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<\/p>\nSummer is officially upon us, and it\u2019s time to take stock of the barbecue segment of the chain restaurant industry. As we touched on in this month\u2019s Restaurant & Foodservice Snapshot Dickey\u2019s Barbecue Restaurants, the largest BBQ chain in the business, is the 550-store gorilla in the room. As seen in the chart below, after adding 250+ units in the last three years, Dickey\u2019s now dwarfs its closest competitors, Famous Dave\u2019s and Sonny\u2019s BBQ.<\/p>\n
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Source: Chains Store Guide Database of Chain Restaurant Operators<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Surprisingly, while Dickey\u2019s has grown by leaps and bounds in the last few years, very <\/em>few other chains have followed suit. Remove Dickey\u2019s from the mix, and the chain BBQ segment doesn\u2019t look much different today than it did three years ago in terms of the players and the number of restaurants they operate. Of the top-20 chain operators, only two \u2013 Moe’s Original Bar B Que and Jim ‘N Nick’s Bar-B-Q \u2013 have shown significant unit growth in the last three years (21 to 40 units for the former; 25 to 37 units for the latter).\u00a0 The other top-20 chains have experienced slight increases, stagnation or contraction in store counts.<\/p>\n A few factors are at work here. With its manic levels of expansion, Dickey\u2019s has simply sucked up a lot of the oxygen in the room. But as importantly, barbecue doesn\u2019t lend itself as easily to chain-based growth as many other concepts. The appeal of barbecue \u2013 regional variations, heritage and grass-roots operations \u2013 limits the likelihood of regional and min-chains blowing up.<\/p>\n Barbecue is everywhere, that\u2019s clear. But it\u2019s a multitude of operators and startups growing the one- and two- and three-unit concepts. Newcomers that grow much past those numbers quickly risk messing with the marketable story, approach and positioning that afford them initial success.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Summer is officially upon us, and it\u2019s time to take stock of the barbecue segment of the chain restaurant industry. As we touched on in this month\u2019s Restaurant & Foodservice Snapshot Dickey\u2019s Barbecue Restaurants, the largest BBQ chain in the business, is the 550-store gorilla in the room. As seen in the chart below, after… Continue reading Breaking Down Barbecue<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"post-template-no-sidebar.php","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[17],"class_list":["post-7205","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-restaurant-foodservice","tag-csg-exclusive","entry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chainstoreguide.com\/offthechain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7205","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chainstoreguide.com\/offthechain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chainstoreguide.com\/offthechain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chainstoreguide.com\/offthechain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chainstoreguide.com\/offthechain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7205"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chainstoreguide.com\/offthechain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7205\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chainstoreguide.com\/offthechain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chainstoreguide.com\/offthechain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chainstoreguide.com\/offthechain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}