At 16 years old, Stacy Kwon’s family immigrated from South Korea to Houston, where they slept in the storage room of a corner store. Now, she’s CEO of Snowfox, a sushi franchise with more than 1,300 full-service kiosks in 38 states and counting.
At 16 years old, Stacy Kwon found herself taking a shower in the wire-fenced backyard of a convenience store. She built a fort of milk cartons as a privacy screen and only showered at night so neighbors couldn’t see—a far cry from the upper-middle-class amenities she grew up with in South Korea. “That was the beginning of my immigrant life,” she said.
Kwon and her family moved to the U.S. to start a new life after her father lost his business in South Korea. Kwon, her parents and her two older brothers moved in to a corner room of the convenience store her father worked at—which had a bathroom with only a toilet and a hand sink—in Houston’s Fifth Ward in “a very scary neighborhood,” Kwon recalled.
“Every day was survival, dealing with theft, robbery, people with guns, people with knives…it wasn’t the life I expected watching American movies in Korea,” she said.
Once they saved enough to move to a better neighborhood, the Kwons began trying out different businesses and trading up for better opportunities where they thought they could make more money, from grocery stores to ice cream shops.
As the youngest of her siblings, “everyone expects the youngest to pick up English faster. So while trying to survive and learn English, going to school, your whole family is depending on you for communication,” Kwon said. “I was the one who had to all the phone company, look at documents and contracts, differentiate mail from bills—it was tremendous pressure.”
Along the way, Kwon and her brother discovered the simplicity of Japanese-inspired sushi kiosks in grocery stores.
“Everything is done, down to the menu; all you have to do is put in effort and maximize sales and you have your business,” Kwon said.
The thought of being able to offer a simplistic revenue model to other immigrant families, “with me understanding exactly the struggles immigrants go through, it was this amazing opportunity for us to build and roll out more stores for more families to get into this safe, simple business, and they don’t have to go through the struggles I did. I thought it was wonderful, almost a calling.”
Snowfox touts high-end restaurant-quality sushi with grab-and-go convenience and offers cooked and raw sushi, bento boxes, chef favorites, appetizers and party platters, with the goal of taking “sushi back to its origins of chef-based theatricality.”
Scaling sushi
In 2005, Kwon and her family began running sushi kiosks within five Kroger stores in Houston. Called Grocery Sushi at first, Kwon wanted to differentiate their brand by renaming it to a friendly, recognizable animal. She settled on Snowfox—another name for the Arctic or white fox that lives in the Northern Hemisphere in Arctic regions—for its symbolism of purity and clarity. “We wanted our sushi to be that image of clean, unpolluted, healthy food,” she said.
Snowfox touts high-end restaurant-quality sushi with grab-and-go convenience and offers cooked and raw sushi, bento boxes, chef favorites, appetizers and party platters, with the goal of taking “sushi back to its origins of chef-based theatricality.”
Wanting to bring the opportunity to more people, especially immigrant families, Kwon started franchising Snowfox in 2013 under JFE Franchising. Simultaneously, she was promoted from executive vice president to CEO and president of the brand.
Founded in 2005, Snowfox operates more than 1,300 full-service sushi kiosks in 38 states throughout the continental U.S., Hawaii and Alaska.
“Not that it’s limited to immigrants, but it’s really the hard work that immigrants bring, that ‘I will do anything I can do to make this work and provide for my family’ energy to it, so naturally most of our franchisees are immigrants whose language skills are not that great,” Kwon said.
Kwon and her family have grown Snowfox to more than 1,300 full-service kiosks in the U.S., which are all owned by franchisees. The majority of owners work full-time in the business as chefs, and though Snowfox doesn’t typically award multiple units, franchisees often have the opportunity to take over bigger and better-performing locations if they outperform in sales.
“Some companies do take top stores and turn them into corporate models, because they do generate a lot of income, but we decided not to do that and award those sites to the best franchisees,” Kwon said.
According to Snowfox’s March 2022 franchise disclosure document, it costs $5,068 to $27,600 to open a satellite Snowfox location, and between $20,722 and $220,400 to open a Snowfox inline, endcap or island sushi bar, including franchise fees. About 150 new franchises are projected to open in the next year.
Forget whitespace—growing via acquisitions
Snowfox’s main competitor, Advanced Fresh Concepts Corp., franchises more than 4,000 AFC Sushi kiosks and food service counter locations in retail stores throughout the U.S., Canada and Australia. Despite the competition and not being the first concept in the space, Kwon sees thousands of opportunities for Snowfox in U.S. grocery stores, adding that her business didn’t grow by going into whitespace, but by acquiring other sushi providers’ accounts.
Snowfox provides “the top service with top menu assortment, quality, managing and being able to provide a service that retailers love to partner with,” she said.
In 2019, Snowfox merged with U.K.-based Yo Sushi, which has about 60 brick-and-mortar restaurants and 200 retail store counters. Founded in 1997, Yo Sushi took over Canadian Bento Sushi chain in 2017 and sushi supplier Taiko Foods in 2018 for an undisclosed amount.
Across all its brands, Snowfox Group posted $448 million in systemwide sales in 2020, 73 percent of which came from kiosks. Snowfox sells more than 60 million trays of sushi per year, according to its website, and seeks to be the number one Japanese food brand for revenue growth, brand recognition, shareholder value and sustainability.
On September 8, Snowfox announced it converted 107 Bento Sushi locations across Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New York and Vermont. The brand is strategically shifting the majority of U.S. grocery store sushi kiosks to Snowfox, while Bento Sushi will focus on Canada, Hawaii and non-traditional U.S.-based markets such as college campuses, business parks and airports. Taiko and Yo will continue serving sushi in the U.K.
“I’m still using the same calculations as when I built the brand with five stores and the program I built then. We’re running a very efficient company here with our sales volume and the sheer size of us today,” Kwon said.
125 flights to thank franchisees
In August, Kwon was named one of Houston’s Most Admired CEOs by the Houston Business Journal, which recognized 45 local business leaders based on company impact, civic involvement, career achievement and more. “I went blank. I was raised to be humble,” Kwon said about her reaction to the news. “I was just doing my job and enjoying my job, so I simply say I’m grateful and honored.”
One metric that shows Kwon’s commitment to franchisees: she hopped on a plane a total of 125 times last year to attend new openings and meet new franchisees, retailers and partners.
“I want that white-glove service, as we are the vendor and they’re the customer,” she said. Even COVID-19 didn’t slow down her travel, as Kwon didn’t want to be the kind of CEO who hid behind her desk at home while franchisees were working on the front lines every day.
Across all its brands, including U.K.-based Yo Sushi and Taiko Foods and Canadian chain Bento Sushi, Snowfox Group posted $448 million in systemwide sales in 2020, 73 percent of which came from kiosks.
“Our chefs are working every day providing sushi at their kiosks, and I really respect them for it. The only way to show appreciation is not just sending nice letters or ‘hey I support you’ videos, but actually meeting them at their locations and thanking them,” Kwon said.
“I fly, grab a city bus and go to work. My office is the lounge at the airport. My exercise is the terminal. I’d rather walk than take the tram from terminal A to B,” Kwon added. “I make things work and I enjoy doing it.”