Champs Chicken - Freestanding Concept

The vendor opportunity at Champs Chicken

Champs Chicken’s freestanding concept is a quick-service restaurant brand headquartered in Missouri. According to the 2025 Franchise Disclosure Document, the system consists of exactly one unit — a company-owned location. No franchised units are reported, and year-over-year unit growth is not disclosed. For software vendors, the addressable market here is minimal. A single-location operation does not generate the multi-unit complexity that typically drives enterprise software adoption, but it does concentrate all purchasing authority at the corporate level.

The royalty rate is 3.0% of gross sales, and the initial franchise term runs 10 years. Average unit volume is not disclosed in the FDD. Vendors evaluating whether to allocate sales resources here should weigh the extremely limited unit count against the possibility that the brand is an early-stage concept preparing to scale. Without disclosed growth figures, that remains speculative.

Who controls software purchasing

The executive team listed in Item 1 of the 2025 FDD is small and centralized. Shawn Burcham serves as President and Chief Executive Officer. Julie Ann Burcham holds the role of Company Secretary. The operations function is led by Brock Blaise, Senior Vice President of Operations, while Carla Dowden oversees people operations as Senior Vice President – People Success. Kyle Menges is the Chief Financial Officer.

No Chief Information Officer, Chief Technology Officer, or VP of IT is named. In a structure this lean, technology purchasing decisions almost certainly involve the CEO and CFO for budget authority, with the SVP of Operations likely influencing tools that affect store-level workflows. A vendor pitching operational software should expect to engage Brock Blaise and Kyle Menges directly. For HR or payroll-related platforms, Carla Dowden is the probable internal champion.

Mandated and current tech stack

The 2025 FDD does not identify any mandated or recommended technology vendors. There is no required point-of-sale system, no specified back-office platform, no named online ordering provider, and no mandated payment processor. This is an open tech landscape — the franchisor has not imposed a standardized stack on the single operating unit.

For a software vendor, this means there is no incumbent to displace and no RFP-driven procurement process tied to a franchise mandate. It also means there is no system-wide integration requirement to navigate. The sale is a straightforward, single-location technology decision made by the HQ team.

Procurement, renewals, and timing

Item 8 of the FDD, which typically outlines designated suppliers and purchasing cooperatives, contains no extract in our corpus. This suggests the franchisor does not operate a formal procurement program with required vendors. Without a designated supplier framework, software vendors are not competing against a pre-approved list.

Renewal mechanics offer one potential timing signal. Under Item 17, a franchisee may enter into up to two additional 10-year successor terms. To qualify, the franchisee must notify the franchisor, be in compliance with the operations manual, renovate the restaurant, execute a release and indemnification agreement, and pay a Successor Agreement Fee of $7,500. If the company-owned unit approaches a renewal window, that could trigger a broader operational review — including technology. However, with only one unit and no franchised locations, the volume of renewal-driven evaluations will be low.

How to read the Champs Chicken FDD

The 2025 Franchise Disclosure Document for Champs Chicken’s freestanding concept is the primary source for all the data points above. It is filed with state franchise regulators and contains the franchisor’s audited financial statements, Item 1 executive roster, Item 8 procurement disclosures, and Item 17 renewal terms. The embedded PDF viewer below provides full access to the document. For software vendors building a ranked target list of franchise systems, FranCloud can surface the unit counts, tech mandates, and decision-maker names that matter most.