Travelin' Tom's Coffee vs Papa Murphy's

Papa Murphy’s gives us a bigger installed base and a procurement model that actually leaves room for third-party software. With 965 franchised units and an approved-supplier structure, operators have real discretion over back-office and marketing tools—meaning our sales motion doesn’t die at a corporate gatekeeper. The tradeoff is brutal unit contraction: -3.6% YoY means a shrinking TAM and franchisees who are cutting costs, not writing new software checks. Budget is tight, and urgency is low unless we can prove immediate labor or COGS savings inside that $450K–$693K build-out.

Travelin’ Tom’s Coffee flips the script. Unit growth at 28.3% signals a land-grab moment where franchisees are still building their tech stacks and haven’t hardened preferences yet. The lower investment range ($185K–$265K) means more operators have post-open cash for software, and the 15% royalty tells you the franchisor is already extracting heavy margin—franchisees will be hungry for tools that claw back profitability. The terrain problem is real: franchisor-controlled procurement means we’ll likely have to sell through corporate first, which slows deals and risks getting locked out entirely.

The growth and greenfield-stack opportunity at Travelin’ Tom’s outweighs the larger-but-shrinking base at Papa Murphy’s. We sell into momentum, not retrenchment, and the timing advantage of catching operators during their build-out phase is worth the procurement-model friction.

Verdict: Travelin’ Tom’s Coffee is the stronger software-sales opportunity right now—growth and stack timing beat installed-base size.