Carey Bringle, owner of Peg Leg Porker Restaurant, Bringle’s Smoking Oasis, Pig Star and Peg Leg Porker Bourbon & Lifestyle Brand.
For any food business owner who has set up shop in their hometown, it’s common to grow beyond the borders of where they got their start. Whether you have a restaurant, café, food truck or bakery, expansion is a monumental task, but it’s one that can be well worth the time and effort required. And now may be the ideal time.
Why? The National Restaurant Association’s 2024 State of the Restaurant Industry report found that sales in the U.S. food service industry were forecasted to reach $1.5 trillion in 2025, and a majority of consumers said they would use restaurants more if they had the money to do so. This suggests to me that there is demand for food businesses of all types in this rapidly evolving market.
The following strategies will help you transform your food business as you set your sights on becoming a regional or even a national presence.
Strategies For Expanding Your Food Business
1. Assess your existing food business and see where you stand.
From hiring and retaining a team to the multitude of tasks that go into daily operations, there’s a science that goes into carrying out a food business smoothly. Given all the moving parts involved, before you think about future locations, you need to do a thorough assessment of how your existing business is running. Be sure to analyze all your processes and workflows, your financials, your customer capacity, and the overall performance of your business so you have a full picture of where you stand.
This will give you valuable insight into how you’ll want to run potential future sites or channels of growth—what would you keep the same and what would you do differently? Answering these questions, combined with the results of your assessment, will allow you to begin your expansion planning by setting realistic goals.
2. Explore food business expansion options.
Next, explore your expansion options. These include opening new locations in other cities (either in your home state or elsewhere), starting a retail arm of your food business, perhaps even dipping into food items beyond what you already offer (like sauces, mixes and beverages), making your new business mobile so you can bring the food to the people at an array of events instead of the other way around, or starting an online store with ordering and shipping functionality.
When I was ready to expand, I took several routes. In addition to our physical flagship restaurant, I opened a sister eatery. I also developed a retail line that allows customers to partake of our dining experience at home. And in 2013, I looked beyond just food to launch a spirits brand, which has allowed my business to reach a much wider audience, not just outside of Nashville, but also in the food and beverage realm as a whole.
3. Invest in strategic partnerships.
Food businesses of all types have to create and maintain partnerships in a number of areas to stay operational. These typically include food and drink suppliers, maintenance providers, and ties to local organizations and individuals that you may partner with for events, for selling certain goods at your location, and for entertainment purposes (such as a live band or karaoke provider). As you begin to expand, you’ll want to build up your existing network of partners by looking for new ones to add to your available resources.
For example, if you choose to offer meal kits as part of your expansion effort, your relationship with your existing food supplier will be vital, but you’ll also need to find a reputable and reliable distributor to help get your products into your customers’ hands. Or if you want to start an online store, you’ll need a skilled webmaster who’s on board with your vision and aims.
4. Begin the process of scaling operations at your first location.
The first step to scaling operations is to nail down your current standard operating procedures (SOPs). You won’t be able to effectively expand your food business to multiple locations or into new company arms, like retail, without carefully perfecting your business’s standard operating procedures.
Clarifying and finalizing these procedures, from employee responsibilities and checklists to compliance and safety standards, must start at your first food business location. Only then will you have a clear-cut road map for how other locations or channels should operate to establish consistency across your brand.
5. Create careful procedural steps that will help you maintain quality as expansion begins.
It’s important to have well-thought-out procedures in place that will help you ensure the quality of your product, no matter how you’re planning to expand. In my own case, I reproduced many of the steps I follow at Peg Leg Porker regarding vendor relations and quality control when I branched off into spirits.
The SOPs you identified will set the baseline for other locations or other niches you enter. You can also boost quality control by pinpointing your food business’s quality expectations, researching industry expectations, providing training to staff, and ensuring that your business expansion has the appropriate equipment. Maintaining quality as you expand is imperative to keeping your business and brand’s reputation intact.
The above strategies are all meant to help kick-start the growth of your food business from local favorite to nationally known brand. The food service industry forms a competitive, thriving landscape (even with its many challenges), with Datassential’s 2025 Industry Forecast report expecting 2025 to see continued growth with sustained consumer spending. Amid this outlook, it could be a great time to take stock of the current state of your business and begin strategizing how you can start expanding past the borders of your hometown.
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