Inside the Quest to Build the World's Next Biggest Franchises -- by Incubating Them Like Silicon Valley Tech Startups
At lunchtime on a recent Thursday, the line at Melt Shop snaked through the restaurant and out onto the pavement, not far from Rockefeller Center, in New York City. Twentysomethings in business-casual attire and tourists alike sat around yellow picnic tables, digging into crispy grilled cheese sandwiches, milkshakes and tater tots.
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From the outside, this seems like your standard success story: Melt Shop is one of many fast-casual restaurants that have sprouted up in recent years, with stylish decor, friendly cashiers and food that’s a cut above the quality of standard fast-food fare but still hovers around $10 per meal. And as a place devoted to grilled cheese sandwiches (plus tasty accessories), it also seems somehow quintessentially New York -- a city that’s birthed many single-focused restaurants, including places that sell only rice pudding or mac and cheese. But Melt Shop is much more than all that, too. It’s an experiment 15 years in the making -- a concept formed in a franchise factory, which is now poised to prove a concept far bigger than itself.
Its co-creators, Andy Stern and John Rigos, have many more in the pipeline just like it.
“On paper, this is a very simple business,” Rigos told me. “You have to , control your ingredients and control your labor. But doing it every day and doing it well is really hard. Two concepts across the street from each other can look like they’re both busy, and one can be
