This week’s episode delves into the Top Food and Beverage Franchises of 2026.
List on Apple Podcasts | Listen on Spotify | Watch on YouTube
Hosts: Allison Dudas and Mariah Morgan, Franchise Business Review
Coffee, chicken, pizza, and ice cream all made the cut. In this episode, Allison Dudas and Mariah Morgan reveal FBR’s Top 25 Food & Beverage Franchises of 2026, ranked by more than 11,000 real franchisees across 52 brands. They dig into the data behind the rankings, what franchisees love, where brands are falling short, and what income actually looks like in this space, before counting down to this year’s number one. Get the full list at franchisebusinessreview.com.
Resources
- Top Food and Beverage Franchises of 2026
- Read: Hungry for a Career Change? Satisfy Your Craving for Being a Food Franchise Entrepreneur
- Read: Inside Year One: A Travelin’ Tom’s Franchisee Tells All
- Listen: Kona Ice Founder Tony Lamb on Building a Franchise Empire
- Listen: Multi-Unit, Multi-Brand Success in Starbucks and Ben & Jerry’s
Transcript
Allison Dudas (00:04)
Welcome back to From A to Franchisee. I am your host today, Allison Dudas from the marketing department here at Franchise Business Review. And I have Mariah Morgan joining me today. Hooray! I’m VP of Marketing here at FBR, and they don’t let me onto the podcast much because who knows what I’ll say. But I’m here today to add some color and keep Allison company. It’s a total marketing takeover. It’s a marketing throwdown. I kind of I’m into that though, because we’re fun. Marketing people are fun.
Fun. Facts. we are here today to announce the top food and beverage franchises of 2026. Yeah. We have 25 on our list this year. And just as like a background, right? We have these lists that we announce every year. We have the top 200 that goes out in January. We have things like most innovative. We have top franchises for culture. For women, recession resistant.
For veterans, we have several lists, and this is to help people who are trying to figure out what franchise they should invest in. Right? Not every franchise is going to appeal to every person. Wait, Allison, I have a question. Yeah. What would you say to someone who says, Wow, these must be arbitrary lists? like pay to play? Yeah. No. Okay, so what a great question. So we go over our methodology.
almost every episode because it’s really, really important. So if you have heard this for the 17th time, buckle up, you’re gonna hear it again. But also thank you for still listening. my gosh. Bless. Okay, so Franchise Business Review is a market research company. We work with franchise ORs, that’s the big corporate offices that kind of organize and are the center for all of these franchise brands to survey franchisees to find out the health of their systems.
That means that we ask franchisees questions like do you respect your franchise or do you trust your franchise or you know how are you feeling about how much money you’re making? how is the training and support? There’s a myriad of questions, 33 benchmark questions that we ask each franchisee to get at the health of a system.
And I think this is super important because a lot of people when they’re researching go straight to how much money can I make? What’s the investment level? We have a lot of that as well. But these are the questions that are really hard to find answers to. Like you can go deep down a reddit rabbit hole and try to find something. And even there you might not find a human being who’s willing to share this stuff with you. This is
really from the mouths of the franchisees, we’re lucky enough to have the relationship with the franchise oars and have franchisors work with us who want to share this in order to attract the right franchisees. Yes. So when we receive that data, we have a ranking system. So we figure out which franchise brands are rated the highest in a bunch of different
In a bunch of different areas, and that is how we make these rankings. So these top food and beverage brands this year are ranked by their franchisees. and this year alone, we surveyed over 11,000 franchisees among 52 brands. And when you think about it just in locations, this is 42,000, over 42,000 franchise locations. So this is like a lot, this is covering a lot of ground.
Yeah. Now when you think about franchising, Mariah, when you think about franchise about it a lot, actually. That’s so weird that you’re thinking about franchising a lot in the marketing department, a franchise business review. How interesting. But when you think about franchises, what do you think of? I think about the locations. Okay, you think about the locations. you’re asking like what kind of franchise? Yeah. Sorry. I think about the food.
Yes. Because that’s what I drive by all the time. Yes. When you think about franchises, most people think McDonald’s, Subway, Jersey, Jersey Mike’s, Starbucks, Stunkin’ Donuts, et cetera. And we go to food, and granted, there are so many different industries where franchises flourish. So many. and you shouldn’t discount those other industries at all. But food and beverage is definitely top of mind. I would say this is like one of
our most popular list that people look at every year. I would say for most people, it it’s the star of the show. The star of the show. So we will be announcing the top ten food and beverage franchises of 2026. You’re just gonna have to stay tuned. Stick around. Because obviously we’re in marketing. We’re not gonna put that at the beginning of the episode. This is why they don’t let us out. We know a thing or two yes about getting you to listen to the whole thing. All right.
