Baja Fresh

The vendor opportunity at Baja Fresh

Baja Fresh operates as a quick-service restaurant chain with 68 total units, of which 67 are franchised and a single location remains company-owned. The brand’s average unit volume sits at $822,568, and franchisees pay a 5.0% royalty on a 10-year initial term. For software vendors, the opportunity is defined by a small but concentrated footprint where a headquarters mandate can unlock nearly the entire system. The chain is independently owned, with no parent company on file, meaning decisions are made internally without a larger corporate hierarchy. No operator footprint data is mapped in our corpus, so multi-unit dynamics remain opaque.

Who controls software purchasing

The buying center at Baja Fresh sits squarely at the Arizona headquarters. The 2026 FDD lists Eric Lefebvre as Chief Executive Officer, Renee St-Onge as Chief Financial Officer, and Jeff Smit as Chief Operating Officer. Senior Vice President of Restaurant Operations Anthony Crosby and Vice President of Restaurant Operations Blake Borwick round out the operations leadership. For a SaaS vendor, the CFO and COO are the likely economic and operational buyers, while the operations VPs will be key stakeholders for any tool touching store-level workflows. There is no CIO or CTO named in the filing, so initial outreach should target the finance and operations functions.

Mandated and current tech stack

The FDD is explicit about two technology mandates. Olo by Olo Inc. is the mandated platform for digital ordering, covering online and mobile channels. A point-of-sale system is also mandated, though the specific vendor is not named in the available extract. This creates a clear integration surface: any software that needs to interoperate with Olo or the POS must fit within a stack where those two components are non-negotiable. Vendors offering complementary capabilities—such as labor scheduling, inventory management, or catering fulfillment—should position their solutions as enhancements that sit alongside, not in place of, these mandated systems.

Procurement, renewals, and timing

Procurement signals are thin in the available data. Item 8 of the FDD, which typically outlines designated versus approved supplier relationships, provided no extract in our corpus. This means the formal procurement model is not disclosed in the most recent FDD. On the renewal side, Item 17 offers a clearer picture: franchisees not in default may renew for a single additional term of 5 years, with no further right to renew afterward. The initial term is 10 years. For a software vendor, this suggests that major technology evaluations could cluster around the 10-year mark, though the absence of year-over-year unit growth data makes it difficult to gauge expansion-driven demand. No recent unit growth percentage is available.

How to read the Baja Fresh FDD

The 2026 Baja Fresh Franchise Disclosure Document is the authoritative source for the facts cited here. It details the executive team, unit counts, financial performance representations, and technology mandates that shape the vendor landscape. The embedded PDF viewer below provides the full filing. For software sales teams, the FDD is a research utility, not a pitch deck—use it to confirm who holds budget authority, what systems are locked in, and when franchise agreements come up for renewal.