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I have walked past a thousand of these and never once thought about what is behind the door.There is no bag in a box in ...
09/02/2026

I have walked past a thousand of these and never once thought about what is behind the door.

There is no bag in a box in there. Just rows of little cartridges, each one holding a single concentrated ingredient. Coke’s engineers took the idea from micro-dosing, the equipment built to measure out medication. One 46 ounce cartridge does the work of a five gallon bag.

That is a real piece of engineering. It cut freight, it cut back room shelf space, and it put over 100 drinks on a footprint that used to hold a handful.

Here is the part we all walk past. The machine counts every pour and sends it back to Coca-Cola. They can watch a new flavor land, store by store, while it is happening. You are running the room, buying the cups, paying the rent, and the cleanest read on what your guests are drinking sits on somebody else’s dashboard.

I am not mad at Coke for building that. I would have built it too. I just think it is worth noticing how much of a restaurant gets designed by companies that are not the restaurant. Your ordering. Your customer list. Your reviews. Your delivery. Same shape, every time.

What is one thing in your place that you know is reporting on you?

Sources: Fast Company, “Inside Coke’s Freestyle Soda Fountain,” Nov 2009 (46 oz cartridge equals a 5 gallon bag, continuous data stream to Coke); QSR Magazine on the Freestyle 9100 launch and micro-dosing; Coca-Cola’s Freestyle product page (100+ combinations).

Photos via Wikimedia Commons: Tdorante10 (CC BY-SA 4.0), Jeff Moriarty (CC BY 2.0), Phillip Pessar (CC BY 2.0, two images), Nielsoncaetanosalmeron (CC BY 4.0), Rowanswiki (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Harland Sanders was forty years old and had never sold a piece of chicken.He took a service station in North Corbin, Ken...
08/31/2026

Harland Sanders was forty years old and had never sold a piece of chicken.

He took a service station in North Corbin, Kentucky in 1930 and started feeding whoever pulled in, off his own dining table. By 1937 he had built a cafe with 142 seats. Then the new interstate went around Corbin and the traffic he had built the whole thing on went with it.

So he went out and sold the recipe instead. In 1952 he shook hands with a restaurant owner in Salt Lake City named Pete Harman. Four cents a chicken, later a nickel, nothing signed. By 1964 more than 600 places were selling his chicken.

That March he sold the company. Two million dollars paid out over six years, and a job as goodwill ambassador at forty thousand a year. Seven years later the men who bought it sold KFC to Heublein for 285 million. In 1973 he sued them for putting his face on products he had nothing to do with, and settled for a million in 1975.

The part that gets me is the last sixteen years. He is still working. Still in the white suit. On television every week. And when the gravy changed he could do nothing about it except tell a reporter in Louisville it had turned into wallpaper paste, which got him sued by one of his own franchisees.

He had the recipe and the face and no vote.

Most of us are never selling a company. We give the same thing away in smaller pieces. The app takes the customer, the app sets the price, the app owns the review, and one day you go to change something about your own restaurant and find out you cannot.

If somebody put two million on your counter tomorrow for the whole thing, would you take it?

Photos: Colonel Sanders in Tehran, 1970s, public domain via Wikimedia Commons. Harland Sanders circa 1914, public domain. Sanders Cafe, Corbin, Kentucky by Ka!zen, CC BY-SA 2.0. Harland Sanders Cafe and Museum by Missvain, CC BY 4.0. Original Kentucky Fried Chicken by Antony-22, CC BY-SA 4.0.

I went down a rabbit hole on In-N-Out this week and the thing that stuck with me is not the burger. It is what is missin...
08/28/2026

I went down a rabbit hole on In-N-Out this week and the thing that stuck with me is not the burger. It is what is missing from the building.

No freezer. No heat lamp. No microwave. Harry and Esther Snyder opened one stand in Baldwin Park in 1948 and ground the beef themselves, and almost eighty years later the company still will not put a freezer in a store.

The patties come out of three company facilities, two in California and one in Texas. Whole chucks, b***d and ground by butchers on their own payroll. Nothing is frozen between that room and the grill.

Which means there is no buffer anywhere in the building. No tray of patties parked under a lamp waiting for the rush. Every burger starts when somebody orders it.

Here is the part people skip. That one absence also draws the map. Their VP of planning and development, Carl Van Fleet: “Nothing is ever frozen. Our new restaurant locations are limited by the distance we can travel from our patty-making facilities and distribution centers.” A day’s drive from a patty plant, and that is why it took them until February of this year to open a restaurant east of Texas.

I have run a line at 11pm on a Saturday. I know exactly how good a freezer sounds in that moment. What keeps pulling at me is that In-N-Out only gets to make that call because they own the whole chain, from the chuck to the counter. The second somebody else owns a link, they make the call and you find out about it after.

What is the one thing in your operation you refuse to hand off, even when it costs you?