All right, so let’s talk about this. so let’s talk about our methodology because we were just having a conversation with this about this in-house yesterday, and we were talking about how we discuss the words franchisee satisfaction. But another way of looking at getting information from franchisees about how they feel about their brand or franchisee sentiment is another kind of part of the lingo that we use.
It we’re really just trying to get at a system health metric. That’s what franchise business review does. We’re trying to figure out how healthy a franchise system is. Because what happens if you’re a part of a bad, healthy, s unhealthy system? A million things, but money loss, loss of your actual franchise, general unhappiness, lack of work life balance, should I keep going? Yeah. I mean there’s so honestly, like if you’re paying attention to the franchise space, there are a lot of really bad stories.
A lot. I mean it’s actually really sad when you read about people losing losing everything because of a bad investment. Devastating. this is often life savings that are put toward an investment. often it’s your family’s well being that’s put at risk. it is pretty terrible. So obviously big risk. and I think it’s important to pause and and look at actually both sides of the coin. So the franchisee satisfaction
for somebody researching an investment, it does matter how happy the franchisees are and the the other side of the coin, the system health metric, how healthy is the brand? So it’s not just how happy are the franchisees, but also how likely is this brand to be a success, and to stick around and not fail its franchisees. So there’s both sides to it, to sort of like the purpose of this research. Yeah.
Yeah, and certainly for those of you thinking about investing in a franchise, you wanna invest in a healthy system. You wanna know that things aren’t toxic, that if you give feedback, it’s gonna go somewhere, that you’re gonna get actual training and support when you sign on the dotted line. You wanna know that stuff before. So that’s that’s really why we do what we do. We do. all right, so let’s walk through the highest rated areas. So when we surveyed these eleven thousand plus franchisees, there were some areas that they rated their the industry.
Kind of the highest. So let’s go let’s go through them. So number one here is enjoying the business day to day. Obviously important to all of us. It’s why we do what we do here. that’s eighty five percent. So eighty five percent enjoy the business day to day. Overall in this sector, which is obviously a positive thing to hear. That’s pretty good. That is pretty good.
all right. But 84% take pride in the organization. So that means like being a part of the larger brand, not just their own specific location. That’s that’s pretty good too. And eighty-three percent feeling like active participants, which for me actually would be super important just if I know that my livelihood is at stake. I would like to feel heard by my brand. Yeah. Yeah. And so many people think about it when they’re
buying into a franchise, they’re they’re kind of thinking like, like I’m just gonna be sort of on my own, owning my Elianos, right? But the reality is you should not be on your own. Not only should you have the support of the franchise or corporate, but you should be able to call on your fellow franchisees. Like maybe you own an Elianos in you know, in Alabama. You should be able to call on a franchisee from Mississippi that has a similar maybe demographic than you.
To be like, hey, how’d that rollout go of this new product? Do you have any tips on how to execute that? and I so I love that stat that you like feel like an active participant. and that goes into the next stat too. I kind of stole my own thunder. So seventy-eight percent appreciate the peer support among franchisees. You gotta be on the phone a friend. Mm-hmm. It’s true. It’s one of your lifelines, right? It’s true. And
Even though as a franchisee you’re not like a business owner in a very traditional sense, you are. You are still a business owner. And it’s lonely at the top. I used to own a business and sometimes it’s hard to feel like you’re just making decisions in a vacuum. So this is an important one. Yes, agreed. I also used to own a business and it it gets
It can be really, really hard. and and I can see the benefits of being a part of a franchise system ’cause you can call somebody who knows exactly what you’re going through. Phone a friend. Phone a friend. And then last on our list is seventy-five percent respect their franchisor, which goes without saying just the importance there of feeling like you’re a part of something that you have respect for. Yeah. Yeah. So these were the highest rated areas. so remember like we ask thirty-three questions.
benchmark questions. They’re all in these different areas, and these are the areas in which franchisees rated their food and beverage franchise the highest. I think it says that like franchisee culture in food and beverage seems to be pretty high. I don’t know. Based on the numbers, absolutely.
So it really does seem like franchisee culture among these fifty-two brands that we surveyed is is pretty high. Morale seems pretty high. And I think it’s worth noting, Allison’s saying fifty-two. We surveyed fifty two food brands. Not every brand makes this list. So just a reminder, we take the best of the best here. We do. We do.
All right. So the franchisees, another piece of data that we do collect is reported income. Now, this is pre-tax, self-reported income from a franchisee. And we exclude fran franchisees that have owned their business under two years because we know that.
