HEAL’s Toronto plan adds a company store to franchise growth

Happy Belly Food Group announced April 24 that HEAL Wellness planned to open its eighth company-operated restaurant the next day, adding a Toronto site alongside its franchise expansion.

The Queen Street West announcement identifies 1092 Queen Street West as the new address. Management describes a corner site with on-site parking and pedestrian access, positioning its smoothie and açaí bowls for the surrounding neighborhood.

The release reports 39 HEAL locations open and more than 169 in development. Those figures describe the size of the operating network and its prospective expansion separately. It does not provide a store-by-store schedule for converting the development total into openings.

The opening remains scheduled for April 25. The announcement gives readers an address and a date, while leaving the final corporate-versus-franchise store count unresolved. Its 39-store figure appears alongside the plan without explaining whether Queen West is included. That prevents a reliable calculation of the franchise count by subtracting eight corporate stores from the reported total.

The earlier pipeline was built through agreements#

Happy Belly’s October 2, 2025, transaction announcement explains how the network developed. Its initial 2022 investment involved a joint venture holding the HEAL operating business. Happy Belly subscribed for half the venture’s shares using company shares valued at C$250,000.

HEAL had two Ontario locations at the initial acquisition, management said. By the October announcement it reported 27 operating stores and 168 additional locations under signed agreements. The company described area development agreements across all 10 Canadian provinces, together with a 10-unit agreement for Dallas–Fort Worth.

An area agreement establishes a relationship and a development commitment. It does not, by itself, establish that every individual restaurant has a lease, construction underway or an opening date. The October disclosure supplies a useful measure of contracted ambition without supplying those later milestones.

Management specifically credited area developers and multi-unit operators with helping expansion while preserving capital. That explanation places franchise development at the center of HEAL’s growth model, even as the company also pursued stores under direct operation.

Full brand ownership was already completed#

A separate ownership event was resolved before the Toronto plan. Happy Belly’s third-quarter 2025 financial statements, in Note 23, confirm that it closed the purchase of HEAL’s remaining 50% on October 9, 2025.

The purchase covered 200 shares in the joint venture. The filing records C$3,896,948 of consideration, subject to adjustments. Settlement combined the transfer of 2,777,777 previously issued Happy Belly shares held by the joint venture with 613,469 newly issued treasury shares. Describing the purchase as a cash payment would misstate the transaction.

After closing, both the holding venture and the HEAL operating entity became wholly owned subsidiaries. That is ownership of the brand businesses. It does not convert restaurants operated by franchisees into corporate stores or eliminate their separate operators.

The filing is unaudited and covers the period through September 30, 2025; its subsequent-events note records the completed purchase. HEAL’s corporate-store strategy therefore sits inside an already wholly owned brand. Ownership consolidation and restaurant development are separate decisions, with different counterparties, funding requirements and milestones.