Dunkin just teamed up with L.L.Bean. It's the latest move in the oldest playbook in hospitality.

Friends of Branded!

Happy Saturday and I hope you had a great week.

If you're old enough, you can still hear the ad. A guy walking along eating chocolate bumps into a guy eating peanut butter. "You got your chocolate in my peanut butter!" "You got your peanut butter on my chocolate!" Two things that were perfectly fine on their own collide by accident, and become Reese's, one of the best-selling candies on earth. A whole empire built on the radical idea that two good things, put together, can be better than either one alone.

I know, I know. This week's Top of the Fold is not a candy column (I pride myself on having pretty decent range, but I'm not going to walk you through the history of confectionery). It's about that collision, b/c I saw the grown-up, corporate version of it this week, and it's a masterclass.

Dunkin just teamed up with L.L.Bean. On September 29 the two of them roll out a co-branded capsule: a Dunkin-fied Birdseye sweater at $79.95, the famous L.L.Bean Boat and Tote at $59.95, a coffee tote, even a limited sweater-pattern cup sleeve. Enter code “Schatzy” when ordering and you’ll receive a few chuckles from Team Branded at absolutely no cost! 😊

Two New England icons that have quietly shared the same Saturday mornings for decades, the coffee run and the drive to the coast, finally putting their names on the same object. As Dunkin's CMO put it, they "love collaborations that feel authentic to the way people actually live." That word, authentic, is the whole ballgame, and I'll come back to it.

JB: do you like what I’m doing here this week with these two legendary New England brands? But don’t get cocky or I’ll bring up the less than authentic collaboration between Tom Brady and Pizza Hut (that’s right, I’m not afraid to go there and drag the GOAT into it).

Here's my thesis. The brand collaboration is not a fad, it's the oldest and most underrated playbook in our industry, and in a year this hard it might be the single most efficient lever an operator has.

And I'd argue McDonald's is the OG.

It started with the Happy Meal in 1979, a genuinely radical piece of business. Put a cheap toy in a box and partner with the movies kids already love, and suddenly you're not selling a burger, you're selling the new Disney or Pixar release with a side of fries. McDonald's turned its own menu into a distribution channel for Hollywood, and Hollywood into a reason to drag your parents to McDonald's. Two great tastes. Everybody won, especially the guy holding the fries.

That DNA never left, it just grew up.

In 2012, Taco Bell and Frito-Lay collided their respective chocolate and peanut butter and gave us the Doritos Locos Taco, which sold 100 million units in its first ten weeks and blew past a billion inside two years. A billion off a taco shell made of a chip that already existed.

Then the celebrity era arrived.

In 2020, McDonald's did its first star meal since the McJordan in 1992, the Travis Scott Meal, and it was so popular that stores ran out of Quarter Pounder supplies. The BTS Meal (a 2021 collaboration between McDonald’s and the massively popular South Korean pop group whose fan base calls itself the “ARMY”) went global across some 50 countries, and it is the cleanest proof of why a collab earns a spot in this conversation. It was not even a new sandwich. It was a box of McNuggets, fries, a Coke, and two Korean-inspired sauces, dressed in BTS purple. Fans didn’t just buy it, they treasured it, reselling the empty boxes, cups, and even the used sauce containers online as collectibles.

That is the whole magic trick of a great collaboration, turning pure fandom into a same-day transaction and a paper bag into a keepsake. And in 2022, the Cactus Plant Flea Market "adult Happy Meal" sold out so fast the toys were flipping on eBay for hundreds. Grown adults, fighting over a Happy Meal, b/c the collab weaponized the one thing money can't manufacture: nostalgia.

Collaborations happen everywhere, in sneakers, in cars, in fashion. What makes them different, and I'd argue better, for restaurants?

Great question.

My magic number, three, is the number of reasons and they’re provided below. Let’s dive into them.

First, immediacy. A sneaker collab is considered a purchase you make a few times a year. A restaurant collab you can buy, hold, and eat this afternoon for five bucks. Food is habitual and high-frequency, so a cultural moment converts into an actual transaction the same day, and then again next week. No other category turns attention into revenue that fast.

Second, distribution. A restaurant chain is a media network money genuinely cannot buy: thousands of locations, millions of daily guests, a billboard on every corner. The partner brings cultural cachet or a brand-new audience, and the restaurant brings the reach to put it in front of everyone by lunch. That's the trade. Each side hands over the one asset the other can't build alone. Equity for distribution, goodwill for goodwill.

Third, and this is the quiet one (and the one I love the most), low risk and high ceiling. A collab is almost always a limited-time play. You get the traffic spike, the social buzz, and the pricing power of scarcity without committing to a permanent menu change or a dime of new CapEx. If it works, you ride it. If it fizzles, it's gone next month and nobody remembers. Heads you win, tails you shrug.

