The Hire
Chicken Salad Chick has appointed Drew Travis as Chief Financial Officer, effective August 2026 — the brand's third executive-level addition this year following the arrivals of a Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Development Officer in February. The clustering of C-suite moves is a deliberate signal: the Auburn, Alabama-born chain is shifting from growth-mode hustle to infrastructure-grade operations.
Travis carries more than 18 years in finance and over a decade of direct restaurant-industry experience. His most recent post was Senior Vice President of Finance at GoTo Foods (formerly Focus Brands), the multi-brand franchising group behind Cinnabon and Moe's Southwest Grill, where he held escalating finance roles across nearly six years. Before that, he held senior financial leadership positions at Bloomin' Brands and GrubHub, along with stints at Discover Financial Services and Levi Strauss & Co. — a cross-sector background that operators eyeing private-label financing or franchise-forward capital structures will find instructive.
What the Timing Tells Operators
At more than 340 restaurants across 25 states, Chicken Salad Chick is no longer a regional curiosity. The brand debuted in Minnesota and Pennsylvania this summer and has publicly committed to entering West Virginia, New York, and Michigan before year's end. Expanding into new states means new real-estate markets, new labor cost structures, and new franchise support obligations — all areas where a seasoned multi-unit CFO with FP&A and P&L depth pays dividends immediately.
For franchisees and prospective franchise buyers watching the brand's trajectory, the Travis appointment is operationally meaningful beyond a title change. Scott Deviney, CEO and president of Chicken Salad Chick, framed it plainly: Travis brings "the business acumen, financial strategy, and leadership our brand needs at this stage of growth." That language — stage-of-growth — is the tell. Brands that have cracked 300-plus units and are pushing toward 500 typically need CFOs who have managed multi-brand franchise P&Ls, negotiated multi-state vendor contracts, and built the reporting infrastructure that lenders and area developers both require. Travis checks those boxes.
Franchise Development Signal
For vendors, suppliers, and operators tracking where fast-casual dollars are flowing, Chicken Salad Chick's deliberate build-out of its finance function alongside its marketing and development teams suggests a brand tightening procurement discipline while accelerating its store count. That usually precedes a round of preferred-vendor consolidation, revised franchise disclosure documents, or both. Suppliers currently in the brand's orbit — and those hoping to get there — should treat this as an inflection point.
The broader fast-casual franchise market offers context: concepts in the 300-to-500 unit corridor that invest in professional finance leadership before capital markets pressure them to do so tend to carry stronger unit economics into their next development phase. Franchise development intelligence published across the F&B Department's operator coverage consistently shows that systematized financial reporting at the franchisor level correlates with faster franchisee ramp times and lower churn — outcomes that matter to the area developers Chicken Salad Chick is clearly courting in new northern and mid-Atlantic markets.
Operators watching the brand for competitive or partnership reasons should note that this is a company deliberately professionalizing its infrastructure. For more context on how fast-casual brands are structuring finance and procurement teams amid multi-state expansion, see our growth department coverage on restaurant brand scaling.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
