Restaurant professionals and brothers Dhavel and Hetal Patel signed a master franchise agreement to open 20+ Freshii stores in parts of New York City. Dhavel and Hetal own and operate 7 Dunkin’ Donuts restaurants in Northern New Jersey, and after reading about Freshii in several publications decided to explore the concept further.

“There is obviously a huge trend towards healthier eating and we had to figure out how to intelligently expand our franchise holdings in that direction,” says Hetal Patel. “After meeting with Matthew Corrin, Freshii’s founder, seeing the Freshii restaurants first hand, eating the food and witnessing the high volumes in relatively small spaces, we knew we wanted in and we knew we wanted as much of NYC as we could get.”

The brothers already have potential locations in mind, and expect to open the first location by early 2010.

“After living in NYC for several years before founding Freshii, I knew Freshii was tailor made for the city, which we originally planned to develop corporately,” says Matthew Corrin, Freshii CEO. “Then, along comes a really experienced franchise group and it only made sense to split the market and double the pace of opening new restaurants. The brothers are already serving thousands of customers every day in their multi-unit Dunkin’ Donuts locations, and after several meetings I grew more and more comfortable with their ability to emulate our culture and execute at the highest level Manhattan will demand.”