Zaxby's Crosses 1,000 Restaurants and Sets Its Sights on a National Footprint

Zaxby's hit 1,000 restaurants in January 2026. For the roughly two-thirds of the country that has never encountered the brand, that number means little. But for operators, franchisees, and investors watching the chicken category, it signals something worth paying attention to: a 35-year-old regional chain with serious institutional backing is done being regional.

The Athens, Georgia-born concept now operates across 22 states, has planted its flag in Las Vegas and Phoenix, and is targeting more than 60 new openings in 2026 alone. The long-range goal is 100 new stores per year. QSR Magazine named it Most Transformational Brand of the Year. The Goldman Sachs Merchant Banking Division, which acquired the brand in 2020, has invested years positioning Zaxby's for exactly this kind of inflection point.

The question the industry should be asking is not whether Zaxby's can open stores outside the Southeast. It clearly can. The harder question is whether it can do so at the pace and scale required to compete for the same consumer mindshare already held by Raising Cane's, Dave's Hot Chicken, and Popeyes.

From College Towns to Coastal Markets

Zaxby's was built on the premise that chicken fingers and wings, done well and served fast, could anchor a loyal following in markets that larger chains had written off. That thesis proved correct across Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and neighboring states. The brand's concentration in the Southeast gave it density, brand recognition, and a core of highly productive stores that funded years of quiet infrastructure building.

The 2020 Goldman Sachs acquisition changed the trajectory. Private equity involvement in QSR is not inherently a sign of aggressive growth to come, but the Merchant Banking Division does not take minority positions and wait. The six-year arc from acquisition to 1,000 units and a stated goal of 100 annual openings tracks with a playbook designed to maximize and eventually exit at scale.

The 2025 expansion into Las Vegas and Phoenix was the strategic tell. Those are not adjacency moves. They are demonstrations that the brand can work in high-cost, high-competition, non-Southern markets where Zaxby's has no legacy awareness. Additional 2025 expansion into Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania extended that proof of concept across both the Midwest and mid-Atlantic.

The 2026 target markets make the national intent explicit: Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. Some of these, like Tennessee and Virginia, are natural extensions of the Southeast footprint. Others, like Michigan and Indiana, are genuinely new territory where the brand will have to earn its place.

The Modern Farmhouse Prototype as a Growth Engine

Scaling a regional brand into unfamiliar markets is not just a real estate problem. It is a unit economics problem, a design problem, and an operational problem. Zaxby's answer to all three is the Modern Farmhouse restaurant prototype.

The format is designed around flexibility. Footprints can be configured for traditional suburban real estate, for non-traditional formats like college campuses, military bases, and travel hubs, and for the drive-thru-heavy suburban configurations that dominate new QSR construction. Dual-lane drive-thrus are built into the standard prototype, a direct response to the throughput demands operators have learned to prioritize after the pandemic years reshaped off-premises volume.

The "Modern Farmhouse" branding is more than aesthetics. It is an identity cue in markets where Zaxby's has no existing reputation. A restaurant that looks and feels like a considered, intentional concept can capture first-visit traffic in ways that a generic box cannot. The refreshed design gives franchisees a tool for establishing credibility quickly.

The non-traditional location strategy also deserves attention. College campuses, military installations, and airports generate captive, high-frequency traffic. They also come with different cost structures and operational requirements than standalone restaurants. For a brand trying to accelerate unit count and build awareness simultaneously, non-traditional channels offer a lower-risk way to put the logo in front of new consumers before committing to full-format traditional sites.

The $2.8 Billion System Sales Target and What It Implies

Zaxby's has set a target of $2.8 billion in system sales. With roughly 1,000 locations, that implies an average unit volume somewhere around $2.8 million per location, assuming minimal unit growth changes the denominator significantly. That AUV figure is within range for a well-run chicken concept with strong drive-thru performance, but it requires consistent execution across an increasingly geographically diverse system.

The challenge with system sales targets is that they require both unit growth and same-store performance to hold. Opening 60 or 100 new restaurants per year only contributes to system sales if those new restaurants are productive from the start, and if the existing base does not erode. New market entries typically underperform until brand awareness builds, which means the early cohorts of Midwest and mid-Atlantic stores will likely drag the average before they contribute to it.

The Goldman Sachs capital structure also introduces the debt service considerations that operators in franchisee communities watch closely. Private equity-backed QSR brands have a mixed record on franchisee economics when expansion velocity is the primary objective. How Zaxby's manages franchisee unit economics in new markets, where ramp times may be longer than in the Southeast, will determine whether the 100-unit annual goal is achievable or aspirational.

