Until 2022, there had never been a fast-casual restaurant to win a “best wing sauce” category at the annual National Buffalo Wing Festival in Buffalo, New York. That changed when Wing It On! secured the top prize for the traditional medium sauce category in September 2022.
Wing It On!’s best-in-class wing sauces are part of the reason why Craveworthy Brands purchased the brand with intentions of scaling it. “That gave me proof of concept,” Craveworthy Brands CEO Gregg Majewski says. “Usually you see mom-and-pop restaurants win in contests like that. Wing it On!’s sauce is that much better than other brands trying to grow out there. I knew we could build a Craveworthy type of experience with it.”
The Wing It On! menu also features chicken sandwiches, tenders, dumplings, french fries, and more. All of the food is built to travel—Wing It On! boasts up to 90 percent off-premises orders at its stores.
Wing It On! fit the Craveworthy Brands playbook not just because of its mouth-watering food, but also due to the wing category’s white space. Majewski calls it out: his goal is to give Wing It On! all the resources it needs to grow into the second-biggest brand in the category.
LOCATIONS: 14
FUTURE LOCATIONS SIGNED: 17
FRANCHISE FEE: $30,000 for single unit, $22,4500 for second, $14,500 each additional unit
TOTAL START-UP COSTS: $210,500–$440,000/store
With 14 locations, including a food truck, currently open and 17 more agreements signed, Wing It On! is a real contender to achieve that goal—in 2022, Wingstop was the only wing concept that appeared in the QSR Top 50. Majewski says Craveworthy’s current projections show Wing It On! checking in at 200 units within the next five years, with “100 or more in the pipeline at all times.”
“And that’s a scaled down version of our projections,” Majewski says. “That’s the sure-thing bet of locations we’ll have open by 2028. I think the sky’s the limit with this brand, because the product is there and now we’ve got the infrastructure built up around it.”
One of the key upsides of Wing It On!’s model is the fact that it requires minimal up-front investment—estimated between $210,500 and $440,000 per store—and very little square footage. It’s a brand that a franchisee can really run with, too: Craveworthy Brands charges a $30,000 franchise fee for a single unit, $22,500 for a second unit, and just $14,500 for each additional unit.
“This is a brand that scales everywhere,” Majewski says. “We are aiming to grow all throughout the northeast, up and down the eastern seaboard, and even into the midwest, in places like the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and we’ll soon be opening up corporate stores in Chicago. But we’re really open to a lot of different places right now.”
Learn more at franchise.wingiton.com.
By Charlie Pogacar