Now the part that matters most, b/c this is a hospitality newsletter and not a marketing one. The collaboration needs to land on the P&L.

At a moment when the industry is fighting real headwinds, including, but not limited to soft traffic, exhausting value wars, margins squeezed from every direction, a well-built collaboration is close to the perfect weapon. It's one of the only marketing spends that shows up as revenue the very same week AND leaves an asset behind: a jolt of brand equity, a younger or a broader audience, and a reason for people to talk about you for free. Awareness, incremental revenue, and equity value, all from one move. When value is this hard to find, you don't leave that on the table.

But here's the catch, and it's the word from earlier, authentic.

The reason Dunkin and L.L.Bean works is that it's true. Both really are New England, really do share that customer, so the collab reads as a wink between old friends, not a cash grab. Force it, pair two brands that have no business being in the same sentence, and guests smell it instantly. A great collaboration feels like a gift. A cynical one feels like a shakedown. Same mechanics, opposite results.

Here's the takeaway for anyone running a business, and it scales all the way down from McDonald's to your two-unit local group (b/c this newsletter isn’t for the BIGS only, it’s for all operators, of all sizes). 

Friends, you don't need Travis Scott (although if Mr. Scott would like to discuss a collaboration with Branded and any of our restaurants, I’m ready to speak and get to work 😊). You need a partner whose goodwill and audience complement yours, and the honesty to make sure the pairing is real.

Team up with the beloved bakery down the block, the local brewery, the hometown team. Borrow each other's distribution, trade on each other's goodwill, and give your guest something neither of you could offer alone. The buddy movie is a genre for a reason. Butch and Sundance, Woody and Buzz, chocolate and peanut butter. Some things are just better together.

It takes a village!

Nigel Henry, Global Director of Operations at Yum! Brands, on how Taco Bell, KFC and Habit Burger & Grill run at a global scale. LISTEN NOW

Join the partner ecosystem built to scale

LEARN MORE

This week's Shoutout goes to the good people at Informa and to FSTEC, which just marked its 30th anniversary. Thirty years. In an industry where most things don't last thirty months, that's a milestone worth celebrating.

If you don't know it, FSTEC is the conference that puts restaurant technologists and operators in the same room, FSTEC 2026, with 1,500-plus operators, 70-plus speakers, and 230-plus tech providers. And it does the one thing our industry desperately needs more of.

Longtime readers know I bang this drum constantly: technologists and operators too often talk right past each other. FSTEC is built to fix that. Real work and real talk, in person, about what operators actually need, not what a roadmap says they might want.

That’s the gap where most restaurant tech goes to die, and closing it is the entire point of a room like this.

Now, a special shoutout within the shoutout. Mr. Keith Lee delivered a keynote, fittingly titled "Beyond the Review: How Authentic Influence Drives Real-World Impact," and by every account the packed room felt exactly what I've always felt about him: this is a genuine, generous, and authentic person.

Keith built an audience north of 20 million by doing something deceptively simple, telling the truth about family-owned restaurants, and the "Keith Lee Effect" has since put more struggling small operators on the map than any ad budget could dream of. He didn't buy that trust. He earned it, one honest review at a time.

And borrowing from this week's Top of the Fold on collaboration, it's not lost on me that Keith is a stakeholder and partner of Brooklyn Dumpling Shop, which, full disclosure, is a Branded portfolio company.

But here's why that partnership works, and why it belongs in the same conversation as Dunkin and L.L.Bean rather than the forced pairings that fall flat: it's real. Keith says he backed the brand b/c "it's creative, it's accessible, and it doesn't cut corners on flavor," and anyone who follows him knows that is exactly the food he actually champions. The man and the mission match. That's the whole game.

So thank you, Informa, for three decades of building the room where operators and technologists finally hear each other, and congratulations to Keith on a keynote that clearly landed. If you build restaurant tech, or buy it, this is a room worth being in.

Here's to the next thirty.

📺 13 new TV shows to binge this fall, from nostalgic comedies to legal dramas and thrillers made for spooky season. -The Wall Street Journal

⛳ The best places to live if your idea of a good commute ends at the first tee. -Travel + Leisure

👔 Are Quince’s men’s clothes actually any good? The designer dupes mostly hit, with a few notable misses. -Esquire

⚖️ Kalshi’s sports-betting expansion is testing the limits of prediction markets—and state gambling laws -The Wall Street Journal

📺 Twenty-eight years later, Seinfeld is still a fan favorite and one of the most decorated comedies in TV history -Men’s Journal

Sticking with this week's theme, let's talk about a brand that has turned collaboration into a growth engine: Big Chicken, the better-chicken concept founded by Shaquille O'Neal back in 2018. Full disclosure, and a happy one: Big Chicken is a Branded portfolio company, so weigh my enthusiasm accordingly. The wins have been coming fast, and the how is the whole story.

