Last year, the brand caught the eyes of Grammy-award-winning artist Drake, who loved the food so much he took a minority stake in the company, along with Samuel L. Jackson, NFL Hall-of-Famer Michael Strahan, and Red Sox owner Tom Werner.
“When you’re in the first couple of weeks at the parking lot, cooking food and making 100 bucks a day, if somebody told you you’re going to be partners with Drake in a couple of years, you’re probably not going to believe it,” Oganesyan says. “So it’s definitely surreal and it just validates that everything we’ve done have been the right things. Keeping the brand authentic, keeping it about the food, keeping it about the customer experience. All that paid off enough that one of the biggest people in pop culture invested into the brand. So it was surreal. We were big fans of him. We still are. And like I said, it validated everything we did and it’s still kind of surreal and hard to believe.”
Although Dave’s is headquartered in Southern California, it has locations in multiple states thousands of miles away, like Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, and New York. The intention is to be a national brand, and Bitticks—formerly the chief restaurant officer of Blaze Pizza—came with a playbook. After all, the pizza chain was once called the fastest-growing restaurant chain in U.S. history. PFG is the distributor, so a countrywide network has been lined up. In terms of markets, the critical factor isn’t so much the demographics of a particular city, but more so the quality of the franchisees driving expansion. Operators typically sign on for six to 10 stores, depending on experience.
Dave’s is willing to go anywhere if the operator meets expectations. The chain moved into Tutalatin, Oregon, a suburb of Portland, in an endcap location, and the team was shocked by the sales volume. The brand opened on the same day in Denver, Colorado, but in an urban endcap spot, and sales were just as impressive. The same results happen with standalone locations. The standard real estate footprint is between 2,000 and 2,500 square feet. The smallest is 1,400 square feet and some reach 3,000 to 3,500 square feet.
Ten to 15 percent of the system uses drive-thru, and the brand opened a ghost kitchen in 2021. A pickup-only location is in development.