Fast casual chain Toastique has grown from one D.C. toast bar to more than 60 stores while working with small, local, and family-owned suppliers. Its model begs the question: what does it take to bring better sourcing into everyday dining, and are the margins even possible for businesses?

In 2018, Brianna Keefe was working long hours in hospitality in Washington, D.C., and kept running into the same problem: there was nowhere to get food that was “truly healthy and still quick,” she says. So she made it herself, packing food daily. But could this be a business opportunity?

Keefe, then about a year and a half out of college, decided to build the job she wanted rather than keep looking for the food she wanted. “The first store was to create myself a job,” she says. She brought in two partners: Kyle Izett, who had a construction background, and her brother, who had also worked in hospitality.

They needed a location with enough foot traffic to work without a marketing budget. The Wharf, a new waterfront development in southwest Washington, was looking for tenants. Its developers didn’t want big chain restaurants, Keefe says. “When we pitched the concept, they really took a chance on us.”

In July 2018, Toastique opened there as a roughly 1,000-square-foot toast and juice bar. Eight years later, the company has 63 locations open and more than 220 under contract, and it has never taken outside investment.

Toastique is one of a small group of restaurant companies testing whether fast, everyday food can also be made from scratch with ingredients from small and local suppliers rather than whatever a broadline distributor has on the truck. Customers say they want it. Making the numbers work is harder, and how a company is financed shapes how fast it can grow and how much room it has for mistakes.

From Hyperlocal to ‘Relationship-based’

The menu combines a juice bar, a coffee program and open-faced gourmet toasts, which Keefe says American restaurants usually treat as a side dish. The cold-pressed juices and smoothies contain no added sugar. Everything except the juices, which are pressed and bottled in-house, is made to order so that customers with dietary restrictions can adjust it.

At first, every supplier was local. Toastique still uses the D.C. bakery that supplied its bread on day one. But when the company expanded to Colorado, its first market outside Washington, DC, Keefe found that sourcing locally in each new city made it hard to keep the product consistent.

Her answer was to stay with small, family-owned companies and grow them alongside the brand. A small roaster in Orlando, Florida, developed Toastique’s proprietary coffee blend. The son of its granola supplier’s owner created its proprietary granola. Its bakery partnerships work the same way.

“What started as hyperlocal has turned into sharing these partnerships,” Keefe says. “As we grow, they grow.”

One category stays local in every market: produce. “It’s fresher, it’s cheaper, and we go through produce more than anything else,” she explains. Stores take produce deliveries five or six times a week.

Toastique doesn’t market itself on certifications such as organic. Keefe described its standard as transparency: “What you see on our menu is what is going to be in your food. And I don’t think a lot of people can say that about their menu.”

Building It Without Investors

Fast casual is a low-margin, capital-intensive business, and better ingredients cost more. Toastique’s first store kept its costs down in other ways.

Keefe opened it with two partners: Kyle Izett, who has a construction background and is now the company’s chief financial officer, and her brother, who runs operations. They paid for it with their savings, credit cards, and money from friends and family. “I personally didn’t have too much of a 401(k) at the time,” admits Keefe, who had been in the workforce for about a year and a half. She opened the store at 24, after a 36-day build-out.

The construction partner relied on contractors he had worked with before, which Keefe said cut the cost of the build-out, “the most expensive thing, lots of change orders.” The menu also needs none of the heavy kitchen equipment a conventional restaurant requires, even though almost everything is made on site.

Location did the rest. The Wharf was new and drew tourists from across the country, and Keefe says the store was profitable from its first day. It spent nothing on marketing for its first year and a half. For that first year and a half, Keefe opened and closed the store every day, training staff herself.

Toastique has never taken outside investment, and the founders still own it, she notes. “The vision was just this one store,” she explains. “It was really to create myself a job.” Without investors, the company has grown mainly through franchisees, who put up the money for their own stores, while it keeps ownership of its restaurants in the D.C. area.

