 | TOP OF THE FOLD Rings Fade, Brands Don'tThe Cowboys haven't won in 30 years and they're worth $17 billion. There's a lesson in that for restaurants. by Jimmy Frischling Friends of Branded! Happy Saturday and I hope you had a great week. I was at a dinner this week when the conversation turned, as conversations with me often do, to sports and money in the same breath (go figure, a finance guy who likes sports, unheard of, right?). The subject of this specific conversation was the Dallas Cowboys and the New York Yankees. Two of the most famous franchises in the history of American sport, both still considered best-in-class organizations, and both among the most valuable franchises on the planet. The Cowboys are, in fact, the most valuable sports franchise on earth, recently pegged at around $17 billion. The Yankees are the most valuable team in baseball at roughly $12 billion (following the financing and equity deal with Apollo Sports Capital). And here's the kicker that got the table going: neither one of these teams has actually won a championship in a very long time. The Cowboys haven't hoisted the Lombardi Trophy since the 1995 season, thirty years ago. The Yankees haven't won a World Series since 2009 (JB: you owe me a beer for this intro). Of course, this week's Top of the Fold isn’t a sports column, so here comes the turn you’re expecting. It's about what that strange fact revealed, b/c somewhere between the entrée and the check, it stopped being about football or baseball and started being about brands. And it's a lesson every restaurant operator should sit with. How is a team worth $17 billion when it hasn't won in three decades? The answer is the thing I want to talk about today: heritage. The Cowboys and the Yankees are no longer selling you a championship. They're selling you a legacy, an identity, a feeling. The star on the helmet and the pinstripes carry emotional equity that was built over generations and simply does not evaporate b/c of a bad season, or ten bad seasons. That equity is an asset. A real one. And it shows up on a balance sheet every bit as much as a stadium does. So let me name the thing, b/c it's underrated in our industry. Call it the dynasty dividend. Heritage is one of the only business assets that a competitor, no matter how well funded, cannot simply go out and buy. You can buy real estate. You can buy equipment, talent, even recipes. You cannot buy forty years of a family's Sunday dinners happening at your table. That kind of trust and familiarity is minted slowly, over decades, and once you have it, it pays you back in the three ways that matter most. It gives you pricing power, b/c people pay a premium for what they trust. It slashes your customer acquisition cost, b/c they already know your name and don't need to be convinced to walk in. And it buys you resilience, b/c in a downturn, people cut the unfamiliar first and cling to the familiar longest. Our industry is full of proof. Think of Rao's, the East Harlem Italian spot that opened in 1896, a single room with maybe ten tables and a reservation list so exclusive it is essentially passed down like an heirloom. By any modern metric, Rao's cannot scale. It barely has seats. And yet its heritage became so valuable that it was turned into a jarred-sauce empire, and in 2023 Campbell's paid $2.7 billion for Sovos Brands, the company built around those Rao's sauces. Two-point-seven billion dollars, b/c a name forged over more than a century means something a new label never could. That is the dynasty dividend, cashed. But here's where I have to be honest with you, b/c heritage is a moat, not a life-support machine, and this is the part operators often get wrong. A legacy brand can win even when the competition is fierce, but only if it keeps earning the equity instead of just spending it. There is a world of difference between trading on your heritage and living off it. The Cowboys trade on theirs, pouring the brand into a media machine, a cathedral of a stadium, and a global fan base. Rao's traded on theirs and built a CPG giant. But for every one of those, there's a Howard Johnson's, once the largest restaurant chain in America, that throughout the 1960s and 1970s, served more meals outside the home than any other organization except the United States Army, but that coasted on its orange roofs until the heritage curdled into nostalgia and the whole thing quietly disappeared. We've watched beloved, decades-old names file for bankruptcy in just the last couple of years. Heritage bought them time, but it didn’t buy them forever. Nostalgia, it turns out, does not pay rent indefinitely. So here's the takeaway for the operators and investors reading, whether you're sitting on a hundred-year-old name or building something brand new. If you have heritage, protect it and reinvest in it. Know exactly what your heritage assets are, the founding story, the signature dish nobody can touch, the room, the ritual your regulars would riot over if you changed it, and defend them like the treasure they are. The single fastest way to destroy a legacy brand is to "value-engineer" away the very thing that made it timeless to save a few points of food cost. You need to take the dividend that heritage throws off and plow it back in. Modernize the experience, extend the brand into new dayparts or retail or formats, meet the next generation where they are, all while