Eggs Up Grill grows despite pandemic opening delays

Eggs Up Grill, the breakfast-lunch concept, adapted to the 2020 pandemic year despite suffering restaurant-opening delays, according to Ricky Richardson, CEO of the concept.

The Spartanburg, S.C.-based midscale breakfast franchisor added nine restaurants in 2020, even though it had to delay opening two units by several months because of the pandemic. It also rolled out a new mimosa program and boosted its off-premises sales, Richardson said in this Nation’s Restaurant News video interview.

In the most recent Datassential Firefly 500+ rankings, Eggs Up Grill rose to No. 417 in 2020, up from No. 479 in 2019. Unit growth was 17.5%, and sales growth was 15.6% in 2020.

The 47-unit Eggs Up Grill, which franchises all but one of its restaurants, early on in the pandemic relied on its local operators to make the crucial decisions for their communities, Richardson said.

“We put together a very simple framework as soon as this happened,” he said. “It was about survivability-sustainability and then growth and survivability. It was about allowing the franchisees the space that they needed to stabilize their business.”