Benchmarking Against Raising Cane's and Dave's Hot Chicken

Zaxby's national expansion story becomes clearer when set against the two chicken concepts that attract the most direct comparison.

Raising Cane's reached its 1,000th restaurant in January 2025, a year ahead of Zaxby's milestone, and did so through a model defined by radical simplicity. One menu, one focus, executed with fanatical consistency. Cane's is now genuinely national, with locations in nearly every major market, and its AUVs consistently rank among the highest in the chicken segment. The brand built national awareness largely through word of mouth and limited-time market entry events, then sustained it with quality and loyalty.

The operational lesson Cane's offers is uncomfortable for most multi-item chains: the narrower the menu, the easier it is to replicate quality at scale. Zaxby's runs a meaningfully broader menu, with flavored sauces, wings, sandwiches, and sides that require more kitchen complexity. That complexity is a product differentiator and a potential operational liability as the system expands into markets where hiring and training pipelines are not yet established.

Dave's Hot Chicken represents the other end of the spectrum. The brand has grown faster than Zaxby's by unit percentage but operates from a much smaller base. Dave's benefits from celebrity-backed marketing, a focused concept with high menu interest, and franchise agreements with experienced multi-unit operators. It is a different kind of growth story, built on cultural heat rather than institutional scale. Dave's will face its own version of the identity-at-scale problem as it moves beyond markets where its brand story has traction.

Zaxby's sits between these two models. It has more menu complexity than Cane's and less cultural moment than Dave's. Its advantage is a 35-year track record of operational profitability in its core markets, a prototype designed for real estate flexibility, and a corporate structure with the capital to absorb the cost of national market entry.

Can the Brand Identity Travel?

The core risk in any regional-to-national expansion is identity dilution. Brands that mean something specific in their home markets often fail to communicate that specificity in new ones. The result is a restaurant that looks like every other QSR, priced like every other QSR, with no compelling reason for a consumer to choose it over the established options.

Zaxby's avoids some of this risk through the product itself. Chicken fingers with proprietary sauces and a made-to-order service model are not commodity offerings. The Zax Sauce, the wing flavors, the signature sides, these are products that consumers remember and return for, provided they encounter them in the first place. The brand's loyalty program and digital ordering infrastructure create a mechanism for driving repeat visits once initial trial happens.

The QSR Magazine Most Transformational Brand award suggests the industry sees real change happening inside the organization, not just a unit count milestone. Transformation in this context typically means investments in digital, franchisee support systems, and operational standardization, exactly the infrastructure required to support a national system.

The harder cultural question is whether Zaxby's Southern identity becomes an asset or a liability in markets like Chicago, Detroit, or Philadelphia. Regional food cultures are real, and they cut both ways. A brand with a clear sense of place can feel like a discovery to consumers in new markets, or it can feel like an import that does not quite fit. How Zaxby's frames its story in non-Southern markets will shape whether it builds national loyalty or remains a brand that non-Southerners visit once out of curiosity.

What Other Regional Chains Should Take From This

Zaxby's 1,000-unit milestone carries lessons for the broader category of regionally dominant chains that are considering or quietly pursuing similar expansions.

The Modern Farmhouse prototype demonstrates that format flexibility is not optional for multi-market growth. A concept locked into a single real estate template will miss opportunities in dense urban markets, campus environments, and non-traditional channels that are increasingly where growth is available. Building format adaptability into the prototype from the start is cheaper than retrofitting it later.

The timing of institutional capital matters. Goldman Sachs acquired Zaxby's in 2020, giving the brand six years of infrastructure investment, prototype development, and strategic planning before the current expansion push. Chains that attempt rapid national scaling without equivalent preparation typically discover their unit economics do not travel as well as their menu does.

And the unit count threshold matters symbolically as well as operationally. At 1,000 locations, Zaxby's becomes large enough to attract national supplier relationships, to justify national media buys, and to be taken seriously by multi-unit franchise groups that drive the majority of QSR system growth. The next 1,000 units will be different work than the first, for better and for worse.

The chicken category has room for multiple national players. Whether Zaxby's earns that position depends on how cleanly it executes the next three years of expansion, and on whether the Modern Farmhouse prototype proves as flexible in practice as it is in the development pipeline.

QSR Pro Staff covers the quick service restaurant industry for operators, investors, and franchise professionals.