Food Owners: The Builders Behind Allison Ellsworth, Amin Dhanani, Andy Patel and Andrew Cherng

Allison Ellsworth

Co-founder & Chief Brand Officer, poppi — Dallas, TX

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Instagram

Allison Ellsworth spent seven years feeling unwell and not knowing why — gut trouble, skin trouble, exhaustion that no doctor could name. An oil-and-gas landman in Texas, she started experimenting in her own kitchen, mixing apple-cider-vinegar drinks until she found something that helped and actually tasted good.

She quit her job, sold the drinks at Dallas farmers’ markets, and nearly went broke doing it. Then came the moment that tells you everything about her: she pitched the company on Shark Tank at nine months pregnant, and walked out with a $400,000 investment from Rohan Oza.

The drink she had made for her own body became poppi — and she became its voice, telling her unfiltered founder story on TikTok until one video did $100,000 in sales overnight.

Poppi grew from a folding table at a farmers’ market into one of the fastest-growing beverage brands in America, passing $500 million in annual revenue in 2024. In May 2025, PepsiCo acquired the brand for $1.95 billion, and Fortune estimated the founders’ personal take at more than $100 million.

Ellsworth, who co-founded the company with her husband Stephen, stayed exactly what she had been from the kitchen days: the brand’s chief storyteller. A health problem nobody could diagnose became a company the biggest soda maker in the world had to own.

WEDO — “From Her Kitchen to a $1.95 Billion Acquisition: How Allison Ellsworth Became a Unicorn”
Thirty Minute Mentors — “Poppi Co-Founder Allison Ellsworth” (Adam Mendler)
Wikipedia — “Poppi (drink)”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Wade Oney  ·  Amin Dhanani

Amin Dhanani

Owner & President, Z&H Foods; General Partner, Dhanani Group — Sugar Land, TX

Official links: Website

Some inheritances are money. Amin Dhanani inherited a work ethic. He is the youngest of eleven children; his father arrived from Pakistan with those eleven children and $50 in his pocket, speaking no English, and built convenience stores and gas stations into a family business.

Amin started where the business starts — on the Whopper line at fifteen — and spent ten years learning every job in it before venturing out on his own in 2010, still under the Dhanani Group umbrella. He says his father’s blessing was still the thing he wanted most on any deal.

This is a family that refused Wall Street money and stayed one hundred percent family owned — and simply out-worked the market.

“Work from your heart and passion, and success will follow. But always stay humble.”

Dhanani became Popeyes’ largest franchisee, named the chain’s Franchisee of the Year along the way.

A 2017 profile counted 270 Popeyes and 26 La Madeleine cafés in his companies; a later Franchising.com profile counts 375 Popeyes, 105 Dunkin’ locations and 42 la Madeleine stores — more than 500 locations in an $800 million operation — while the wider Dhanani Group owns 510 Burger Kings and 150 convenience stores and is described as a billion-dollar group.

The boy on the Whopper line now signs the deals his father used to bless.

Franchising.com — “Dhanani Dynasty II: Youngest Son of Family Business Branches Out”
Franchising.com — “Big Dealer: 3 Brands, 500+ Locations, and Adding More”
Franchising.com — “Driving Ambition: 38-Year-Old Operates 125 Popeyes in 4 States”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Allison Ellsworth  ·  Anand (Andy) Patel

Anand (Andy) Patel

Principal, Apple Investors Group — Boynton Beach, FL

Andy Patel arrived from Gujarat, India, in the 1980s and did not start at the bottom of one restaurant — he started at the bottom of four at once. His first job was at a Wendy’s in Laurel, Maryland; within six months he was promoted to management, while also working part-time at McDonald’s, Domino’s and Burger King.

In 1992 he bought a failing IHOP — and doubled its volume within a year. That turnaround became his signature: the operator other brands call when a restaurant is flailing. In 2017 he received the American Dream MVP Award, franchising’s honor for exactly the journey he had lived.

“My definition of the American Dream is the ability to be successful through hard work and determination,”

Patel founded Apple Investors Group in 2008 and built it to more than 140 restaurants managing more than $220 million in revenue and 4,500 employees — a multi-brand portfolio spanning burger, pizza and breakfast chains.

He is candid about how he leads: he makes it a point to know as much as possible about every position in the company, because, as he puts it, his employees show him what is working and what is not.

Four part-time jobs became one of the largest restaurant portfolios in Florida — built, fittingly, by a man who once held all four at the same time.

