The Halal Guys vs Shah's Halal Food

Both brands sell chicken and rice and related platters, and a buyer will treat them as one conversation. The filings do not. The Halal Guys row, from the May 2024 comparative study of published FDDs, is a franchised quick-service system built out of a New York cart, with 93 units in the 2024 count, 88 franchised and 5 company. Shah’s Halal Food, from an FDD issued 10 April 2024, reports 58 outlets in its 2023 count, 14 of them company-operated and none operating as franchises; 44 ran under license agreements.

A licensed footprint is not a franchised one

That is the first diligence fork. Item 20’s current and former franchisee lists are the calling list you build validation on, and they attach to franchise relationships. On the Shah’s side, as of that filing, there were no operating franchises to populate such a list. The 44 licensees are real operating evidence about the food, the supply and the format, and they signed a different instrument, with different obligations, different support and different remedies. What a licensee tells a buyer about their business may not describe the agreement the buyer is being offered.

Two related absences belong in the same conversation. Shah’s discloses no year in which it began franchising, which is consistent with that history and is worth raising directly. And the ownership pattern inverts the usual assumption: the brand with the larger disclosed footprint of company units is also the one with no franchises operating, while The Halal Guys — five company units in 93 — is almost entirely franchisee-run and has an 88-outlet base to call. Ask Shah’s how many franchise agreements have been signed since the filing, how many licensees have converted, and on what terms a conversion happens.

Capital, and one filing that does not add up

Shah’s discloses $197,000–$405,000 for a full-sized restaurant of 1,200–2,000 square feet, and it publishes the line items: build-out and construction at $80,000–$160,000, a fixture package at $30,000–$50,000, signage at $10,000–$28,000, initial inventory at $10,000–$30,000, travel to attend training at $2,000–$20,000, computer hardware, software and POS at $4,000–$6,000, and three months of additional funds at $10,000–$30,000. The Halal Guys discloses $461,400–$1,333,500 with no footprint and no line items here, so its floor sits above the Shah’s ceiling and nothing published here explains what drives its range.

One arithmetic fact travels with the Shah’s table and should not be tidied away. The high column of its fifteen line items sums to $410,000 while the filing prints, and its cover page repeats, a total of $405,000. The gap is in the document. A consultant who reconciles it quietly has edited a disclosure; the correct move is to ask the franchisor which figure governs.

Grand opening spend is $1,000–$5,000 at Shah’s against $17,000 at The Halal Guys, and the initial franchise fee is $30,000 against $60,000, the largest initial fee on the table. Those are consistent differences in the size of the project each document describes. They are two different opening cheques, not a cheap version of the same store.

Neither filing makes a representation

The Halal Guys row makes no financial performance representation. The Shah’s filing states expressly that it makes none. Two blanks, and no legitimate way to fill either. A broker’s store-average slide is not an Item 19, and neither is a licensee’s account of their own trade. What you do with two absences is stop treating projected revenue as an input at all: build the model from your own rent, labour, food cost and hours, then test it against what operators on both sides say about volume patterns, and put the absence in writing in the shortlist memo so nobody downstream assumes it was overlooked.

Fees, term and what each grant covers

Ranked, Shah’s is 7% — a 5% royalty, a 1% brand fund and 1% local advertising — and The Halal Guys is 9%, being 6%, 2% and 1%. Two points of gross sales, every week, for as long as the agreement runs. Both initial terms are ten years, Shah’s with one additional ten-year term and The Halal Guys with one ten-year option, and the exit is priced differently: a Shah’s transfer costs 50% of the then-current franchise fee, which is unknown today and indexed to whatever the franchisor charges at the time, while a Halal Guys transfer costs a flat $10,000 and renewal costs $5,000. Shah’s row discloses no renewal fee, which is a question rather than a saving.

Territory also differs in shape. Shah’s grants up to five miles by driving distance, smaller in cities, with non-traditional sites excluded. The Halal Guys grants a quarter-mile to two-mile radius set by area. Driving distance and radius are not the same measure, and in a dense market they can describe very different areas from the same number, so the comparison should be made on a map of the specific site rather than in the abstract.

Training hours are disclosed on both rows: 24 classroom and 136 on the job for The Halal Guys, 19 and 85 for Shah’s. Attendance commitments, not quality scores.

What the columns leave open

Whether the buyer is being offered a franchise, a license or a mix, and which list they can actually call. Whether the Item 7 format on offer matches the site in mind or a smaller licensed counter. What each current filing now says about Item 19, and who would be excluded from any later representation. How much of each system is still company-operated, and what that means for supply and support. The Mediterranean and halal essay is the category reading. Neither column is a certification of anything.