Ranked by the franchisor's own accounts

Item 21 of a Franchise Disclosure Document contains the franchisor’s audited financial statements. A third party has signed them. They sit in an exhibit at the back, which is why they get skipped. This ranking takes the most recent audited result, most profitable first, and puts the auditor’s opinion beside it.

Every figure was read out of statements attached to a disclosure document. That matters because other columns on the site are not all sourced the same way. Five rows — Dog Haus, The Halal Guys, Crave Hot Dogs and BBQ, Capriotti’s and bluTaco — take fees and unit counts from a comparative study of published filings, while their financial statements come from the filings themselves. Two brands have no statements here. The second table names them.

These are the franchisor’s accounts

These numbers belong to the company selling the franchise. They say nothing about what a restaurant takes in or what it earns. A franchisor’s income statement is royalties, franchise fees and rebates against corporate overhead. A franchisee’s is food, labour, rent and a share of gross sales paid upward. Unit-level performance, where a brand discloses any of it, is Item 19.

What Item 21 does answer is whether the company on the other side of a ten-year contract can fund the work it is promising: training, field support, supply relationships, marketing administration, and, in most of these agreements, a right of consent a franchisee needs exercised promptly for a decade. Those promises are staffed out of the accounts on this page.

Read the opinion column before the money column. Three findings sit behind it. An unmodified opinion. An unmodified opinion with an emphasis-of-matter paragraph, which points at a footnote without asserting doubt. And a report that states substantial doubt about the entity’s ability to continue as a going concern, which usually also produces a special risk on the state cover page. German Doner Kebab is in the middle category. What the filings say about the franchisor works through the difference at length, because treating the middle case as the third one is a false statement about a competitor’s audit.

The order

Dog Haus, FDD issued 9 April 2024: net income of $2,344,415 for the fiscal year ended 31 December 2023, first on this table. Shah’s Halal Food, FDD issued 11 April 2025: $675,588 for FY2023. Note that this brand’s fee and unit row elsewhere comes from the FDD issued 10 April 2024, so the two halves of the record are a year apart. The Halal Guys, FDD issued 29 April 2024: $517,749 for FY2023. Crave Hot Dogs and BBQ, FDD issued 3 April 2024: $502,391 for FY2023.

Then the near-break-even group. Atomic Wings, FDD issued 29 April 2025: $110,756 for FY2024, the second of two profitable years after a loss year whose auditor’s report carried a going-concern paragraph. 375° Chicken ‘n Fries, FDD issued 30 April 2024: $36,229 for FY2023, on a franchisor entity, 375 Global Franchise LLC, that is a different company from the one in that filing’s Item 19. Mad for Chicken, FDD issued 12 March 2025: $22,817 for FY2024, the fourth year of a series that has stayed inside a band of roughly $77,000 from top to bottom.

Döner Haus, Franchise Disclosure Document issued 7 April 2026: a young franchisor entity whose statements cover a stub year from formation plus FY2025. The auditor’s opinion is unmodified.

Then the losses. Doner Shack, FDD issued 29 April 2025: a loss of $90,719 for FY2024, its only audited year. bluTaco, FDD issued 24 April 2023: a loss of $311,486 for FY2022, the third consecutive loss of roughly a quarter of a million dollars. The Great Greek Mediterranean Grill, FDD issued 17 August 2023: a loss of $891,888 for the fiscal year ended 30 April 2023. German Doner Kebab, FDD registered 24 September 2025: a loss of $1,513,634 for FY2024, the sixth loss in six years on file, about $7.47 million in total, an accumulated deficit of $7.6 million, and owner advances that stood at $5.9 million by year end. The US company has never covered its own costs. Capriotti’s, FDD issued 21 July 2023: a loss of $4,368,938 for the fiscal year ended 25 December 2022, the largest figure in either direction on this table.

Fiscal years do not all end in December

The table ranks comparable measures over non-comparable periods. The caption says so because the rows cannot be repaired. The Great Greek closes 30 April, so its most recent audited year ran from May 2022 to April 2023. Capriotti’s closes on a 52/53-week date in late December, and the year on its row ended 25 December 2022. Everyone else here closes 31 December. Great Greek’s most recent audited year therefore closed eight months before the December-2023 years it is ranked beside. Different trading conditions, different interest rates, a different stage of its own build-out.

The document dates compound it. The oldest statements in this table were audited for a year that ended in 2022 and published in a 2023 document; the newest cover 2025 and were published in 2026. Both can sit on the same table. They do not describe one moment. That is the same discipline the methodology applies to fees and unit counts, and it applies here with more force, because a financial position is the field most likely to have moved since the document was issued.

Loss size and the auditor’s reaction

The useful relationship on this ranking is between the loss column and the opinion column. Capriotti’s loss of $4,368,938 for the year ended 25 December 2022 sits against an accumulated deficit of $23,777,352 and total equity of $(2,797,283), and its auditor’s report is unmodified with no additional paragraph. German Doner Kebab’s $1,513,634 loss for FY2024 carries an emphasis-of-matter paragraph. And Atomic Wings, whose loss from operations for 2022 was $205,812.35 — about a twentieth of the Capriotti’s figure — drew a full going-concern paragraph in its FDD issued 30 April 2024 and a matching special risk on that document’s state cover page.

The order of this table is therefore not the order of auditor concern. The bottom row is the largest loss, not the most precarious franchisor. What an auditor weighs is scale relative to backing: whether the losses can be funded, by whom, and on what commitment. A large loss inside a capitalised group and a small loss in a company with negative working capital are different facts that this ranking, which sorts on one number, cannot distinguish. The essay is where that pair is set out with both sets of figures.

Two more distinctions the ranked number hides. A loss and a deficit are different facts: The Halal Guys was profitable in all three disclosed years while carrying an accumulated deficit, and Dog Haus, first on this table, prints its statements under the heading “Members’ Deficit”. And a loss is not necessarily an operating loss: The Great Greek’s three underwater years are substantially litigation, which is visible only when Item 3 and Item 21 are read together.

Two brands have no statements here

Pepper Lunch and Wienerschnitzel are absent from the ranked table and appear in the second one below it instead. Their records here come from the May 2024 comparative study of published filings rather than from a document, so there are no financial statements to read. Their financial condition is unknown here. Wienerschnitzel is the oldest and largest system on the site; neither of those facts is an audit.

The same rule governs the rest of the gaps. A row with no figure gets no figure, in the way the entry-cost ranking leaves Wienerschnitzel unranked rather than importing a total from an undated portal, and in the way what the filings leave blank inventories blanks rather than closing them.

How to use this ranking

Use it to decide which packets need Item 21 read line by line before anything else in the document is discussed, then stop using the sort. A profitable franchisor can run a weak support organisation. A loss-making one can be funded by a parent for as long as it takes. A franchisor at break-even by design is a different proposition from one that arrived at break-even on the way down. The profiles carry each brand’s full fiscal-year series, the equity caption as the statement prints it, and the opinion, which is where the reading actually happens.

Then ask for the current document. Every figure here has a date on it, and a financial position is the field that ages fastest. The newest statements in this table were audited in 2026 and the oldest in 2023. The oldest rows describe a company as it stood three years ago. Atomic Wings is the case: read only its 30 April 2024 filing and the conclusion is a going-concern qualification; read the next document and that paragraph is gone.

Brands with no statements on hand