise-led, supply-chain-monetizing system where store count, GMV, revenue, and market value all mean different things.
(opens in new tab)Darden owns and operates its restaurants, so its $13.2B in FY2026 revenue is its actual scale — the company-operated mirror image of a franchisor's system-sales gap. The clean yardstick for company-operated revenue.
(opens in new tab)Same-store sales is the most-quoted number in restaurant earnings and the most misread. A comp is a traffic effect times a price-and-mix effect — decompose it into transactions and check before you judge the business. The analyst's lens, with worked examples from Starbucks, McDonald's, and Darden.
(opens in new tab)A franchisor's system sales and its revenue are two completely different things — and the gap between them is the franchise model itself. How $139B of customer spending becomes $27B of McDonald's revenue, why Domino's ratio is higher (supply chain), and the cross-basis comparison that misleads everyone.
(opens in new tab)Five of the biggest Western restaurant brands in China — KFC/Pizza Hut, McDonald's, Starbucks, Burger King, Domino's — and not one is a wholly-owned, HQ-operated business. The discipline that keeps you from misreading all of them: the footprint belongs to the operator, the royalty belongs to HQ, and the two must never be stacked.
(opens in new tab)Sysco is buying Restaurant Depot's parent for ~$29.1B — the largest deal in its history, in the invisible distribution layer beneath every restaurant. A distributor is sized by revenue and share, not operator metrics; and the price isn't Sysco's scale.
(opens in new tab)The 2026 China F&B Hong Kong IPO wave is record-breaking and sharply split — Mixue +130%, Nayuki −94%. A caliber framework for reading it: the franchise rate decides the basis, and the subscription multiple decides nothing.
