Chick Fil A has 2,813 locations.
5.8 billion was the companies revenue in 2021.
An average revenue of 2 million per store.

Which that average is just for the company as a whole.

The average Chick Fil A makes 4.2 million in revenue on average.

Comparing that

KFC’s average 1.3 million.
McDonald’s average 2.7 million.
Taco Bell is 1.5 million.

Chick Fil A is by far the highest earning fast food franchise for per store revenue, but unlike most chains, they are actually a private company and will always be private.

The companies founder S. Truett Cathy before passing away had his children sign a clause in their inheritance, agreeing to never take the company public and require his grandchildren and their kids to follow.

This makes it unlikely Chick Fil A will ever go public, but I wanted to write what they’d be valued at if the company was publicly traded.

I want to compare with the largest publicly traded fast food chains and see what the value is.

McDonald’s is worth 183 billion revenue.

23 billion for 2021’s revenue.
7.5 billion in profit.

McDonald’s trades at 7.9x revenue and 24.4x profit.

Yum Brand’s which owns Taco Bell & KFC trades at 33 billion.

6.6 billion for 2021’s revenue.
1.6 billion in profit.

Yum Brands trades at 5x revenue and 20.6 profit.

Domino’s is worth 14.3 billion.

4.4 billion for 2021’s revenue.
510 million in profit.

3.3x revenue and 28x profit.

Those were the biggest franchise model publicly traded companies in the US that I looked at and that shows a trend the companies trade at market cap’s 3-8x revenue and 20-28x profit, with a heavy gap depending on stage of company.

Looking at this, I’m going to go by profit and say Chick Fil A would be worth 24x the current profit of the company.

While the company is private, so records aren’t as transparent as public companies, Chick Fil A is fairly open on this and said they made 1.2 billion in profit for 2021.

That’d mean if Chick Fil A was public, it’d have a market cap of about 28.8 billion dollars, putting it below Yum Brands, but above Domino’s in valuation.

Final thing

I posted this, because of two polls I did asking the same question.

Why is McDonald’s popular?
Why is Chick Fil A popular?

Results for McDonalds.

Low prices-54%
Fast speed-12%
Quality of food-7%
Locations of stores-14%
Unsure-12%

Comparing that with Chick Fil.

Low prices-6%
Speed-4%
Quality of food-66%
Location of stores-2%
Unsure-22%

I don’t want people to think this is a knock on McDonald’s, where it’s not a bad thing to be the low cost option that is really quick.

That said, cool that Chick Fil A had two thirds of voters say the food was the reason for success, where I don’t think any other franchise would come even close to that.