Franchising.com — “Master of Innovation: Hard Work and Determination Are Rewarded”
1851 Franchise — “Multi-Unit Moguls: 25 of the Industry’s Largest Franchisees”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Amin Dhanani  ·  Andrew Cherng

Andrew Cherng

Co-founder & Co-CEO, Panda Restaurant Group (Panda Express) — Rosemead, CA

Official links: Website

Andrew Cherng was born in Yangzhou, China, raised in Taiwan and Japan, and came to the United States in 1966 to study mathematics — working summers as a waiter, the son of a chef who had never owned a business of his own.

In 1973 he and his father scraped together family funds and an SBA loan and opened Panda Inn in Pasadena, California, the whole family working in it. A decade later, a mall developer who ate there suggested a fast-food version.

In 1983 Andrew and his wife Peggy opened the first Panda Express in the Glendale Galleria — and American shoppers met orange chicken.

“Life is more than just for yourself. You want to do well for family, to take care of other people, other causes — that is where happinesses are.”

Panda Express grew into the largest Asian dining concept in the United States: more than 2,500 locations, roughly $7 billion in annual sales and some 55,000 employees — still family-owned, still not franchised in the usual way, a deliberate choice the Cherngs have kept for four decades.

The giving is built into the business: Panda Cares, the group’s philanthropic arm, has donated more than $140 million to children’s hospitals, schools and relief efforts, and the Cherngs have been named Carnegie Corporation Great Immigrants and inducted into the National Restaurant Association’s Hall of Fame.

A waiter’s summer job became an empire — and the empire kept the family’s name on the door.

Inc. — “Panda Express Founders Built a $7 Billion Empire — Now Helping Employees Become Homeowners”
Carnegie Corporation of New York — “Andrew Cherng, Great Immigrants”
Gold House — “Andrew & Peggy Cherng”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Anand (Andy) Patel  ·  Anil Yadav

Anil Yadav

Founder & CEO, Yadav Enterprises — Fremont, CA

Official links: Website

Anil Yadav emigrated from India at seventeen, and Jack in the Box would not hire him. It took three visits in 1984 to land a part-time kitchen job making tacos. Within eighteen months he was a manager; within five years he had bought his first restaurant.

The fry cook did not stop at owning a store — he learned the whole system from inside it, the way only someone who has worked the fryer can.

Yadav Enterprises grew into more than 400 restaurants across eight brands, and Yadav became the largest Jack in the Box franchisee in the United States — the chain that once made him ask three times.

“I started my restaurant journey as a teenage fry cook at Jack in the Box, worked my way through the system, and eventually became a franchisee,”

Then the fry cook started buying the brands themselves.

Yadav acquired the roughly 150-unit Taco Cabana chain for $85 million and became its franchisor, added Nick The Greek, and then brought the Del Taco brand itself under Yadav Enterprises — a sale priced at $115 million by its former owner, Jack in the Box Inc. His company is today the largest franchisee of Jack in the Box, Denny’s and TGI Friday’s, and franchisor of brands of its own.

Asked about the full circle, Yadav points back to the kitchen: the lessons from the fryer, he says, have served him on both sides of the business.

Franchising.com — “MVP: Anil Yadav Began as a Fry Cook” (Multi-Brand Leadership Award profile)
QSR Web — “Del Taco Begins Operations Under Yadav Enterprises”
Fast Casual — “Del Taco Begins Growth Phase Under New Ownership”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Andrew Cherng  ·  Antonio Swad

Antonio Swad

Founder, Pizza Patrón & Wingstop — Dallas, TX

Official links: Website

Antonio Swad, the son of a truck driver and a waitress, started at fifteen washing dishes at a Columbus steakhouse and was its general manager by twenty-one.

In Dallas he opened a small pizza shop with about $11,000 and a conviction nobody else had acted on: the city’s Hispanic families deserved a pizza place built for them — fresh dough, low prices, and what he called friendly, bicultural service. Pizza Patrón, founded in 1986, was that bet.

In 1994 he made a second one: that chicken wings, then a happy-hour afterthought, could carry a whole restaurant. Wingstop was born — and grew so fast that within five years it had 88 restaurants and $35 million in sales.

Swad sold Wingstop in 2003 in a $22 million deal that nearly fell apart over a single word buried in the contract — a cautionary tale he later told in full on NPR’s How I Built This, and the making of him as a teacher of founders, not just a builder of brands.

Pizza Patrón grew to more than 120 locations in eight states, famous for letting customers pay in pesos and order in Spanish; Swad eventually sold it, too, to its largest franchisee, and moved on to new concepts. Two national brands from one dishwasher’s station — both built by seeing a customer everyone else had walked past.