Photos, all Wikimedia Commons: Jeremy Hall (CC BY 2.0), Spatms (CC BY-SA 4.0), Thank You (21 Millions+) views (CC BY 2.0), Northwalker (CC0), Xnatedawgx (CC BY-SA 4.0), Julianibarra (CC0).

I have sat at a Waffle House counter at 2am and watched the grill operator work a full line with nothing written down an...
08/27/2026

I have sat at a Waffle House counter at 2am and watched the grill operator work a full line with nothing written down anywhere.

No screen. No ticket rail. The server stands on one red tile set into the floor by the grill, calls the order out loud from that spot and only that spot, and the cook answers by putting a jelly pack on a plate. Right side up at six o’clock means scrambled eggs. Flip that same pack over and the toast is wheat. Apple butter instead of jelly and it is raisin toast. The plate is the ticket.

They have been calling orders that way since 1955, when Joe Rogers Sr. and Tom Forkner opened one restaurant in Avondale Estates, Georgia and never locked the door. More than 2,000 restaurants later it is still the same code on the same plates.

Here is the part I keep chewing on. Nobody sold that system to them. No vendor built it, no vendor charges a monthly fee for it, no vendor can sunset it or reprice it next quarter. Waffle House owns the way its own work happens, which is the whole reason it has lasted this long without being taken away from them.

Most of us gave that up without noticing. We rent our ordering, we rent our customer list, we rent our margin, and then we act surprised when the rent goes up.

What is one thing in your restaurant that still works because you built it yourself?

Photos via Wikimedia Commons: Paul Lowry (CC BY 4.0), Big Wang (CC BY-SA 4.0), Whaledad (CC BY-SA 4.0), Nick Gray (CC BY-SA 2.0), Thisisthestoryofagirl (CC BY-SA 4.0), Benoît Prieur (CC0). Waffle House logo, public domain.

Google is your real front door.Someone searches your name, or “jollof near me,” and Google answers with your hours, your...
08/26/2026

Google is your real front door.

Someone searches your name, or “jollof near me,” and Google answers with your hours, your photos, your reviews, and an ordering link. All before your website gets a vote. If the listing is half empty, that customer goes next door.

The check-up takes about ten minutes:

01. Read your punch list. Digital Presence, then Overview.
02. Set your primary category. “West African restaurant” beats plain “Restaurant.”
03. Push your menu. If it says Dirty, Google is serving an old version.
04. Reply to reviews, then Publish All.
05. Kick the delivery apps off your listing. They can add their own ordering links without asking. Remove them and set yours as preferred.

One update in Town publishes to Google, Apple Maps, Siri, and the AI assistants people now ask for dinner picks.

Running your restaurant on Town already? DM us and we’ll run the check-up with you.

restaurantlife commissionfree onlineordering restauranttech independentrestaurant

There is a Jollibee in Woodside, Queens with a line out the door on a Tuesday. Here is how it got there. 1975, Manila. T...
08/26/2026

There is a Jollibee in Woodside, Queens with a line out the door on a Tuesday. Here is how it got there.

 

1975, Manila. Tony Tan Caktiong, his wife Grace and their families put their money into an ice cream business. Customers kept asking for hot food, so three years later they converted the parlors and it became Jollibee.

 

Then McDonald’s landed in the Philippines in 1981. Friends told Tony to sell now and take the money. He flew to America to study them instead, came home, and rebuilt the menu around what Filipinos actually ate. Rice with the fried chicken. The sweet spaghetti.

 

He sold nothing.

 

First American store, Daly City, 1998. Today there are over 100 across the US and Canada doing an average of $4.9 million each, which the company puts at roughly two and a half times many QSR chains. USA TODAY has called Chickenjoy the best fast food fried chicken in America three years running.

 

Three of those stores are franchised. Three, out of more than a hundred.

 

Everyone treats this as a food story. The food is great. It is not why it worked. He could rewrite the entire menu the year McDonald’s showed up because he owned every store and nobody had to sign off on it. Control is slow and expensive, and it is the only thing that lets you do something your market cannot copy by Monday.

 

What would you change tomorrow if you did not have to ask anybody?

 

Sources: Jollibee Group history page for 1975 and 1978, and their 3 August 2026 press release for Daly City 1998, the 100-plus North American stores, the $4.9 million average unit volume, the USA TODAY recognition and the third franchised North American store. The 1981 McDonald’s story as told by Ernesto Tanmantiong on CNBC’s Managing Asia and reported in Forbes.

 

Photos, via Wikimedia Commons: Woodside, Queens by Tdorante10 (CC BY-SA 4.0). Ala Moana Center, Honolulu by Ominae (CC BY-SA 4.0).

 

White Castle turned 105 this year and has still never sold a franchise in the United States.I think about this one a lot...
08/25/2026

White Castle turned 105 this year and has still never sold a franchise in the United States.

