Chicken Salad Chick's Millennial and Gen Z Franchisee Surge Signals a New Franchise Model Preference

Chicken Salad Chick entered 2026 with something most fast-casual brands would envy: momentum. The Alabama-born chain, which has built its reputation on a single-category menu and a fiercely loyal customer base in the Southeast and beyond, closed out 2025 with a record number of franchise deals and a development pipeline exceeding 300 units. To carry that growth forward, the brand brought in a seasoned marketing veteran as its new chief marketing officer.

On March 23, 2026, Chicken Salad Chick appointed Jill Thomas as CMO. Her resume spans more than two decades across some of the most recognizable names in hospitality and consumer brands: PGA Tour Superstore, Edible Brands, Cinnabon, Bloomin' Brands, Yum Brands, Disney Parks, and Publix. Thomas will oversee national consumer marketing, digital and loyalty strategy, menu innovation support, and guest experience, according to the company's announcement.

The hire signals that Chicken Salad Chick is preparing for a different kind of scale than it has known before.

A Record Year, by the Numbers

The 2025 performance figures the brand shared are notable. Chicken Salad Chick awarded nearly 100 new franchise restaurant deals in a single year and opened 42 locations across 13 states. That expansion spread, across more than a quarter of U.S. states in a single calendar year, reflects a brand that is no longer a regional story.

With more than 300 locations now in the development pipeline, the brand is positioned to cross thresholds that would put it in a different competitive category entirely. For context, the fast-casual segment in 2025 was not uniformly friendly to growth. Sweetgreen closed locations. Noodles and Company dipped below 400 units. Shake Shack spent much of the year reining in unit economics before committing to 55 new locations. Against that backdrop, Chicken Salad Chick's 42 openings, and its deal volume heading into 2026, stands out.

Why Millennials and Gen Z Are Choosing Structured Franchising

The brand's VP of Franchise Development, Mark Verges, has been direct about who is driving the current wave of applications: younger entrepreneurs, specifically Millennials and Gen Z. His framing of why is worth examining. Verges has described this cohort as wanting "the independence of owning a business but also want a proven model and a brand they genuinely believe in."

That combination of autonomy and infrastructure is not a new concept in franchising, but the emphasis has shifted. A decade ago, the franchise pitch was largely financial: established systems, lower failure rates than independent starts, brand recognition. Today, for buyers in their late 20s and 30s, brand alignment carries equal or greater weight. These are operators who grew up with direct-to-consumer brands that had strong identities and vocal communities. They are applying those expectations to the brands they want to own.

Chicken Salad Chick benefits from a specific version of this dynamic. The brand has a clearly defined identity: Southern hospitality, female-founded origins (Stacy Brown opened the original location in Auburn, Alabama, in 2008), and a menu that is narrow by design. For franchisee candidates who want to avoid operational sprawl, a brand built on chicken salad and sides is easier to commit to than a full-service or broad-menu concept.

The brand's concentration in women-owned and family-operated units has historically been a differentiator. If the current franchise surge includes a meaningful number of first-time operators, that structural simplicity becomes a genuine screening advantage.

What Thomas Brings

Thomas's background maps onto the growth challenges Chicken Salad Chick will face as it scales.

Her experience at Cinnabon and Edible Brands covers brands where the emotional relationship between product and consumer does a lot of the marketing work, but where loyalty programs and digital infrastructure have to be built deliberately. Her time at Bloomin' Brands (parent of Outback Steakhouse and Carrabba's Italian Grill) and Yum Brands (Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut) gives her large-system fluency: how to run national campaigns while supporting local operators, how to manage franchisee marketing relationships at scale, and how to build digital ordering and loyalty programs that hold up under volume.

Disney Parks and Publix are less obvious entries on a QSR resume, but both represent high-stakes guest experience environments where consistency is non-negotiable. Disney in particular is a case study in how to maintain emotional resonance across enormous operational scale.