1851 Franchise — “How Antonio Swad Doubled Down on Franchise Concepts”
Franchise Times — “‘Idea Guy’ Founder Sells Pizza Patron, Pivots to What’s Next”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Anil Yadav  ·  Aslam Khan

Aslam Khan

Founder & Chairman, Falcon Holdings — Dallas, TX

Official links: Website

Aslam Khan grew up in extreme poverty in a mountain village in Pakistan, left home at fourteen, and arrived in America in 1987 with $20 in his pocket. His first job was washing dishes in a California Church’s Chicken for $3 an hour. He did not stay in the dish pit.

Khan became a turnaround specialist inside the chain — the man sent to fix struggling stores — and in 1999 he bought ninety-seven distressed Church’s restaurants in a single stroke and founded Falcon Holdings. The dishwasher became the largest franchisee in the Church’s system.

“I’ve been fighting against poverty all my life,”

Falcon Holdings grew to some 300 restaurants across Church’s Chicken, Long John Silver’s, A&W, Hardee’s and Piccadilly — and Khan kept the promise the poverty made him swear.

The International Franchise Association named him its Entrepreneur of the Year in 2014 and honored him with its Ronald E. Harrison Award for diversity in operations; he builds leadership programs inside his own company so dishwashers behind him get the same ladder he climbed. “I feel it is my duty from my earned success to pay it forward to others,” he says — a sentence his whole career is arranged to prove.

Franchising.com — “American Dreamer: Aslam Khan Wants to Reach $1 Billion by 2020”
QSR Magazine — “Church’s Chicken Franchisee Wins Entrepreneur of the Year”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Antonio Swad  ·  Cameron Mitchell

Cameron Mitchell

Founder & CEO, Cameron Mitchell Restaurants — Columbus, OH

Official links: Website · LinkedIn

Cameron Mitchell’s story starts where too many stories end. His parents divorced when he was nine; by middle school he was using alcohol and drugs, and in high school he dropped out and ran away. At sixteen, having contemplated suicide, he called home, came back, re-enrolled — and took a night job as a dishwasher in a Columbus steakhouse.

Somewhere between the dish room and the line, the lost kid found the thing he was for. He wrote his goals down that era and chased them one by one: the Culinary Institute of America, executive chef, general manager, and finally president of his own company by thirty-five.

“I had 40 restaurants in 2008, and we sold 22 of them to Ruth’s Chris for $92 million,”

Mitchell founded Cameron Mitchell Restaurants in 1993 with a first concept scraped together from $400,000 of other people’s money and a great deal of personal debt.

The group built more than 100 restaurants over its life; in 2008 he sold two flagship concepts — twenty-two restaurants — to Ruth’s Chris Steak House for $92 million, paid off his partners, and then, when the crash nearly took the rest, put everything he had back in to keep it afloat.

He rebuilt it anyway: today the group runs roughly fifty restaurants under twenty concepts, doing more than $250 million in annual revenue, still independent, still privately held — and famous in the industry for a culture that treats its people the way Mitchell wished someone had treated the kid in the dish room.

Inc. — “How This CEO Turned His Life Around and Built a $250 Million Restaurant Empire”
Chief Executive — “Restaurant Company CEO Cooks Up Company Culture”
Wikipedia — “Cameron Mitchell Restaurants”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Aslam Khan  ·  Carlos Castro

Carlos Castro

Founder, President & CEO, Todos Supermarkets — Woodbridge, VA

Official links: Website

Carlos Castro grew up in El Salvador in a two-room home shared with nine siblings, and left a country sliding into civil war. His first crossing ended in detention — forty-five days, working odd jobs for a dollar a day — and deportation. He crossed again, and started over in America scrubbing toilets, cooking and washing dishes, sending money home.

He learned English, took classes, became a citizen, and in 1990 — ten years after he left El Salvador — he opened Todos Supermarket in Woodbridge, Virginia, to feed the Hispanic community growing up around him.

Todos grew into a small chain in Woodbridge and Dumfries employing more than 200 people, repeatedly named a Virginia Fantastic 50 business and commended by the Virginia House of Delegates.

But Castro built more than stores: Todos added money transfer, notary and tax services, health and housing information — a community hub as much as a supermarket, and Castro became a civic fixture, serving on chamber, college-foundation and workforce boards, co-founding the Hispanic Organization for Leadership and Action, and representing America’s independent grocers at a White House roundtable.

The man detained at the border for a dollar a day ended up advising presidents’ staffs on how food reaches families.

