Slim Chickens, the 11-year-old creation of a couple of Fayetteville restaurant entrepreneurs, appears poised to take advantage of diners’ increasing appetite for chicken.
“You’ve got to have a target on the wall,” Tom Gordon, president of the chain, told Arkansas Business recently. That target, said Gordon and his business partner Greg Smart, is 600 restaurants in 2025.
The chain, which opened its first location in Fayetteville on Feb. 17, 2003, now has 13 locations with a 14th scheduled to open June 16. That 14th outlet will be Slim Chickens’ third restaurant in Fayetteville. The chain has two locations in Little Rock and outlets in Rogers; Jonesboro; Conway; Hot Springs; and Texarkana, Texas; along with three in Oklahoma. Five of those are franchises; the other eight are company-owned, as will be the newest location.
Gordon and Smart, the company’s chief marketing officer, put Slim Chickens’ annual revenue in 2013 — counting every unit — at between $15 million and $20 million.
As for average annual sales of each location, Gordon, while declining to be specific, said, “We have a range that we like to see.” The restaurants “that perform exceptionally well” have annual sales of between $1.7 and $2 million, he said.
By that standard, the first Slim Chickens in Little Rock, at 4500 W. Markham, is on track to be among those performing exceptionally well: It didn’t open until May 2013 and yet racked up $1,296,143 in sales for the year and has had sales of $404,794 in the first three months of 2014.
A National Trend
The Slim Chickens chain is among a number of restaurants seeking to exploit Americans’ taste for chicken.
Food Business News, an online industry publication, reported earlier this month that Chick-fil-A, KFC, Domino’s Pizza and others were introducing new “chicken concepts.” And Technomic, which provides research for the food service industry, reported in March that chicken chains grew 5.1 percent in 2013, outpacing the 3.9 percent experienced by the overall limited-service restaurant market.Chick-fil-A was the category leader, increasing 9.3 percent with 2013 sales of $5.1 billion and surpassing KFC as the top chicken chain.
Yum Brands Inc., parent company of KFC, on April 9 opened Super Chix in Arlington, Texas, a test store focusing on chicken tenders and sandwiches, in what was seen as a potential challenge to the mighty Chick-fil-A.
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