You know, those first two years, you’re just grinding. You’re just in the business. That’s not fair to include. No. No, arguably you could probably even expand that to three years for for certain brands. But self-reported pre-tax income for food and beverage sector was 129,000 around that. So good to know. Absolutely. Good to know.
all right, well now we obviously have to look at the flip side. Like
about these brands? What areas did franchisees rate their brand the lowest? So number one on this list is technology adoption. That’s not entirely surprising. I think that’s a challenge for a lot of brands, not just food and beverage related in the franchise space, but it’s also a challenge for
a lot of businesses out there. this is the age of AI we’re all trying to keep up. so it’s not surprising that that’s reflected here. Yeah, and certainly like if you’re rolling out something from corporate, it’s gonna have glitches, right? And then also you’re gonna have I mean I used to be a high school teacher and I think about like when we would roll out something new for the whole school.
Some teachers would like quickly adopt and it would be really easy. Some would struggle. Sometimes the instructions from the top were really, really good. Sometimes not so much. so it kind of all depends. So that’s yeah, that’s not surprising. so think of this as like your due diligence checklist. Okay. One of the other areas that was rated more negatively or weaker is marketing and promotional support. Also not uncommon.
For any franchise, but I think this is one of those areas where a franchisee can feel like they don’t have a whole lot of experience. and it makes sense that like in the food sector you might come to this with business experience, you might come to it with food service experience, but you might not have hands on marketing experience. Like some of us do. Like some of us hosting this podcast today. so it’s not surprising that this is shows up on this list. So yeah.
Alright, another one, innovation and creativity. We just did our most innovative list. we did a podcast on it, I don’t know, like a month ago. So definitely check out that list. I know at least two food brands that made that list, Kona Ice and Travelin’ Tom’s. And I think that’s interesting to think about considering it seems like many food and beverage.
brands struggle with being innovative and creative. but those two don’t. Yep. Snaps for them. I’m snapping. If you can’t hear it. Okay. let’s see. Another area that was rated more negatively is involvement in company decisions. And then I think going hand in hand is system wide communication. so some of that involvement in company decisions is actually like a
result of a communication barrier. You don’t know what’s happening at the top. and then the communication issue. So that is sort of like often a trickle down. but yeah. Yeah and I think it’s worth noting too that some of these food and beverage brands are huge, are really big and have been around a long time. So if you’re thinking that
you’re interested in in investing in a food and beverage franchise, you should weigh the different things that matter to you. If innovative, if innovation and creativity matter to you a great deal, look into that. We have data about that. and chances are some of the bigger brands they they might be a little bit more behind. But at the same time, you’re dealing then with a product that’s been around a long time, that has
a long history of showing up and and really being successful. So I don’t think that that’s necessarily the thing that you should like hang your hat on, like, they’re not innovative and creative. their communication’s not great. Like that might not be the thing that makes or breaks it for you. Yeah, and I I think
It’s also worth noting, like none of these things necessarily are make or break. They’re just we’re bringing them up here because we think they’re important points for folks to know about and we come to this with full transparency. We have this data, we want to share that information. So it’s just sort of a saying to you, be aware. Yeah. Like do what you want with it, but but don’t be afraid of information if you’re looking to invest in a franchise. This is your money. You deserve to know how these brands stack up.
All right, well, let’s talk about the 25 winners, shall we? I think we shall. so I think we don’t necessarily have to name every single one because you should visit franchisebusinessreview.com so you can see the full list. But we can at least like go through some some highlights here and even just the different kinds of food franchises, food and beverage franchises. So obviously we’re gonna see a lot of coffee and beverage. So we’ve got Eliano’s coffee.
Got Travelin’ Tom’s Coffee Truck,
so you’ve got Smoothie King, Tropical Smoothie Cafe, Playa Bowls Kona Ice.
They’re really A, the franchiseor is a really innovative ownership. and also it’s just kind of a fun brand. So yeah, I know we both have kids who are obsessed with Kona Ice. Do your kids have a favorite?
My kids actually talk about the flavors that they like the most. Put every single flavor on it so that it looks like a black mass. And I also just had to correct them that it wasn’t cone of ice. It’s cona. Like the town in Hawaii. Like I know a few things about this franchise and it is not cone of ice. Yeah. Anyway. So I’m here to educate. You know what I’m saying? My daughter like cranks the the grape. So it’s like dark purple and then her.
Yeah, purple. Yep. Yeah, but they also have some dye-free options, just so you know. not that this is, you know. Anyway. All right. So very innovative. Very innovative. All right. So smoothies, bowls, and ice cream.
Haagen Dazs I think they have the best chocolate ice cream on the planet. Personally. I’ve tried a few. Yeah. You’ve
put in the good work. Yeah, yeah. Somebody’s gotta do it. We have some great pizza franchises, tonados, pizza factory. Not surprising. Great franchises.
