The Expansion Move
Chicken Salad Chick is planting its flag in West Virginia on September 16, opening a unit at Tanyard Station shopping center in Barboursville — the brand's first location in the state and a marker that pushes the chain's footprint to 26 states and more than 345 restaurants. CEO and president Scott Deviney noted that first locations in New York and Michigan are also on the near-term horizon, signaling that the brand's development pipeline is moving well beyond its Southern home base.
For operators watching the fast casual space, this is a useful data point: Chicken Salad Chick is one of the cleaner case studies of a single-protein concept executing deliberate white-space strategy — entering underserved markets sequentially rather than clustering openings in saturated metros. The Barboursville location also picks up a tri-state trade area that overlaps with eastern Kentucky, effectively giving the franchisee two addressable markets from a single unit.
The Franchisee Profile
The Barboursville location is owned by Tammy and Rancie Hannah, a couple making their first move into franchising. Tammy spent more than 30 years in pharmaceutical sales at Pfizer; Rancie is a practicing physician specializing in hospice care. Neither comes from a restaurant background — which is increasingly the norm rather than the exception in fast casual franchise development. Concepts with streamlined menus, tight operational playbooks, and strong franchisor support systems are specifically designed to convert high-trust professionals from adjacent service fields into viable operators.
That operator profile matters to vendors and suppliers evaluating where to focus franchise sales and onboarding resources. First-time owners with deep service-sector experience tend to prioritize systems and training over customization, making them reliable adopters of franchisor-approved tech stacks, POS platforms, and inventory management tools from the outset. For suppliers and foodservice distributors entering new regional markets, a franchisee like this represents a stable, predictable account.
What It Signals for Operators
The grand opening activation — free chicken salad for a year for the first 100 guests, paired with daily merchandise giveaways through the brand's app — is a textbook loyalty-acquisition play. Requiring guests to download the app and enter a code to redeem the prize converts foot traffic directly into a CRM asset. That approach is worth noting for any fast casual operator building a loyalty program: the prize is the hook, but the app download is the actual business objective.
More broadly, Chicken Salad Chick's continued expansion into Appalachian and Rust Belt markets reflects a wider industry read — that mid-size cities and suburban retail corridors in historically underpenetrated states are absorbing fast casual concepts that would have once targeted only major metros. Franchisors with concept simplicity and strong unit economics are finding that secondary markets often deliver faster payback periods than high-rent coastal locations. Operators evaluating franchise investment or competitive positioning in these geographies should factor in that the window for being first-to-market in many of these states is narrowing quickly.
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.
