7 Brew did not exist in 2017. Today its largest franchisee, Brew Crew Holdings, finished 2025 with 130 stores and $273 million in sales, ranking No. 61 among the country's largest restaurant franchisees, according to Franchise Times.
The franchisee is targeting 100 new locations this year alone.
That is on top of the 130 it already operates.
Franchised 7 Brew stores now average $2.65 million in annual sales, up from $1.9 million the year before.
That is a 39 percent jump in average unit volume in a single year, in a food category most operators assumed was mature.
"I think the industry hasn't been disrupted in a long time, and that's what's been happening over the last few years," said Brew Crew President Connor Wilson.
Operations director Matt Martinkovic put weekly volumes more bluntly: "insane."
The mechanism behind the growth is not operational efficiency.
It is the drink menu.
7 Brew built its business on customizable, colorful drinks like Pink Mermaid 7 Fizz and Cereal Milk Matcha, served through double drive-thrus that keep cars moving without ever requiring a customer to leave their seat.
7 Brew is not alone.
Dutch Bros and dirty-soda concepts Swig and Fiiz Drinks are running the same playbook, and it is forcing the established coffee chains to respond.
Iced drinks overtook hot coffee sales at Dunkin' two years ago.
Starbucks' refresher platform, built on flavored, customizable, largely caffeine-light drinks, is now a $2 billion business inside a much larger company.
That is the part worth sitting with.
Starbucks spent decades training customers to want espresso drinks.
It took a handful of newer, smaller operators building an entirely different product category, one built around customization and color rather than coffee itself, to force the incumbents to follow.
The lesson for smaller operators is not "add a novelty drink."
It is narrower than that.
7 Brew's growth is coming from treating the drive-thru itself as the product, not a delivery mechanism for an existing one.
The format, double lanes, fast throughput, order customization at the window, was built around the menu it now sells, not retrofitted to sell a menu it already had.
Most small operators inherit a format and try to bolt innovation onto it.
7 Brew built the format and the menu together.
That sequencing, product first, format built to match, is the harder and more transferable part of this story.
Copying a single drink recipe is easy.
Copying an entire operating model designed around that drink is not, and that gap is exactly why 7 Brew's growth curve has stayed this steep for this long.
There is a scale lesson buried in the numbers too.
A 39 percent jump in average unit volume for an established franchisee, not a single flagship store, is a different signal than one hot location.
It means the model travels across dozens of sites in different towns, run by different crews, without losing the thing that made the first location work.
That is the harder test most novelty concepts fail.
A single standout store can always be explained away as a fluke of location or timing.
A 130-store chain posting that kind of growth across the board cannot.
For any small operator watching a mature category from the outside, the question is not what new item to add to an existing menu.
It is whether the format itself was ever actually built for what it now sells, or just inherited from whatever came before it.
Source: Entrepreneur, citing Franchise Times.