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SJ Restaurateur Signs Major Franchise Deal

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The prolific restaurateur who launched her food service career with a sizable Pizza Hut enterprise and brought Moe's Southwest Grill, Panera Bread, and Sonic to our shores, has set sail on a course that could more than double her enterprise over the next eight years. The only uncertain part of the current equation is whether or not one of her new restaurants will drop anchor in the local marketplace.

Joyce Lunsford has signed a significant deal with a small New York start-up called CoreLife Eatery. The company, founded in the spring of 2015, currently has eight locations in upstate New York and Ohio, with two others coming on line soon in New York and three in Pennsylvania. Lunsford, who owns Trigo Hospitality of Stevensville owns more than 30 Pizza Hut locations, and at least half a dozen Sonics. When she opened Moe's Southwest Grill in St. Joseph in August of 2012, she had committed to opening two dozen more of those in Michigan, Indiana and Ohio. Her group sold 22 Panera Bread sites including the one in St. Joseph shortly before opening Moe's.

CoreLife Eatery is categorized as an "active lifestyle" restaurant, uses greens, grains and bone broth as the core building blocks for menu items. All dressings, broths and beverages are made from scratch every day on site in each location. Joyce told Grand Rapids reporter Charlsie Dewey, "CoreLife is a unique brand where the focus is on the quality and the food, which is rare nowadays within the restaurant industry." 

Lunsford's deal with CoreLife Eatery begins with a new restaurant in the Bucktown shopping center of Grandville, outside of Grand Rapids this April, and will reportedly be followed by 25 to 30 more locations throughout Michigan and perhaps into Indiana according to the Grand Rapids Business Journal.

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Her total franchise agreement with the team at CoreLife Eatery is for 51 new locations over the next eight years. The CoreLife Eatery website franchising section says that the initial franchise fee is $35,000 per location, making the deal worth nearly $1.8-million just in initial fees alone. Ongoing royalty fees are 5-percent of gross sales.

The franchise guide also pegs the typical cost of a CoreLife Eatery in the range of $786,000 to $1.25-million for a single unit. Founders of the company suggest the ideal size for a CoreLife Eatery is 3,500 to 4,300 square feet plus an outdoor patio. Each store is expected to be open seven days a week from 11am until 9pm "at a minimum."

When I reached out to Lunsford's business partner Brian Cronkrite about the potential for one of the 51 CoreLife Eatery sites being planned by Trigo Hospitality, he said Lunsford indicated it is "Just to soon to say." Since they are currently in the very beginning stages of developing their first unit, there's a lot of work to do before they can plot their total strategy for the franchise line up, so stay tuned. 

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