That makes Toastique unusual. Private equity firms invested $94.5 billion in U.S. bars and restaurants between 2014 and 2024, according to PitchBook data.

Many of the chains Americans eat at every week now belong to investment firms or large restaurant groups. Roark Capital backs Inspire Brands, owner of Dunkin’, Arby’s, Buffalo Wild Wings and Jimmy John’s; it bought Subway in 2024; and it is behind GoTo Foods, which owns Cinnabon, Auntie Anne’s and Jamba. Blackstone took a majority stake in Jersey Mike’s, and valued it at about $8 billion.

Investment firm ownership isn’t automatically bad for diners, though it raises questions about quality. Roark has grown McAlister’s Deli’s system sales more than fivefold since buying it in 2005. But the model leaves less room for error: nearly half of the restaurant and bar chains that filed for bankruptcy in 2024 were backed by private equity, according to PitchBook.

There are signs diners are wary. In a May 2026 poll of 1,000 likely voters by Lake Research Partners and Chesapeake Beach Consulting, commissioned by the advocacy group Americans for Financial Reform , 51% agreed that private equity extracts short-term profits while making necessities more expensive and worse, and 60% said Wall Street has too much control over the economy. Spending is shifting too. Independent restaurants have surprising shown “sustained strength in spending growth relative to chains,” especially among higher-income households, the Bank of America Institute reported in February .

Keefe’s model leans into that. Each Toastique is run by an owner-operator “that’s already part of their community,” she says, with a local mural on the wall and marketing done with neighboring businesses. “We’re only as successful as our operators are.”

Fast Casual But Not Cheap

Toastique’s prices sit in the middle of the market. Keefe doesn’t claim it is cheap.

“We aren’t a discount brand,” she notes. “We truly are focused on the high-quality experiences and the product, and of course, that does come at a cost.” Her argument is that customers are paying for more than the food: ingredients made in-house, consistent service, and healthier options. People who understand that, she says, “don’t really mind the cost because they know it’s good for them, they’re investing into themselves.”

That argument is being tested across the industry. Fast-casual sales roughly doubled over the past decade, according to Technomic data reported by Nation’s Restaurant News . But traffic growth slowed through 2025 as customers pushed back on years of steady price increases, and even category leaders such as CAVA and Sweetgreen missed expectations in the third quarter of 2025.

Other Examples With A Similar Playbook

Toastique isn’t the only chain making this bet. Everbowl, an açaí and superfood bowl chain that opened its first store in San Diego in 2016, now has more than 100 locations in 33 states , and about as many more in development.

Its founder, Jeff Fenster, describes a goal close to Keefe’s: “to make better-for-you food more affordable, filling, delicious and accessible.” His solution to cost is similar too. Everbowl developed its own recipes for its superfood bases and works “directly with the growers to secure the best pricing,” Fenster says. The company has also brought more of its supply chain in-house to cut costs. The bases are shipped frozen to every store. Fresh fruit, like Toastique’s produce, is bought locally and delivered several times a week.

That combination, a few proprietary ingredients made centrally plus fresh produce bought locally, is what let the chain grow without hurting quality, Fenster explains. Like Keefe, he avoids promising that everything on the menu is healthy. “We define ourselves as Better for You, as ‘healthy’ can mean something different for everyone.”

Everbowl grew a different way. It ran 28 company-owned stores before it began franchising around 2020. In 2019, it raised $3 million from International Franchise Inc., part of Toronto-based Serruya Private Equity. Former NFL quarterback Drew Brees later became an investor and franchisee. In 2021, another private equity firm, Sloan Capital, signed on to open 50 Everbowl stores in Texas.

