Mad for Chicken franchise

Corporate-heavy Korean fried chicken

Mad for Chicken is a Westbury, New York, Korean fried-chicken system founded in 2017 and franchising since 2019. The FDD issued 12 March 2025 records 12 outlets as of 2024: ten run by the franchisor’s affiliates and two franchised. It supersedes the FDD issued 3 May 2024, which recorded 19 outlets at year-end 2023, 14 company-owned and five franchised. In both documents most of the disclosed system is the franchisor’s own, a useful fact when interpreting both operating history and Item 19.

The filing distinguishes physical formats. The full restaurant assumes 2,000 to 4,000 square feet and an Item 7 range of $321,125 to $691,700. It separately discloses an express range of $243,500 to $470,700. A third table, at $263,500 to $711,700, is not a physical format: it prices entry into a three-outlet development agreement plus the first outlet, with a $55,000 development fee where the single-unit tables charge $35,000, its low assuming an Express Model and its high assuming a Full Restaurant. That is also why its range straddles the two single-unit tables rather than sitting above them. The operator’s franchise page now describes mall, QSR and storefront concepts, reinforcing why a buyer must match the investment table to the exact agreement instead of combining the lowest cost with the largest restaurant. Grand opening advertising is $15,000. Working capital in the line-item table is three months.

Escalating funds and a revenue-only Item 19

The initial franchise fee is $35,000. The comparable stack starts at 8%: 5% royalty, a 1% brand fund, 1% media marketing and 1% local advertising. The brand-fund and media-marketing components can each rise to 2%, so the starting rank does not express the maximum permitted advertising burden.

Item 19 in the 12 March 2025 filing presents unaudited 2023 and 2024 gross revenue for affiliate and franchised outlets. It reports revenue, not costs or profit, and the populations are not balanced between ownership types. A prospect would need to separate those groups and account for the chosen format before drawing an earnings conclusion. The 3 May 2024 filing did the same thing a year earlier for 2022 and 2023, covering twelve affiliate outlets and three franchised.

Training is 25 classroom hours and 196 on the job. The initial term is ten years with two successor terms of ten years each. Transfer fee $10,000. Territory is non-exclusive: at least a five-mile radius in suburban markets and a quarter-mile in cities, sized after site approval.

Ten affiliate restaurants and two franchisees

The 12 March 2025 filing records 12 outlets as of 2024, ten of them run by the franchisor’s affiliates and two franchised, with franchising beginning in 2019. Six years of selling has produced two operating franchisees in the current document, and the large majority of the system remains in the franchisor’s hands.

That balance cuts both ways, and neither reading should be assumed. A franchisor running ten restaurants holds real, current operating knowledge to transfer and absorbs the cost of its own mistakes rather than exporting them. It also means the disclosed history is mostly a record of company performance under company management, in company-chosen sites, with company capital behind it — conditions a franchisee does not reproduce. The two franchised units are the only disclosed evidence of the concept running as a franchise, and they are the whole validation pool.

The same numbers frame the Item 19, and they frame it more tightly than they did a year earlier. The 3 May 2024 filing’s representation covered twelve affiliate outlets and three franchised; the 2025 filing’s covers a smaller affiliate estate and two franchisees. A representation weighted that far toward the franchisor’s own restaurants is disclosed plainly and is not improper, but it does mean most of the data describes an operating model the reader is not buying, and that the franchisee side of it is now a pair.

An 8% stack with a 10% ceiling

The comparable stack starts at 8%: a 5% royalty, a 1% brand fund, 1% media marketing and 1% local advertising. The brand fund and the media marketing fee may each rise to 2%. At those disclosed ceilings the stack reaches 10% — two points available to the franchisor without renegotiating the agreement, landing entirely on the advertising side rather than the royalty.

Two points of gross sales is not a rounding difference, and the useful question is procedural rather than arithmetic: what triggers an increase, what notice is required, and whether the right has been exercised before. Item 6 and the franchisor’s history answer that; the starting rate does not. No renewal fee appears in this row either, which is a gap to close out of Item 17 rather than a sign that renewal is free.

Item 11 discloses 25 classroom hours and 196 on the job, and the companion Item 7 record carries a training expense line of $4,000 to $10,000, up from $3,000 to $6,000 in the 3 May 2024 filing — travel and lodging rather than tuition, and a figure implying that at least part of the programme happens somewhere other than the buyer’s own market. The on-the-job component is the field on this row that moved most between documents: the 2024 filing disclosed 106 hours and the 2025 filing discloses 196, an increase of ninety hours in the required in-store programme with the classroom half unchanged. A franchisor lengthening its training is disclosing a decision, not admitting a problem, and the useful question is what the additional hours cover and who pays for the trainee’s time while they run.

A territory decided after the signature

Territory is non-exclusive, at least a five-mile radius in suburban markets and a quarter-mile in a city, and it is sized after the site is approved. The sequencing is the disclosure that matters. A buyer commits to the system before the geography of the grant is fixed, which makes the site-approval process and the franchisor’s discretion inside it more consequential than either radius.

The three tables sit on the same fault line. The full restaurant assumes 2,000 to 4,000 square feet, the largest footprint disclosed here, and it is the format the line-item table describes. The express range of $243,500 to $470,700 and the development agreement at $263,500 to $711,700 each arrive with no square-foot assumption, no line items and no separate statement of fees or training in this row. Anyone working either of those deals has a total and nothing underneath it, and every construction, equipment and working-capital figure on this page belongs to the large box.