The Immigrant Learning Center — “Episode 35: Carlos Castro” (interview)
National Grocers Association — “Hispanic Heritage Month Profile: Carlos Castro of Todos Supermarket”
Pioneer Institute / JobMakers — “Carlos Castro: From Crossing the Border to Owning a Business”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Cameron Mitchell  ·  Peter Cancro

Peter Cancro

Founder, Jersey Mike’s Subs — Point Pleasant, NJ

Official links: Website

We’re inspired because Peter Cancro never forgot who believed in him first. He named a program that turns his own store managers into franchise owners after Coach Rod Smith — the football coach and banker who backed a teenager nobody else would have financed.

The kid who was handed a chance built a company whose signature move is handing chances to other people: every year, Jersey Mike’s stores give an entire day’s sales — not just the profit — to local charities.

“The opportunities to give are all around us so please seek out your opportunity to give and make a difference in someone’s life.”

Cancro started working at the original Mike’s Subs at 14.

At 17, a high-school senior, he heard the owner wanted to sell, skipped class for a week to study the shop’s numbers, and talked his coach into a $125,000 loan so he could buy the business before he was old enough to legally slice a sub — giving up an accepted place at university to run it.

He franchised under the Jersey Mike’s name and built the chain to roughly 3,000 locations and more than $3 billion in revenue, then sold a majority stake to Blackstone in a deal valuing the company at about $8 billion, keeping a significant stake and the chairman’s role. Bloomberg puts his fortune at roughly $7.5 billion.

The Month of Giving campaign run by the stores he built has raised tens of millions for local charities.

CEO Today — “Peter Cancro: How Jersey Mike’s Became a $7.5 Billion Sandwich Empire”
NRN — “Jersey Mike’s CEO Peter Cancro Wins the 2024 Restaurant Leader of the Year Award”
Franchising.com — Jersey Mike’s Day of Giving release

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Carlos Castro  ·  David Tran

David Tran

Founder & Owner, Huy Fong Foods — Irwindale, CA

Official links: Website

You have seen his rooster a thousand times. David Tran, an ethnic-Chinese refugee from Vietnam, fled in 1978 aboard the freighter Huey Fong with more than 3,000 other refugees — and named his company after the ship that carried him out.

He had made chili sauce in Vietnam since 1975, bottling it in recycled jars; in Los Angeles he filled jars again, sold them from a blue Chevy van to Chinatown restaurants, and let word of mouth do what advertising never has. Huy Fong Foods has never advertised. It has never needed to.

The rooster sauce — Sriracha, named for a Thai coastal town, wearing the bird of Tran’s birth year — became one of the most imitated condiments on earth, and Tran never trademarked the name. Brookings reports sales over $60 million a year with about 200 workers; other coverage puts revenue far higher.

Production runs from a 650,000-square-foot plant in Irwindale, California, and demand has outpaced supply for most of the company’s life — a problem Tran has consistently refused to solve by cutting corners on peppers. A refugee ship’s name is now printed on bottles in kitchens on every continent.

Brookings Institution — “A Spicy Red Sauce and How Immigrants Generate Jobs and Growth in the US”
Wikipedia — “Huy Fong Sriracha”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Peter Cancro  ·  Dawn Lafreeda

Dawn Lafreeda

Owner, Den-Tex Central Restaurants — San Antonio, TX

Official links: LinkedIn · X

Dawn Lafreeda was a Denny’s hostess at sixteen, a waitress soon after, financially stable at seventeen on her own saved wages — and a restaurant owner at twenty-three, in the tiny mining town of Globe, Arizona, after banks that would not take a young waitress seriously finally met one who would.

Denny’s itself was so impressed that eighteen months later it offered her four ailing West Texas restaurants to rescue.

She rescued them, kept calling headquarters until they sold her a store in San Antonio, and built from there — through a recession in which, while other chains closed dining rooms, she opened ten restaurants in one year and fourteen the next.

“I knew from a young age I was going to own my own business,”

Den-Tex Central Restaurants runs more than seventy-five Denny’s across six states, and Lafreeda is the largest female Denny’s franchisee in the world — at points in her career the largest single owner in the whole system.

She has spent the second half of the story widening the door behind her: she is an executive producer of Show Her the Money, the documentary about how little venture funding women receive — two percent, as she points out — made by a woman the banks once would not take seriously.

The hostess now owns the dining rooms, and lectures the money on its manners.

