RBI paying $600,000 per restaurant for 16 Miami units — roughly eleven times what Pulse paid per store for the Tampa/North Florida package — is the clearest available signal of how the franchisor values dense, high-volume urban Popeyes trade areas versus the rest of the portfolio. Corporate-held restaurants acquired out of distress are almost always refranchised later; these are future transaction inventory.
| Date | Type | Detail | Value |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Bankruptcy sale | Sailormen, Inc. — 97 Popeyes restaurants Pulse Restaurant Group 50 units / $2.69M; RFI Ventures 23 units / $2.5M; Popeyes corporate 16 units / $9.6M; SBH Foods PLK 5 units / $650K; 61 Biscuits 3 units / $1.11M. Approximately 33 additional locations closed via lease rejection.1 | $16.55M |
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What it means for the Chicken Wars: The decline moderated from -6.5% in Q1, which management will present as progress. It isn't recovery. Six consecutive negative quarters at ~$235K of restaurant-level profit is a franchisee solvency timeline, not a marketing problem — and the Sailormen bankruptcy already showed what the end of that timeline looks like.
What it means for the Chicken Wars: The 100 basis point spread between corporate and franchisee QSR is the single most important number in chicken real estate. It is the market pricing exactly what CSW tracks: who actually operates the restaurant. In a year with a major Popeyes franchisee bankruptcy, expect that spread to widen — and to widen most for brands with negative comps.
What it means for the Chicken Wars: Read the per-store prices: Popeyes corporate paid $600K per restaurant for 16 Miami units; 61 Biscuits paid $370K per restaurant in West Palm Beach; Pulse paid about $54K per restaurant for 50 units across Tampa, Tallahassee, Pensacola and Jacksonville. That spread is a live map of where Popeyes trade areas still work and where they don't. Thirty-three restaurants found no buyer at all and went dark through lease rejection.
What it means for the Chicken Wars: The $235K figure is the most consequential number RBI disclosed. At that level, a franchisee carrying acquisition debt across 100 units cannot service it. Sailormen filed in January. Assume more filings follow before comps turn.
What it means for the Chicken Wars: 3,300 employees, $233.5M of fiscal 2025 revenue, 136 restaurants across Florida and Georgia — gone as a going concern within twelve months of the franchisor reporting $235K average restaurant profit. The largest single distress event in chicken franchising this cycle.
What it means for the Chicken Wars: Down from 9.1% in 2024 and more than 12% in 2023 — still comfortably ahead of the 3% industry, but the era of automatic double-digit chicken growth is over. Category-wide, growth is now being redistributed rather than created: Dave's, Cane's and Zaxby's are taking it out of KFC, Popeyes and Jollibee.
What it means for the Chicken Wars: Chicken remains the most consumed animal protein in the United States and is still growing. The demand backdrop is not the problem for Popeyes, KFC or Wingstop. Share is.
What it means for the Chicken Wars: FCPT is the most visible institutional buyer in restaurant net lease and has bought Popeyes assets with ~20 years of term. Its acquisition pace is a useful proxy for where institutional capital thinks restaurant real estate is priced correctly — and its 2026 buying has skewed heavily toward non-restaurant service retail.
Every figure on this page is attributed. CSW does not publish estimates as facts — where a number is unavailable it is shown as “—”, and where a figure is derived arithmetically from two published figures it is marked as derived.