Gene Sherman, a former Anytime Fitness franchisee turned Playa Bowls operator, has signed a lease for 1,226 square feet at Westview Promenade in Frederick, Maryland — his third Frederick County location and the clearest signal yet of a deliberate co-tenancy strategy built around the health-and-wellness consumer.
The Westview Promenade unit is scheduled to open in December 2026, with a fourth location in Urbana slated for Q1 2027. Sherman is already targeting two additional sites in Carroll or Washington counties, which would bring his personal franchise network to five units. The national Playa Bowls system now spans more than 400 shops across 30 states.
The Co-Tenancy Logic
Sherman's site selection at Westview Promenade is not incidental. The 200,000-square-foot outdoor lifestyle center is anchored by MOM's Organic Market and Regal Westview Cinema, with co-tenants including Starbucks, Cold Stone Creamery, and X-Golf. More than 90,000 consumers live within five miles, with nearly 35,000 households reporting average household income above $85,000 — precisely the demographic that over-indexes on premium, better-for-you food spending. For operators evaluating new units, this is a textbook example of using anchor-tenant affinity to reduce demand-generation costs: a loyal MOM's shopper arrives pre-sold on clean ingredients, removing the need to educate on the brand's no-dye, no-chemical, fresh-blended positioning.
This approach mirrors a broader fast-casual trend in which health-forward brands prioritize adjacency to fitness studios, specialty grocers, and outdoor lifestyle anchors over pure traffic-count metrics. Operators in the açai, smoothie, and functional-beverage categories have consistently reported higher average ticket and repeat-visit rates when co-located with organic grocery or boutique fitness tenants.
What Operators Should Watch
Sherman's background as a multi-unit fitness franchisee is operationally relevant. Anytime Fitness operators are trained in membership retention, community engagement, and recurring-revenue thinking — skills that translate directly into frequency-driving loyalty programs and local wellness partnerships. Fast-casual brands recruiting franchisees should note the crossover appeal of wellness-sector operators: they arrive with a built-in customer relationship model and a values alignment that reduces staff and franchisee turnover.
From a real estate intelligence standpoint, the Westview Promenade deal — brokered with Hill Management Services on the landlord side and Tennant Commercial representing the tenant — reflects continued landlord appetite for experiential and health-oriented quick-serve tenants as anchors for outdoor lifestyle centers. As traditional retail vacancies persist in secondary markets like Frederick County, food-and-beverage operators with recognizable national branding and proven unit economics remain among the most competitive lease candidates.
For multi-unit operators considering similar expansion paths, the intelligence takeaway is straightforward: demographic density and household income matter, but co-tenant alignment with your core customer's existing habits can be a stronger predictor of unit-level performance than raw foot traffic alone. Sherman's five-unit buildout in a single Maryland corridor is a case study in disciplined, values-matched market penetration rather than opportunistic growth.
Operators exploring franchise growth strategy or site-selection intelligence for better-for-you concepts should benchmark this co-tenancy model against their own pipeline criteria.
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.
