Who Owns Subway, Dunkin' and Arby's? Inside Roark Capital's Roll-Up

You order a sandwich from Subway. A coworker grabs a coffee and a donut from Dunkin'. Someone else picks up wings from Buffalo Wild Wings, and on the drive home, a burger from Hardee's. Four completely different meals — and one owner.

How does a franchise royalty stream actually work?#

Almost none of these restaurants are owned by the company whose name is on the sign. They are franchises: independently owned locations that pay to use the brand.

A franchise owner pays an upfront fee to open the location, then hands over an ongoing royalty — usually somewhere between four and eight percent of every dollar through the register — plus a cut for national marketing. In exchange they get the name, the recipes, the supply chain and the playbook.

1. →

   Every register

   $100

   A sandwich, a coffee, a burger — rung up at a location the brand does not own.

2. →

   The royalty

   4–8%

   Paid up to the brand owner on every dollar, plus a cut for national marketing.

3. One office

   19 brands

   Different logos, different menus, the same ultimate owner collecting from all of them.

It does not need any single brand to be the next big thing. It needs thousands of cash registers, under nineteen different names, to keep ringing.

The company at the top never has to flip a burger. It owns the brand and collects the royalty, from every location, automatically. Which raises the obvious private-equity question: why buy one royalty stream when you can buy ten unrelated-looking brands, keep the logos separate so customers never suspect a thing, and collect all ten from one office?

Who is Roark Capital?#

Roark Capital is based in Atlanta, founded in the early 2000s by Neal Aronson. It specialises in one thing: franchised, multi-unit businesses that generate steady, predictable royalty income no matter what the broader economy is doing.

Over the following twenty-five years it built one of the largest restaurant portfolios in the world — brand by brand, deal by deal, almost entirely out of public view.

Which brands does Roark Capital own?#

Inspire Brands

• Arby's
• Buffalo Wild Wings
• Sonic Drive-In
• Jimmy John's
• Dunkin'
• Baskin-Robbins

GoTo Foods (formerly Focus Brands)

• Cinnabon
• Auntie Anne's
• Carvel
• Moe's Southwest Grill
• McAlister's Deli
• Schlotzsky's
• Jamba

Held directly

• Subway
• Dave's Hot Chicken
• Carl's Jr.
• Hardee's
• Miller's Ale House
• Seattle's Best Coffee

Add it up across Inspire Brands, GoTo Foods, Subway, Dave's Hot Chicken, CKE, Miller's Ale House and Seattle's Best Coffee, and Roark's restaurant portfolio spans at least nineteen separate consumer-facing brands.

How was Inspire Brands built?#

Just like that, one holding company owned Arby's, Buffalo Wild Wings, Sonic, Jimmy John's, Dunkin' and Baskin-Robbins — six brands most people would never guess were related.

Who bought Subway, and when?#

On April 30th, 2024, Roark completed its biggest and most surprising acquisition: Subway. It was the first change of ownership in Subway's entire history — the chain had been independently owned since it was founded in 1965.

Regulators had one specific concern before approving the deal: Roark already owned Jimmy John's, another major sandwich chain. They cleared it anyway.

Roark also owns CKE Restaurants — the parent company of Carl's Jr. and Hardee's — along with Miller's Ale House and the franchising rights to Seattle's Best Coffee. In June 2025 it added Dave's Hot Chicken, a chain that started as a parking-lot popup in Los Angeles in 2017, for one billion dollars.

How does a restaurant roll-up make money?#

First, diversification. If one brand has a bad year — a health scare, a viral bad review, a menu item that flops — the other eighteen keep the royalty cheques coming. You are not betting on one restaurant; you are betting on the entire habit of eating out.

Second, shared infrastructure. Nineteen brands can share back-office systems, supply-chain negotiating power, and the same real estate and franchise-development playbook — cutting costs across the whole portfolio in ways a single chain never could.

Third, it is a royalty machine. Every location, under every logo, sends a percentage of every sale to the same place. Roark does not need any single brand to be the next big thing. It needs thousands of cash registers, under nineteen names, to keep ringing. And eventually some get sold again — sometimes back to the public markets — turning years of collected royalties into a bigger payday on the way out.

Has Roark Capital's track record actually been good?#

Not uniformly. This is the part the press releases do not lead with.

Roark has also tried to sell some of these bets and come up short: Corner Bakery and Naf Naf Grill were both divested at disappointing valuations. And out of twenty-three restaurant acquisitions over twenty-five years, Roark has only fully exited three.

This is not a story about a genius formula that always works. It is a story about a company that has figured out how to make money on a royalty stream — win or lose on any single brand.

Is any other firm doing the same thing?#

Yes. Panera Bread and — until 2021 — Krispy Kreme were both owned by JAB Holding, a European investment firm that spent years quietly buying up coffee and bakery brands, including Peet's Coffee and Caribou Coffee.

Coffee and bakery

• Panera Bread
• Krispy Kreme (until 2021)
• Peet's Coffee
• Caribou Coffee

JAB took Krispy Kreme public in 2021. It recently sold off Panera's sister chain, Au Bon Pain — widely read as a sign it is preparing to take Panera public too. Different firm, different brands, same underlying idea: buy the businesses that already collect a small piece of a lot of transactions, and let that add up.

What does this mean for customers?#

None of this is illegal, or even secret — it is all public record if you go looking. But it changes how you should think about the food court, the strip mall and the drive-thru you pick out of habit.

When you choose Arby's over Jimmy John's, or Baskin-Robbins over Carvel, you may feel like you are picking a winner. Most of the time you are choosing which register, at the same company, gets your money today.

That is the real lesson of a roll-up: competition on the surface, concentration underneath.