The Angel Next Door — “The Power of Franchising: Dawn Lafreeda’s Road to Owning 72 Denny’s”
Give an Ovation Podcast — “Empowering Women in Restaurants and Business with Dawn Lafreeda”
Franchise Singapore — “How a Former Denny’s Waitress Amassed an Empire of Over 75 Denny’s Locations”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  David Tran  ·  Gail Becker

Gail Becker

Founder, CAULIPOWER — Los Angeles, CA

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Instagram

Gail Becker had never worked in food. She was a president at Edelman, one of the biggest public-relations firms on earth, when both of her sons were diagnosed with celiac disease and the grocery store’s gluten-free aisle offered them food she describes as full of unnecessary fat, salt and sugar.

Her father — a Holocaust survivor who had built a business from nothing — had recently died, and his example would not leave her alone. At fifty-two, with no food-industry experience, she quit, started the company on credit cards, and bet everything she had on a cauliflower pizza crust she could not buy anywhere.

CAULIPOWER passed $100 million in revenue within its first five years and put reinvented comfort food — pizza, pasta, chicken tenders, tortillas — into more than 30,000 stores and 5,000 restaurants; the brand was later acquired by Urban Farmer.

Becker is plain about the starting conditions: people thought she was crazy, manufacturers turned her down, and she sold clothes online to keep going.

A mother who could not find dinner for her sons built a category the food industry had missed entirely — and became, along the way, a Jeopardy! clue, which she counts as the moment she knew she had really made it.

Taste Radio — “Ep. 196: CAULIPOWER’s Gail Becker Built a $100M Brand”
All American Speakers — “Gail Becker” (biography)
Her Agenda — “Caulipower Founder Gail Becker on Building a $100M Brand”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Dawn Lafreeda  ·  Guillermo Perales

Il Yeon Kwon

Founder & CEO, H Mart (Hanahreum Group) — New York, NY

Official links: Website

Il Yeon Kwon grew up on a small farm plot in rural South Korea and came to New York in the late 1970s, when barely one percent of America’s population was Asian and an immigrant looking for the ingredients of home mostly looked in vain.

In 1982 he opened a 700-square-foot corner grocery under the elevated tracks in Woodside, Queens, and named it Han Ah Reum — Korean for “an armful.” It was a store for people who missed the taste of somewhere else.

His daughter Stacey remembers the years after: an empty chair at the family dinner table, because building the thing took everything he had.

The armful became H Mart — America’s largest Asian supermarket chain, with around 100 stores across the United States plus locations in Canada and the United Kingdom, some 5,500 employees, and revenue reported by the National Retail Federation at over $2 billion in 2024.

The stores grew into cultural institutions: food courts, kimchi facilities, the place a generation of immigrant families does the big shop. Kwon rarely discusses the company’s numbers and almost never discusses himself. The work speaks instead — one small Queens grocery that refused to stay small, until “an armful” described a country’s worth of groceries.

Inc. — “Stacey Kwon Knows What Customers Love About H Mart”
Wikipedia — “H Mart”
GoldSea — “Il Yeon Kwon Has Built an Asian American Cultural Institution”

Guillermo Perales

Founder, President & CEO, Sun Holdings — Dallas, TX

Official links: Website · LinkedIn

Guillermo Perales immigrated to the United States from Mexico with a business degree, high honors from Tecnológico de Monterrey and an MBA from Texas A&M — and no restaurant experience, no industry connections, and no one to call.

What he had was the franchise model itself: a way for an outsider to be handed the playbook of a proven business and out-execute the field. He opened his first Golden Corral in 1997 and founded Sun Holdings — and then simply did not stop acquiring, brand after brand, market after market, for nearly three decades.

Sun Holdings operates more than 1,000 locations across a dozen states — Burger King, Popeyes, Arby’s, IHOP, Applebee’s, Taco Bueno, GNC and T-Mobile among them — and has created more than 22,000 jobs, making Perales the largest Latino restaurant franchisee in the United States.

The honors match the scale: the International Franchise Association named him its Entrepreneur of the Year — twice, a Golden Chain Award followed, and Latino Leaders has put him on its 101 Most Influential Latinos list year after year. His company marks Veterans Day by serving tens of thousands of free meals.

The immigrant with no connections became the connection thousands of families’ paychecks run through.

International Franchise Association — “IFA Names Guillermo Perales as the 2015 Entrepreneur of the Year”
Papa John’s — “Brand’s Largest Domestic Development Deal Ever With Sun Holdings”
Franchising.com — “Multi-Unit Franchisee Profile: Guillermo Perales”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Gail Becker  ·  Il Yeon Kwon