I think about this one a lot. Every operator I know hits the same fork eventually. Somebody offers to fund your growth in exchange for a say in how you run the place. It feels like free money right up until it isn’t.

Billy Ingram and Walter Anderson borrowed $700 in Wichita in 1921. By 1933 Ingram had bought his partner out. Everybody else in burgers grew by selling franchises. Ingram would not, so he had to build the whole machine himself. Own meat plants. Own bakeries. Own steel shop that manufactured the restaurants.

Slower. It also meant nobody outside the family ever got a vote on what White Castle was.

Four generations later, Lisa Ingram runs about 350 restaurants and the company owns every single one.

Most of us are not building a chain. But the same question shows up on a much smaller scale every week, usually as a 30 percent commission or a contract that quietly says your guest belongs to someone else.

What did you give up for growth that you wish you had kept?

Photos via Wikimedia Commons: Building No. 8 Minneapolis by McGhiever (CC BY-SA 4.0); White Castle hamburger giveaway, Columbus Metropolitan Library via DPLA; Northside Cincinnati by Jere Keys (CC BY 2.0); Queens Blvd by Tdorante10 (CC BY-SA 4.0); night exterior, Pittsfield Township by Dwight Burdette (CC BY 3.0); Harlem storefront by Paul Sableman (CC BY 2.0); Edgar Waldo Ingram portrait via DPLA, public domain.

Culver’s lost money for two straight years and didn’t turn a net profit until year three.July 18, 1984, Sauk City, Wisco...
08/25/2026

Culver’s lost money for two straight years and didn’t turn a net profit until year three.

July 18, 1984, Sauk City, Wisconsin. George and Ruth Culver, their son Craig and his wife Lea, opening on the same lot where his parents had run an A&W since 1961.

Their first franchise deal in 1988 charged no fees and no royalties. The operator walked inside a year. Craig has said the guy had nothing in it, so leaving cost him nothing. They rebuilt the whole system after that. A Culver’s franchisee now trains for 17 weeks before they open a door.

Seventeen weeks to protect the standards of one restaurant. Most of us hand our entire customer list to an app in about four minutes and never think about it again. I’ve done it. That’s the part that gets me.

Headquarters is still Prairie du Sac, a town of about four thousand people. 1,041 restaurants open. Still private. When Roark Capital came in 2017 the family sold a minority slice and kept the majority, and Craig has said plainly he does not want to sell the rest.

The average Culver’s did $4.1M last year. The average franchised McDonald’s did $4.06M.

Forty-two years of refusing to hand over control, and the math still works.

If someone offered you money today for a piece of your restaurant, what would you need to keep to say yes?

Sources: Culver’s 2026 Franchise Disclosure Document, QSR Magazine, Wisconsin State Journal, Milwaukee Business Journal, US Census, Craig Culver interview with Aaron J. Armstrong.
Photos, all Wikimedia Commons: Tony Webster (CC BY 2.0), Stephanos100 (CC BY-SA 4.0), Corey Coyle (CC BY 3.0), Missvain / Sarah Stierch (CC BY 4.0), Michael Barera (CC BY-SA 4.0).

My favorite kind of ownership story. Pete Cancro was 17 and slicing subs at Mike’s in Point Pleasant when the shop went ...
08/24/2026

My favorite kind of ownership story. Pete Cancro was 17 and slicing subs at Mike’s in Point Pleasant when the shop went up for sale. His mom told him to buy it. His old football coach ran a bank and helped him put $125,000 together in three days. He wasn’t old enough to legally run the meat slicer.

He renamed it Jersey Mike’s in 1987 and his first franchisees were his own customers. Blackstone’s 2024 deal valued the company at $8 billion. It listed on the NYSE this July, 3,100 stores later, and Pete is still the CEO.

I think about the 51 years between the loan and the bell a lot. He didn’t inherit a brand. He held onto one shop until it became one.

Every operator I know has a regular who would back them like that coach did. Would you have signed for $125,000 at 17?

Photos: Hkeely, Aspensmonster and Ser Amantio di Nicolao via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0 / CC BY-SA 4.0); Rick Obst (CC BY 2.0); Jersey Mike’s logo (public domain); 1978 Point Pleasant boardwalk by John Margolies, Library of Congress (public domain).

08/21/2026

CBS asked the owner of In-N-Out if she’d ever go public, franchise, or sell.

“No way. Never. Never. The only reason you would do that is for the money. And I, I wouldn’t do it.”

Lynsi Snyder is the last heir of the family that started In-N-Out in 1948. She lost her grandfather, her uncle, and her dad along the way, and she still runs every store the family way. No franchises. No shares. Forbes says $8.7 billion, and the answer is still no.

I put the full family story in today’s carousel if you want the whole arc.

Keeping the keys is a strategy. It works at 400 stores and it works at one.

Would you have said no to that money?

🎥 Clip: CBS Mornings (YouTube)

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