Gregorys Coffee vs Papa Murphy's

Papa Murphy’s is the stronger opportunity right now, and the dimension that decides it is terrain. Gregorys Coffee has no franchised units—zero. Selling into a fully corporate chain means navigating a single, slow, centralized procurement process where one “no” kills the entire account. Papa Murphy’s, with 965 franchised doors, is a true multi-tenant landscape. You can lose deals and still build revenue, iterate on the sales playbook across owners, and leverage local operator pain points that corporate-owned locations rarely surface with the same urgency. AUV is lower, but software attach rates in franchise systems routinely outperform corporate environments because franchisees pay out of their own pocket for tools that drive revenue or cut labor.

The tradeoff is unit growth trajectory versus addressable base. Gregorys is shrinking slower and has a higher starting investment ceiling, which means richer individual store budgets for add-on software. But “richer stores” don’t matter when there are zero independent buyers. Papa Murphy’s provides a TAM of nearly 1,000 units with a procurement model that lets you circumvent a single-threaded vendor review. The YoY contraction at Papa Murphy’s is a tailwind for efficiency software, not a threat: declining same-store sales force owner-operators to aggressively adopt scheduling, marketing automation, and back-office tools to protect margins. Gregorys’ corporate structure absorbs that pressure internally with less urgency to buy outside tech.

Verdict: Papa Murphy’s wins on terrain—965 franchised buyers with margin pressure outweigh a 51-unit corporate chain with a higher per-unit budget and no independent decision-makers.