• Once the largest TGI Fridays franchisee in the world, Brad Honigfeld and The Briad Group are now plotting growth with convenience store brand Circle K, signing a deal to develop 40 locations in New York.
• The Briad Group operates two Wendy’s restaurants, along with 14 Marriott hotels and a large New Jersey shopping center.
Brad Honigfeld is the type of person who’s never going to retire. That’s according to his son, who said the longtime restaurant franchisee would be too bored if he didn’t have a project in the works.
“His mind never shuts off,” said Jason Honigfeld, who’s worked with his dad in The Briad Group, which the elder Honigfeld founded, for more than a decade. “He loves to create and he loves to build.”
Enter Circle K. The convenience store retailer inked a franchise development agreement with The Briad Group for 40 locations in Upstate New York, a market with “tons of greenspace,” said Brad Honigfeld, and potential for acquisitions. Circle K has 25 corporate units in the state.
The brand, with more than 6,000 domestic and 7,500-plus international stores, is just 21 percent franchised. Circle K’s parent company, Quebec-based Alimentation Couche-Tard, is pursuing the acquisition of competitor 7-Eleven, the world’s largest franchise by unit count with more than 84,000 stores, 93 percent of them franchised.
Circle K, said Honigfeld, represents a new chapter for The Briad Group.
Brad Honigfeld, left, got his start in franchising in 1987 with a Steve’s Ice Cream/Carnegie Deli and went on to create The Briad Group. His kids, Jordyn Honigfeld Suchoff, middle, and Jason Honigfeld are involved in the business as HR director and COO, respectively.
Once the largest TGI Fridays franchisee in the world with 74 restaurants, Honigfeld exited the brand for good in 2020 when he sold his remaining 36 units to corporate for $10 million. Plenty of closures came first, he noted, as the brand’s private equity ownership—Sentinel Capital and TriArtisan Capital Partners bought the chain in 2014 for $800 million—“drove it into the ground.”
“By 2018, Fridays was bad and sales were plummeting,” said Honigfeld, and it came as no surprise to him when the company filed for bankruptcy November 2. Court documents show there are just 39 company-owned restaurants and 122 franchised ones left in the United States. Fridays had 500 domestic restaurants in 2014.
“When private equity came in, their whole thing was, let’s put new paint on the building,” said Honigfeld as he recalled earlier attempts to refresh the brand. “What it needed was to be reconcepted and modernized.”
In 2006, when Honigfeld combined Briad’s 18 Fridays locations with 56 owned by Main Street Restaurant Group, a publicly held company with Fridays locations primarily in California and
Arizona, he leveraged his Wendy’s business to finance the deal.
The Briad Group in 2023 had 105 Wendy’s restaurants doing nearly $300 million in total sales. Today, the group operates two Wendy’s, in Philadelphia and New Jersey, after selling the bulk of its stores to Flynn Group.
“We were caught in a tsunami with 14 banks,” said Honigfeld, and the demise of the Fridays business and entangled financing didn’t help. “Food inflation, wage inflation and interest rates soared, and we couldn’t handle the debt and went into workout.”
The two Wendy’s stores Honigfeld kept were outside the credit facility, and the group is still on good terms with brand leadership, he said. He sees an opportunity to regrow the Wendy’s business, perhaps by pairing its quick-service restaurants with his Circle Ks.
“C-stores today, the right ones are kind of like mini food courts with gasoline out front,” he said, and noted he’s also in talks with Dunkin’ and Jersey Mike’s. “It hedges the downside so you’re not just a c-store with gasoline,” and in terms of land use, “it’s really difficult to just put one thing on a pad.”
The Briad Group has five sites under contract and a $50 million commitment from a lender to finance its first 10 Circle Ks. The group will own the real estate and leverage its construction and design experience to develop multiple locations at once, said Jason Honigfeld, chief operating officer and chief financial officer. Now 35, he started in the business just before turning 24 and spent his first several years on the construction and project management side.
“Our real expertise is as a developer,” he said, noting the group also has 14 Marriott hotel properties and a 145,000-square-foot shopping center in northern New Jersey. In a persistently high-cost environment, the group will rely on its experienced team to keep to an aggressive development schedule.
“It’s make sure, before you’re putting a shovel in the ground, that everything is as well-thought-out as it could be,” he said, “so you’re not making changes later that end up being costly.”
Brad Honigfeld’s daughter, Jordyn Honigfeld Suchoff, is also in the business, as The Briad Group’s director of human resources. Having his children involved is another motivating factor for the 65-year-old as they reconstruct the business.
“I like to work,” said Honigfeld. “My DNA, it’s important to have a purpose every day. And in this business, nothing goes in a straight line.”