keeping the soul intact. Honor the legacy. Don't embalm it. And if you don't have heritage yet, understand that you cannot buy it, but you can start minting it today. Heritage is just consistency, compounded over time. Every brand that has it started with a single great year, and then refused to have a bad one. So operate like a brand that fully intends to still be here in fifty years, b/c that is the only way you ever get there. I remember when Smith & Wollensky opened in New York City on the corner of 49th street and 3rd Avenue by the legendary Alan Stillman, back in 1977. I have a distinct memory of asking my dad as we were passing the joint why the owners felt the need to put the year (1977) on the building next to its name when they had only just opened. I remember my dad telling me that they must intend to be here for a long time. Over 50 years later, that sign has only become more powerful and meaningful to me. The Cowboys and the Yankees taught my dinner table something this week that your P&L already knows. The trophy is nice, but the trophy is temporary. The brand, if you tend to it, is forever. You don't necessarily need to win the championship this year. You need to be the kind of name people still believe in long after the last one. Rings fade. Great brands, cared for, do not. It takes a village! | | | | Drive-thru intelligence. Not just automation.  Arc is the first voice AI platform that lets you run, optimize, and grow your drive-thru like a digital channel. Start with what fits your operation, from analytics, to Crew Assist, to full Voice AI ordering. Kickoff to pilot in 8 weeks, with no upfront investment. Get a Demo | | | THE SHOUT OUT, POWERED BY ORACLE "The best traceability tool is the one everyone can use." That line, from our friends at Starfish, is the whole Shoutout this week, so let me make the case. Full disclosure and a proud one: Starfish is a Branded portfolio company, so weigh my enthusiasm accordingly. Here's who they are. Starfish is a neutral connectivity layer for the food supply chain, the quiet plumbing that lets everyone's different systems actually talk to each other. And this week they did something I love: they built an open-source GS1 Digital Link Resolver and gave it away, free for anyone to use, as a contribution to Supply Chain of The Future alongside GS1 US, TOTEM, and the International Fresh Produce Association.  |
In plain English, here's the magic. Put one QR code on a case of produce, and that single code can now tell a different, tailored story depending on who scans it. The grower sees one thing, the distributor another, the retailer another, and the consumer gets the clean, friendly version, all from the same sticker. Under the hood, the resolver reads the product's identifiers, finds where that item's traceability records actually live, and routes each scanner to exactly the data they need. And here's the kicker, the one I keep coming back to: nobody has to rip out the systems they already run. It works with what you've got. Now the Branded take, b/c there's a bigger lesson here. Traceability is no longer a nice-to-have. Between food safety, FSMA, and a consumer who increasingly wants to know where dinner came from, it's coming for all of us. But traceability has been stuck for one simple reason: fragmentation. Everybody's on different systems, and "rip it all out and start over" is a non-starter for an operator running on thin margins. The only thing that ever breaks that logjam is a layer that's both neutral and open, one that doesn't force you to pick a side or replace your stack. That's exactly what Starfish built. And giving it away for free, rather than locking it behind a paywall, is the tell of a company that understands shared standards only work when the tools behind them belong to everyone. You grow the whole pie, and you earn the trust that comes with it. Starfish demoed its GS1 Digital Link Resolver this week at the IFPA Global Produce & Floral Show, scanning one QR code to show what a retailer sees versus what a consumer sees for the very same lot. If you’d like to learn about or explore the open-source code for yourself, please click here: Starfish GS1 Digital Link Resolver or you can contact me directly. One sticker. Every answer. Open to all. That's how you actually move an industry forward. | | | WHAT WE'RE READING THIS WEEK 💊 The five supplements that really matter after 50 – and the ones you can afford to skip 🥃 29 Bourbon Cocktails From Ice-Cold Juleps to Warming Hot Toddies ✈️ 7 Best Places To Visit In 2027, According To Travel Advisors 🏝️ ‘The White Lotus’ Filming In Cannes As Season 4 Production Enters Final Stretch, Hôtel Martinez Transformation Confirms New Resort Logo 🥩 This Everyday Food Outranked Steak, Salmon, and Eggs in a New Protein Analysis | | | THE DEAL ROOM This week, one of the hottest restaurant groups on the planet walked into the grocery business, and I think it's a signal worth reading closely. Major Food Group, the team behind Carbone, Sadelle's, and The Grill, founded in 2011 by Mario Carbone, Rich Torrisi, and Jeff Zalaznick, just made the first outside investment in its history. Not another restaurant. A grocery store. MFG is coming on as founding investor and strategic advisor to Wilder, a roughly 8,000-square-foot neighborhood market opening this fall in Midtown Miami, founded by Danielle Axman, with a Michelin-caliber kitchen