Inside the Supreme Deli FDD: A Case Study in Vetting Franchise Accounts Before You Chase Them

Supreme Deli's 2026 FDD shows a franchise system that grew from 8 to 33 kiosks between 2023 and 2024, then collapsed to 11 in a single year, a net loss of 22 outlets, or -64.5% YoY. The filing also discloses that host supermarkets and the franchisor together can withhold up to 60% of a kiosk's weekly gross sales before the franchisee pays for food, labor, or anything else. The twist: Supreme Deli's sibling brand, Supreme Produce, runs the identical royalty structure out of the same Richardson, Texas office and grew 75% YoY to 591 units. Same parent, same fee stack, opposite outcomes, which is exactly the kind of signal a franchise database built on FDDs is meant to catch before a sales team spends a quarter chasing the wrong account.

Most sales teams selling into franchising build target lists off brand name, segment, and unit count, the numbers that show up in a directory listing. Supreme Deli's FDD is a useful reminder that those numbers don't tell you what's actually happening inside the system, and that a sibling brand under the same parent can be having a completely different year. This is what franchise market research grounded in the actual disclosure documents looks like: not a headcount, but a read on whether an account is worth your team's time.

What is Supreme Deli, and what does its FDD disclose?

Supreme Deli is franchised by Supreme Service Solutions, Inc., a Texas corporation formed in November 2021 and headquartered in Richardson, Texas. Per Item 1, the concept operates "Deli Kiosks," small-footprint sandwich, salad, panini, and deli-platter counters placed inside third-party "Host Locations," described in the filing as typically upscale supermarkets. The franchisor doesn't operate any kiosks itself; every location is franchised, and it doesn't own the real estate, it licenses space inside someone else's store.

Supreme Deli isn't a standalone bet by its founders, Katie Aung (Executive Chairman and Co-Founder) and Thein Aung (Co-Founder and CEO). The same filing entity also does business as Supreme Produce, a produce-kiosk concept in the same host-location model, and its affiliate Fresh Food Concepts, LLC franchises a third kiosk brand, Yummi Go Gourmet (sushi), which reported 560 units of its own. Three kiosk concepts, one Richardson address, one leadership team.

How fast is the system actually growing, or shrinking?

Item 20's outlet table tells the real story, and it isn't the story a size-only filter would surface:

YearOutlets at StartOutlets at EndNet Change
2023827+19
20242733+6
20253311-22

Supreme Deli roughly quadrupled in its first two years, then lost two-thirds of its footprint in 2025 alone, a -64.5% year-over-year unit swing on FranCloud's growth metric. Item 20 also shows ownership churn accelerating alongside the contraction: three franchisee-to-new-owner transfers in Kentucky in 2025, versus zero to one in each of the prior two years, plus multiple locations recorded as "ceased operations" across Alabama, Kentucky, Maryland, and Ohio. For a sales team, a net-change table like this is a five-minute check that would have flagged the account as high-risk before a single call got booked. For the broader pattern of warning signs in filings, see FDD red flags.

What does the fee structure actually leave a franchisee?

Item 6 discloses two separate withholdings taken directly from a kiosk's weekly Gross Sales, not from profit:

  • Hosting Fee: the supermarket Host Location withholds 15–35% of weekly Gross Sales.
  • Franchise Fee (royalty): Supreme Deli then withholds up to the remaining 5–25% of weekly Gross Sales.

Combined, that's a disclosed range of 20% to 60% of a kiosk's top-line sales gone before the franchisee has paid for food cost, labor, insurance, or anything else. Layer in the other Item 6 charges, a $50 fee per inventory order, a $400-or-2%-of-sales biweekly management fee, a $100/month labeling-machine rental, and 18% annual interest on anything paid late, and it's a thin-margin structure even before a location has a bad month. Notably, Item 19 (Financial Performance Representations) discloses no average unit volume for Supreme Deli, so there's no franchisor-published number showing what's left over after that split.