Thomas's formal mandate includes digital and loyalty strategy. Chicken Salad Chick has operated a loyalty program called "The Chick" for years, but as the unit count grows and the geographic spread widens, that program will need to perform differently. Loyalty economics work best at scale, and 300-plus units in the pipeline means the brand is approaching a threshold where its loyalty data becomes genuinely strategic, not just a retention tool for core markets.

Menu innovation support is also part of her remit. Chicken Salad Chick's approach to menu development has been deliberately restrained. The chain rotates limited-time flavors and seasonal offerings against a stable core, which protects operations while giving marketers content to work with. As competition for lunch and fast-casual traffic intensifies, managing that calendar well becomes a marketing function as much as a culinary one.

The CMO Hire as a Growth Signal

Brands at Chicken Salad Chick's current scale often make the CMO hire later than they should. The demands of franchise development tend to consume leadership bandwidth early on, and consumer-facing marketing gets treated as execution rather than strategy. The Thomas appointment suggests the brand's leadership believes it is past that stage.

Bringing in someone with Thomas's multi-brand background also sends a signal to prospective franchisees. Franchise candidates conducting due diligence on a brand pay attention to who is joining the corporate team and why. A CMO with deep chain experience, particularly in digital and loyalty, suggests the brand is investing in the infrastructure that franchisees depend on: national advertising, technology platforms, and the kind of consumer awareness that drives traffic to new markets.

The timing relative to the development pipeline matters here. With 300-plus locations in development, the brand will be entering markets where it has limited existing awareness. That is a different challenge than growing in Alabama, Georgia, or Tennessee, where Chicken Salad Chick has years of brand equity. A CMO who has driven market entry at Yum Brands or Disney Parks understands how to build awareness ahead of an opening rather than waiting for foot traffic to generate it organically.

What the Franchisee Surge Actually Means for Operators

For the franchisees already in the system, the growth story has a dual dimension. On the positive side, scale drives better supplier terms, more sophisticated marketing support, stronger brand recognition in new markets, and technology investment that individual operators couldn't fund alone. On the more cautious side, rapid expansion can dilute brand consistency if the franchisee selection and training infrastructure doesn't keep pace.

Chicken Salad Chick's approach to this tension will be tested over the next two to three years. The 42 openings in 2025 represent a significant jump from earlier years, and 300-plus locations in the pipeline could put that number higher still in 2026 and 2027. The question for existing franchisees is whether quality control mechanisms, supply chain coordination, and franchisor support scale proportionally.

The younger franchisee cohort that Verges describes also has different expectations from the generation that built the system. Millennials and Gen Z operators are more likely to expect digital tools, transparent performance data, and responsive corporate communication as baseline features rather than differentiators. If the brand can deliver those things at scale, the younger operator demographic becomes a durable advantage. If it can't, the same cohort that was drawn to the brand's identity will be the most vocal about gaps.

The Broader Context

Chicken Salad Chick's trajectory in early 2026 reflects a pattern showing up across the faster-growing franchised fast-casual brands: a focused concept with a clear identity is finding it easier to attract franchise capital than broader, more complex operations. Raising Cane's, built around chicken fingers, has articulated an aggressive multi-thousand unit vision. Wingstop, despite some same-store sales softness heading into 2026, continues to attract franchisee interest on the strength of its brand clarity.

The common thread is that operators, whether they are first-time entrepreneurs or multi-unit investors, are gravitating toward brands where the concept is legible and the operations aren't sprawling. A brand built on chicken salad is a concept you can explain in one sentence and operationalize in a defined format. In a franchise environment where complexity kills margins and training costs, that simplicity is a real competitive asset.

Whether Thomas's hire and the momentum heading into 2026 can translate into the kind of brand recognition that sustains growth in new regions will be the defining question for Chicken Salad Chick in the next 18 months. The deal volume and pipeline suggest the brand has franchisee conviction. Building the consumer awareness to match it, in markets where the brand has no history, is where the work begins.