Chicken and barbecue. We’ve got Dave’s hot chicken, hard not to love. Pizza. I’m sorry, I’m church’s chicken, Sunny’s barbecue. Yeah. No, and Dave’s hot chicken. Holy cow. What growth they’ve experienced. What growth. sandwiches and subs. So we have Pot Belly. We have Penn Station East Coast sub. we’ve we’ve even got the
The catering, the B2B catering company called Apple Spice. I think Apple Spice is pretty fascinating. Yes. Yeah. You interviewed Apple Fice at Apple Spice’s CEO. I did. Yeah, he’s great. so if you are looking at the food and beverage industry, you’re not gonna find amazing
work life balance. That’s something that definitely comes through with a lot of franchisees, especially in those first few years of ownership. Apple Spice is really different because they’re a B2B franchise. They’re open business hours. So they’re doing like box lunch catering. really interesting, they’re also opening up more in they don’t have like storefronts like a like a Donato’s pizza. They’re operating in in more like warehouse parks where they’re preparing the food and then people are delivering them to
To business offices. So really, really an interesting brand to check out. all right, and then we have like breakfast and casual dining. Lots of those, actually. Got eggs up grill, another broken egg. Culver’s has a huge following. East Coast Wings, also huge. Yeah. Wetzels pretzels, who doesn’t love a pretzel? Who doesn’t love a pretzel? yeah, so anyway, definitely some some interesting.
things to look at. Some of them in terms of investment level are gonna be quite high because you’re dealing with a build out, you’re dealing with a brick and mortar location. really most of them are gonna be pretty high. But then of course you have some mobile options that are going to be a lot lower. So if you’re thinking about that, just note, right? You the sticker shock might be real when you’re looking at food and beverage franchises, but
You do have options. Again, all those numbers are on our website. So if you’re doing your research, you might as well check those out there too. Yes, absolutely. All right. Well, should we get to the top ten? I’ve been waiting. It’s taken us so long. All right.
So number ten on our top food and beverage list of twenty twenty six is Donato’s Pizza. And then number nine, we’ve got Penn Station subs. Number eight, the Hog and Daz’s shop. Number seven, Smoothie King. Number six, Dave’s Hot Chicken. They came in hot.
Somebody should just send me home. Then we’ve got number five, Tropical Smoothie Cafe. We’ve got number four, East Coast Wings and Grill. Number three, Travelin’ Tom’s, one of my all-time favorites. Number two, Culver’s. And then number one, not surprising to any of us at FBR because we know them well, is Kona Ice.
Kona Ice does it again. Often at the top of our lists. So congratulations to Kona Ice and congratulations to all these brands that made it to the top twenty five. Really something to be proud of. It is not an easy feat. and also we have pretty high standards for who makes these lists, so
We really do. We really do. And I I really like that about working here. I feel really good about sharing the information that we have to people who are thinking about investing in a franchise because we just wanna make sure that if you are looking to invest in a franchise, that you make a wise choice and Michelle always jokes about this, but if we talk you out of investing in a franchise, if you find out that it’s not the right choice for you, we have done our jobs. Like it’s no skin off my back if you buy a franchise or not.
Zero. Like goose egg. Matters to me not at all. But you know what does matter to me? Getting you proper information about the system health of a franchise that you might be checking out. so if you are looking at franchise brands and they’re not doing a franchisee satisfaction survey, ask them. Ask them why.
If a franchiseor is not interested in what their franchisees think about the system, they don’t want to hear feedback about how training and support is, about how much they trust them, about the franchisee community, I would definitely be like, wait a second, why don’t you wanna know that? Why don’t you have systems in place that are checking in on franchisees?
And in some cases that might be a red flag. In other cases they might be o they might they might just not be sharing that information and you can probably get it if you ask. but they should they should. Nobody should be afraid of feedback because it’s it’s the only way to get better. Agreed. that was one of my biggest aha moments actually when I started working at FBR was the
realization that there are franchise systems who literally don’t want to know what their franchises have to say because it’s like a la la la la situation. for me that is a huge red flag and if they’re not listening to what the franchisees are saying about the system, if they’re not using that as a metric for the health of the brand, then that’s a problem. But as Allison said, they might be doing it and not sharing it. So if you are doing this research and you’re not seeing them on our website, ask them. They might be running their own survey
Internally, and they might be willing to share with you if you are an interested buyer. Yeah. Yeah. So I would say that that’s a good takeaway. If you’re looking at food, make sure you have a franchisee survey that you’re looking at as well from that brand. Another thing that you can do, another takeaway for today, is you can check out our food and beverage sector report. We take a look at this whole sector. We give you things like average
We give you things like salary. we give you things like general sentiment about the industry, even how many hours people are working a week. So that’s worth checking out. You can download that at franchisebusinessreview.com in the top menu, go to sector reports and you’ll find it.
All right, well, I think we’ve covered a lot of information here. Huge congrats to the brands on this list.
And for those of you listening, best of luck in your franchise research. And don’t forget to use our information. That’s what we’re here for. That’s what we’re here for. Literally. You can always reach out to us if you need some help. All right. Have a good one.