run by the Grassfed Culture team behind Los Félix. Terms weren't disclosed. As Carbone put it, "making Wilder our first investment in a grocery retailer was an easy decision." Read that again, b/c there are two firsts stacked on top of each other. MFG's first investment outside its own four walls, and its first in retail grocery. A group famous for owning and operating everything itself just broke both rules at once, to go buy into a store. That doesn't happen by accident. Here's the take. The lines between restaurant, grocery store, and convenience store are blurring, and this deal pours gasoline on the fire. Wilder itself is the proof of concept: it's pitched as a farmers’ market, a grocery store, and a restaurant kitchen all in one, about 4,000 products on the shelves and a chef-driven prepared-foods program coming out of the back. That is not a grocery store with a deli counter. That's a restaurant group's sensibility wrapped around a grocery store's square footage, and it captures every meal occasion a dining room structurally cannot: the Tuesday-night cook-at-home, the grab-and-go lunch, the prepared dinner you pick up on the way home. And the convergence runs in every direction at once. Grocery is going chef-driven and experiential (Wilder, Erewhon). Convenience stores are going fresh and hot (watch what Wawa, Sheetz, and Buc-ee's have done to that category). And restaurants are pushing out past their tables into retail, into CPG, and now into the stores themselves. We talked just above in the Top of the Fold about Rao's turning a century-old restaurant name into a $2.7 billion sauce brand on grocery shelves. This is the next step past that: a restaurant group not just selling a jar in the aisle, but helping build and own the aisle. So what actually wins in a world where the formats all melt together? Great question. The same thing that always wins: brand and trust. When the category lines disappear, the brand becomes the organizing principle, not the format. MFG isn't bringing warehouse logistics to Wilder. It's bringing the thing money can't easily buy, a reputation for taste, hospitality, and curation so strong that people will trust a grocery store simply b/c that group is behind it. Pair that with Wilder's own sourcing framework and a Michelin kitchen, and you've built a store people trust the way they trust a great restaurant. In a blurred market, that trust is the whole moat. One more tell worth flagging for the operators and investors reading. MFG has always been vertically closed, operating only what it builds. The fact that it's now willing to act as an investor and advisor in someone else's concept says the best operators are quietly becoming platforms, deploying their brand and their playbook as capital. That's a page worth stealing. So here's the takeaway. Stop thinking in channels, b/c your customer never did. They don't wake up deciding to patronize "a restaurant" or "a grocery store." They decide they want something good to eat, and they'll get it wherever it's easiest and best. The wall between restaurant and store is coming down, and the operators who own a trusted brand are the ones who get to walk through it and sell into every one of those occasions. For the investors keeping score, that means the addressable market for a great food brand just got a whole lot bigger than its dining rooms. The lines are blurring. The smart money is already shopping in the blur. | | | THE B LIST Know someone who should be on this list, or someone who'd want to see it? Forward this email or share it with your network! | | | MY POINT OF VIEW by Julie Zucker My commute has recently become a part-time job. Only one without a salary, benefits and very limited opportunities for advancement (especially when the bus isn’t moving). What used to take under an hour now takes close to two, and my only reward upon arrival is my overnight oats. At this point, Buddy the Elf’s walk through the Lincoln Tunnel is starting to look like an efficiency strategy. Here’s the thing… I like going to the office. But sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic gives you plenty of time to calculate what you could be doing instead. And while I have the flexibility to answer emails, take a call from the road (apologies in advance for that one) or adjust my day… of course it got me thinking about the people who don’t have this flexibility… restaurant employees. You can’t work a restaurant grill from your living room. You can’t clear table twelve through Teams. And you still can’t Zoom a french fry. Restaurant workers have to physically show up, just as so many did when the world shut down. But when traffic makes them late, they may face lost pay or a write-up. We ask these teams to serve up patience and understanding every day. How much are we offering them when their own day goes off course? This week’s POV takes a very slow ride into a conversation about time, flexibility, and taking care of the people who take care of us. Come along for the full story (we should have plenty of time to read it before this bus moves). Read this week's POV | | | THE INSIDERS | | | | | | | | | | 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. Looking to get in front of 400,000+ hospitality movers and shakers? Dive into our media kit and see how we can help amplify your brand. HOSPITALITY HEADLINE |
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