One more detail worth flagging for anyone doing supplier-side prospecting: the Brand Standards Manual's single largest section, 143 of its 182 pages, is Boar's Head's own "In-Store Controlled Food Solutions Operations Guide." That's a strong signal of who the anchor food supplier is behind the deli program, even without a formal Item 8 mandate citation.

The lesson: identical economics, opposite trajectories

Here's the part that matters most for GTM strategy. Supreme Produce, same franchisor family, same Richardson HQ, same founders, the same disclosed royalty structure (up to 25% of Gross Sales), grew 75% YoY to 591 units (567 franchised, 24 company-owned) in the same period Supreme Deli was contracting. The fee stack isn't what separated the two outcomes. Something else did: location quality, host-partner relationships, category performance inside the store, or execution, and none of that shows up if you're scoring "Supreme" as a single brand family or filtering a prospect list by segment and unit count alone.

That's the practical takeaway for any sales or RevOps leader building a franchise account list:

  • Pull the Item 20 net-change table before you prioritize an account. Total unit count tells you size; net change tells you direction. A brand can look identical on a size filter and be moving in opposite directions.
  • Check the full revenue withholding, not just the headline royalty. Supreme Deli's 25% royalty looks roughly in line with other QSR franchises until you add the 15–35% Hosting Fee sitting on top of it. A franchisee under that kind of margin pressure is a poor target for anything beyond the cheapest, most obviously ROI-positive tool.
  • Never assume sibling brands under one parent perform the same. Supreme Deli, Supreme Produce, and Yummi Go Gourmet share an office, a leadership team, and a royalty structure, and materially different trajectories. Franchise data analytics that only look at the parent entity would miss this entirely.
  • Watch ownership-transfer counts as a churn proxy. A jump from zero to three transfers in a single state in one year, alongside "ceased operations" entries, is a distress signal worth weighting as heavily as growth rate.

What this means for account prioritization

None of this is investment or legal advice on Supreme Deli specifically, it's a template. The same four checks apply to any brand on a sales team's target list, and they take minutes to run against a filing instead of weeks to learn the hard way in a sales cycle. This is the case for franchise performance benchmarking as a standing part of account research, not a one-off diligence step reserved for the biggest logos. The selling-to-franchise-systems playbook covers how to run that research into a real motion.

FranCloud extracts these signals, unit-count trends, fee structures, sibling and parent relationships, franchisee churn, across every active US franchise system, searchable at the franchise directory. If you're new to reading disclosure documents, our FDD guide in the Learn hub walks through what each Item actually discloses, and pricing covers what it takes to run this kind of screen across your own target list instead of one brand at a time. For parallel brand reads, see the Jersey Mike's FDD breakdown and the McDonald's FDD breakdown.

Common questions

Inside the Supreme Deli FDD, answered

Supreme Deli is a franchised deli-kiosk concept, placed inside third-party "Host Locations" (typically upscale supermarkets), franchised by Supreme Service Solutions, Inc. of Richardson, Texas. It reported 11 units at the end of its 2025 fiscal year, down from 33 the year before.
They're franchised by the same entity and share the same founders, headquarters, and royalty structure, but they're distinct concepts. Supreme Deli sells sandwiches and deli platters; Supreme Produce sells cut fruit, produce, and related items. Supreme Produce reported 591 units and 75% YoY growth in the same filing period Supreme Deli contracted by 64.5%.
Item 7 discloses an initial franchise fee of $5,000 to $50,000. The FDD does not disclose a full total-investment range or an average unit volume (Item 19) for the concept.
The FDD doesn't state a single cause, but Item 20 shows multiple locations recorded as "ceased operations" and an increase in franchisee-to-new-owner transfers in 2025 versus prior years, both consistent with franchisee-level financial strain, which the disclosed 20–60% combined Hosting Fee and royalty withholding would plausibly contribute to.

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