Atlanta Good Food category interest

A fast-casual sandwich shop is expanding to the Peach State.

A franchise agreement is slated to bring 15 Potbelly Sandwich Works locations to the Atlanta market. The agreement includes portions of Fulton and DeKalb counties.

The team behind the agreement is Royal Restaurant Group, who are also bringing 36 Potbelly locations to Florida and Ohio.

Randy Pianin, CEO of Royal Restaurant Group, told What Now Atlanta they are currently negotiating with several landlords to get the first locations locked down. They are hoping to have the market’s first location open by the end of 2025.

“I’m in Atlanta frequently,” said Pianin, who went to Emory University. “I love the area. It continues to grow. It’s a great environment for restaurants, and we think Potbelly will kill it in Atlanta.”

Potbelly first opened in Chicago in 1977, followed by its first shop outside the Windy City in 2002 in Washington D.C. The company opened its first drive-thru in 2007, adding new menu items. There are now more than 430 locations.

The menu includes a variety of toasted sub sandwiches. Pianin sings the praises of the Wreck, a meaty fan favorite with turkey, ham, roast beef, salami and swiss. But the menu goes beyond sandwiches.

“One of the things that drew us to Potbelly was not just the subs,” Pianin said. “The salads are great, the soups are amazing, especially the chicken pot pie soup. The cookies are great. The sugar cookie is the best sugar cookie on earth.”

Pianin brings a slate of restaurant experience to Potbelly. Prior to forming Royal Restaurant Group, Pianin was the CEO of JAE Restaurant Group, a franchise group with more than 230 Wendy’s locations.

The West Palm Beach, Florida-based Royal Restaurant Group launched at the end of 2022. In addition to Potbelly, their portfolio includes dozens of Burger King restaurants.

Potbelly’s Senior VP of Franchising Lynette McKee told What Now Atlanta that the city is a place that the brand has always wanted to expand to.

“We are in a lot of metropolitan areas – Chicago as the home base, Dallas, Houston, New York, Denver, Phoenix – but we’ve not had a foothold in the Southeast market really ever,” she said. “We started growing, and the state of Florida started booming right away.”

They had an eye on Atlanta as the next hub of Southeast development for Potbelly. When Royal Restaurant Group, which operates several Potbelly locations in Ohio, expressed interest in bringing the brand to the Atlanta market, “that was like music to our ears,” McKee said.

McKee said that the recent agreement for development in the Atlanta market is an example of the brand’s typical strategy of offering multi-unit deals, often with experienced Potbelly franchisees who are interested in opening more locations.

“Our existing franchisees are coming back and buying more development opportunities,” she said. “They see the leadership of the brand, the systems in place, all the things for an existing franchisee that you’d want to see.”