Dive Brief:
- Cava will open its first store in Detroit on Friday, marking its second Michigan unit, according to a press release. This continues the chain’s successful Midwestern expansion, which began in Chicago in 2024.
- The downtown Detroit restaurant is 3,000 square feet, with a dining room and accommodations for digital pickup and delivery orders.
- Earlier this summer, Cava opened its first Michigan unit in Canton, an outer suburb of Detroit. Opening in a suburb first and in a downtown zone later deviates from Cava’s Chicago playbook, which saw the chain open its first store in the Wicker Park neighborhood, within the city’s urban core.
Dive Insight:
While Cava’s scorching same-store sales growth has moderated somewhat, the chain is still expanding rapidly, with 16 net new units in Q2. Cava even modestly increased its growth projections. The chain entered the Pittsburgh market last month and Indianapolis in the spring.
Cava’s expansion comes as sales growth for many fast casual brands has slowed — Cava’s comparable sales growth dropped from 14.4% in Q2 2024 to 2.1% in the same period this year.
But CEO Brett Schulman said on the chain’s most recent earnings call that the reception of the brand’s new units gave Cava confidence in further growth.
“The strength of this demand and the performance of our recent new openings give us even greater confidence in reaching our next major milestone of at least 1,000 restaurants by 2032,” Schulman said.
Cava has made a number of recent moves designed to boost its same-store sales growth, while keeping up a swift development pace. The chain has reworked its loyalty program, for example, and deployed Shawarma Chicken as an LTO protein earlier this month.
Other public fast casual brands have had a difficult 2025. Portillo’s cut its projected openings and ended a breakfast pilot, before the ouster of its longtime CEO earlier this week. Noodles & Company is speeding up the closure of underperforming units. Sweetgreen, which has benefitted from similar health-seeking consumer trends as Cava, laid off a large chunk of its workforce and abandoned its fries program last month, though it is still opening new units.