Three filings, and a table that shows the survivors

Three Mad for Chicken documents have been read here: 13 September 2023, 3 May 2024 and 12 March 2025. Each makes a financial performance representation covering affiliate-owned and franchised outlets, revenue only. Read together they describe an estate that grew and then contracted: affiliate outlets at 4 for fiscal 2021, 6 for 2022, 12 for 2023 and 10 for 2024, with franchised outlets at none, two, three and two across the same four years.

The 2025 filing says what happened, in its own words, inside Item 19. “Four (4) affiliate outlets have been excluded from the table below because they closed and did not operate the full year,” it states, and “two (2) Franchise outlets have been excluded because they closed and did not operate the full year.” It adds that the excluded outlets “were open only two (2) to eleven (11) months during our most recent fiscal year.”

Six restaurants therefore closed during fiscal 2024, and the revenue table prints the ones that were open for the whole of it. This is very probably the correct accounting treatment: a full-year revenue table that mixed in a restaurant open for two months would understate that unit and distort every comparison drawn from the column. The franchisor also disclosed the exclusion rather than performing it silently, and named the count on both sides of the ownership line. Nothing here is concealed.

It is still the easiest thing on this row for a reader to miss. The eye goes to the table; the exclusion is in the sentence above it; and what the table shows, by construction, is the units that survived the year. Someone who reads the figures without the note reads a set of continuing restaurants as though it were the system. The correction is not to distrust the numbers but to carry the denominator with them: ten affiliate and two franchised outlets in the current document, six closures during the year it reports, and a performance table covering neither the closures nor their reasons, which the filing does not give.

Two smaller drafting details on this row make the same argument about reading speed. The 3 May 2024 filing’s Item 19 prose announces “the following tables shows the 2022 and 2021 Gross Revenue” above tables headed 2023 and 2022, and the 12 March 2025 filing carries a page footer reading “Rev. April 2, 2024” although it was issued in March 2025. Neither changes a figure. Both are reasons to check which period a table actually covers rather than trusting the sentence that introduces it.

The same restaurants across two documents

Because the representations name individual restaurants, two filings can be set against each other unit by unit — which is the only way this brand’s Item 19 yields a direction rather than a level.

From the 3 May 2024 filing, fiscal 2022 to fiscal 2023: Flushing $3,333,431 to $2,885,923; Bayside $3,591,148 to $3,240,511; Brooklyn $1,392,756 to $1,097,591; Astoria $1,035,433 to $1,062,335; Chelsea $755,182 to $1,037,237; and Sunnyside $753,334 to $2,150,959. From the 12 March 2025 filing, fiscal 2023 to fiscal 2024: Bayside $3,240,511 to $3,272,236; Flushing $2,885,923 to $2,845,751; and Williamsburg $1,097,591 to $963,955.

The two largest restaurants tell a flatter story than either filing alone. In the 2024 document Bayside and Flushing are both down year on year; in the 2025 document Bayside is up slightly and Flushing is down slightly, so both are roughly level after a decline. Sunnyside is the outlier in the earlier pair, nearly tripling between 2022 and 2023, and a jump of that size in a single unit is a question about what the earlier year contained — a partial year, a relocation, a change of trade — rather than a growth rate to apply to anything.

The Williamsburg line needs care. The 2025 filing’s fiscal 2023 figure for Williamsburg, $1,097,591, is the same figure the 2024 filing gives for Brooklyn. Identical figures for the same year strongly suggest one restaurant carried under two names, which would make it a unit that fell from $1,392,756 in 2022 to $963,955 in 2024. Have the franchisor confirm that rather than assume it, and this profile will not merge the two rows on its own: naming is exactly the kind of detail that decides whether a series is one restaurant or two.

The aggregate in the earliest filing sets the frame for all of it. The 13 September 2023 document reports $10,861,284 across its outlets for 2022 against $9,918,732 for 2021. A total that rises while individual restaurants fall is not a contradiction — it is what happens when the count of restaurants is also moving — and it is the clearest reason on this page to read a per-unit column before an aggregate one. What successive filings reveal sets out the same discipline across the other brands here.

Neighbours on the aisle

Mad for Chicken is the larger-box, corporate-heavy side of 375° versus Mad for Chicken and of chicken and fries. 375°’s 800–1,500-square-foot chicken-and-fries shop is the compact packet. The Item 19 is revenue only. The express low end cannot be mixed with the full-restaurant kitchen. Source: FDD issued 12 March 2025; 2025 filing.

The take

Mad for Chicken is a corporate-heavy Korean fried-chicken restaurant row. The compact fries shop is 375°. The full restaurant is 2,000–4,000 square feet at $321,125–$691,700. Express is $243,500–$470,700. The Multi-Unit Development Agreement at $263,500–$711,700 is one restaurant plus a commitment to two more, not a third store format. Those tables do not mix. Item 19 is unaudited 2023 and 2024 gross revenue for affiliate and franchised outlets, revenue only, with four affiliate and two franchised outlets left out because they closed before completing the year. The count in the current document is 12 as of 2024, ten affiliate and two franchised, against 19 at year-end 2023 in the 3 May 2024 filing. Stack starts at 8% and the two marketing components can each rise to 2%. Training is 25 classroom and 196 on the job, up from 106 in the previous filing. Territory is non-exclusive and sized after site approval. Grand opening advertising is $15,000. Working capital in the Item 7 line items is three months, with additional funds of $51,375–$162,000. Leasehold improvements run $75,000–$235,000, furniture, fixtures and equipment $85,000–$110,000, POS $3,000–$15,000 and initial inventory $14,250–$28,200 — all on the full restaurant, not the express range. What successive filings reveal is why both documents belong in the file.