Start with the newest one. This week Big Chicken opened at Jackson State University, its first location on an HBCU campus, in the Legacy Food Court, through a partnership with SodexoMAGIC.

Sit with that pairing for a second, b/c it's beautiful.

SodexoMAGIC is itself a collaboration, the joint venture between food-service giant Sodexo and Magic Johnson Enterprises, a minority-owned business majority-held by Magic. So this is, quite literally, Shaq's brand and Magic's platform teaming up to serve students at a historic HBCU.

Two Hall of Famers, one food court. It even helps that Shaq and JSU's basketball coach Mo Williams were teammates on the Cavs. The whole thing is authentic to its bones, which, per this week's Top of the Fold, is the entire ballgame.

And it's not a one-off. In August, Big Chicken opened its first standalone Maryland restaurant in Gambrills, run by franchise partner Pratik Patel, adding to an earlier Baltimore arena location. The brand is now north of 40 locations, almost all of them operated as franchises or franchise-partner deals, with Craveworthy Brands, the multi-brand platform led by Gregg Majewski, serving as managing partner. 

Dr. O’Neal, for his part, has built roughly a $500 million empire across restaurants, car washes, and fitness.

Here's The Deal Room lesson, b/c it's bigger than one chicken brand.

Watch how Big Chicken actually scales, b/c it's a clinic in growth by collaboration, and every layer is the same trade: equity for distribution. Big Chicken brings the one thing money genuinely cannot buy, Shaq's brand equity and goodwill, an instant reason for a landlord, a campus, or a franchisee to want you in the building. In return, each partner brings the asset Big Chicken would otherwise have to build slowly and expensively on its own.

SodexoMAGIC brings distribution into campuses and venues that are notoriously hard to crack, plus real community credibility. The franchise partners bring local capital and operating muscle.

Craveworthy brings the operational playbook, systems and the scale. Nobody's doing it alone, and nobody has to.

That's the pattern worth internalizing. A challenger brand does not have to choose between growing fast and growing capital-efficiently. Stack the right partners and you get both. Big Chicken is opening in arenas, on campuses, and in new states largely on other people's balance sheets, using borrowed distribution and a founder's borrowed fame, which is about the most capital-light way to scale a restaurant brand that exists. Forty-plus locations, most of them funded and run by partners, isn’t an accident. It's a design.

But here's the catch, and it's the same one from the lead. The collab only works if it's real. The reason Shaq and chicken land, and the reason Shaq and Magic serving an HBCU lands even harder, is that none of it feels forced. It's a credible founder in a credible category, partnered with credible people who share the mission.

Match the brand to the partner honestly and the goodwill compounds. Force it and guests smell the shakedown a mile away.

So, the takeaway for operators and investors both: in a brutal market, the fastest and cheapest path to scale usually isn't building every capability yourself. It's assembling a roster. Find the partners whose distribution, capital, and credibility complement what you already own, make sure the fit is genuine, and let each side do what it does best.

Shaq knows this better than anyone. You don't win a championship with one superstar. You win it with a team.

I did something I swore I wasn’t ready to do yet. I got my 10-year-old a cell phone. (I know. Judge away.) But with one very important rule: use the phone to make the plans, then put the phone down and actually do the plans.

Which got me thinking about us adults and how phones earned themselves an extra seat at the restaurant table. We use them to make the reservation, look at the menu, photograph the food (the phone eats first, obviously), post the meal…and then sometimes spend the entire dinner staring at them instead of the people sitting across from us.

And that’s where hospitality comes in. Restaurants are still one of the few places specifically designed to bring people together IN PERSON. This past week at FSTEC, I looked around a dinner table of 25 restaurant executives and realized something: not one person was on their phone. Everyone was talking, laughing and connecting. It was a great reminder that the best technology in hospitality is the technology that gets us to the table…but then it needs to gets out of the way.

So what can my 10-year-old’s first cell phone teach the rest of us about screen time at the dinner table? Put your phone down for a few minutes and keep reading.

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By Melissa Hughes

Biggest Takeaways From FS/TEC 2026

From operational excellence and smarter guest data to AI, retention and better vendor partnerships. READ MORE

By Rev Ciancio

That's it for today!

See you next week, same bat-time, same bat-channel.

It takes a village!

Jimmy Frischling

Branded Hospitality

[email protected]

235 Park Ave South, 4th Fl | New York, NY 10003

Branded Hospitality is a foodservice growth platform with three integrated business lines—Ventures, Solutions, and Media. We invest in innovative tech and emerging brands, provide expert advisory and capital strategies, and amplify visibility through podcasts, newsletters, social, and events—creating a powerful flywheel that drives growth, brand strength, and lasting success.

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