Franchising To Stay Local

Are customers driving this expansion? Yes, says Keefe. “No less than 20 times in the first month, people were saying, ‘You need to franchise this,’ or ‘I want to open one,’”

Keefe initially resisted the idea, because she associated franchising with big corporations. She came around when she realized “you can really franchise however you want.” Toastique owns its stores in the D.C. area. Everywhere else, stores belong to owner-operators who put up their own money. A franchise sales organization handled early marketing and screening of candidates, and a franchise attorney handled the legal work.

Toastique picks the operator first and the market second. “We’ve never searched out markets and then tried to look for owner-operators,” Keefe explains. That meant starting from scratch in each new city, from D.C. to Colorado to California, which she called one of the company’s biggest early headwinds.

She thinks it is also what keeps the stores local. “People who have their own passion and time and money and reputation involved are going to care more than a manager we just send across the country,” she said. More than 90 franchise partners now run Toastique stores, and 62% have signed for a second location, according to FastCasual .

Sustainability and Community Feedback Drive Decisions

Sustainability has been a driver, since the first store, she adds. Toastique bottles its cold-pressed juices in glass rather than plastic. Customers who bring bottles back get $1 off per bottle on anything on the menu. Bowls and utensils are compostable or made from agave. Keefe believes Toastique is one of the few juice bars still using glass.

The menu changes every quarter. Ideas come from customers, from franchisees who pilot new items in their stores, and from sales data showing what works and where. The newest addition is a limited-time collaboration with creator Kit Keenan, that launched Sept. 25 with a pop-up at Toastique’s Bryant Park store in Manhattan.

Keefe wants Toastique to be a household name, but not on every corner. “We want every space to feel exclusive and really have a personal touch.”

The Harsh Reality And The Setbacks

Some of the companies that have pushed hardest on sourcing show how thin the margin for error is.

Fenster put the risk plainly. Healthy concepts that have struggled to scale, he says, “sometimes sacrifice their core strength and brand value in exchange for speed or cost.”

True Food Kitchen , a full-service chain founded in Phoenix in 2008, built its brand on food that was both nutritious and delicious. In 2022, it committed to cooking only with avocado and olive oils, and by February 2025, it said its whole menu, across 46 restaurants, was free of seed oils.

On Oct. 4, though, it closed 12 of those restaurants and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The filing does not blame ingredient costs. The company’s chief restructuring officer cited the pandemic, frequent management turnover, and investments in new concepts that were “unsuccessful and outside the Company’s core mission and menu,” as well as some restaurants in places with “lower-than-anticipated foot and driving traffic.”

True Food reported about $42 million in funded debt. An affiliate of its largest shareholder, HumanCo, agreed to provide $20 million in financing to keep it running through bankruptcy, and the company plans a court-supervised sale, according to BankruptcyData . Thirty-four restaurants remain open.

This summer, Salad and Go, a drive-thru salad chain, closed 70 stores and filed for bankruptcy, Restaurant Dive reported. When a business is already paying more for its ingredients, a bad location or a failed expansion leaves little cushion.

Deep-pocketed owners don’t guarantee growth either. Jamba, the smoothie chain that Focus Brands, now GoTo Foods, bought in 2018 for about $200 million, is owned by a group backed by the private equity firm Roark Capital. Jamba ended 2025 with about 710 locations, a net loss of 17 for the year. Between early 2023 and 2026, 130 of its franchise agreements ended, more than four times as many as at rival Tropical Smoothie Cafe, according to its franchise disclosure document. Analysts cite tighter household budgets and the spread of GLP-1 weight-loss drugs as contributing causes.

Despite all these challenges facing the restaurant industry, and particularly the fast-casual space, Keefe thinks the demand is real and still underserved. “People are being more aware of what they’re putting into their bodies,” she says. “Everyone’s standards are getting higher, and the pace of modern life isn’t slowing down either.”

National brands don’t meet those standards yet, she argues. “Some restaurants are trying to be healthy, but then they’re adding extra things.”

She would like to see more companies do it well. “People want transparency. They want clean ingredients. I do hope it grows.”