3 Things the New 2026 FDDs Are Telling Us About Franchising

The first wave of 2026 Franchise Disclosure Documents has landed. Here's what jumped out across more than 300 fresh filings.

Most franchise buyers only pick up the FDD of the specific brand they're evaluating. That's the right move when you're making a decision about one system.

But when you can read across 300+ refreshed 2026 FDDs in a single filing window — which is what's been landing on ClearlyFDD over the last two weeks — the patterns jump off the page fast.

Three jumped out at me, and each one has implications for anyone evaluating a franchise system right now. I posted ten notable year-over-year moves on LinkedIn this past Friday as a #FranchiseFriday quiz, and shared the answers this morning. (If you missed either, catch up here and here.) This post zooms out from those individual brands to the three patterns connecting them.

(Quick side note: there's a distinction between updating and filing an FDD that comes up a lot, and I broke it out into its own short post here so I don't have to explain it every time. Worth a read if you're new to the industry.)

1. Smaller formats are unlocking a much larger franchisee cohort

Two of the most recognizable brands in QSR — Dunkin' and Burger King — moved their investment ranges down significantly in their 2026 filings.

Dunkin' cut its minimum investment from $527,000 to $142,000. That's a 73% reduction in the floor of Item 7. Burger King cut its maximum investment by $1.4M, from $4.7M down to $3.3M.

Different ends of the same equation. Both brands are signaling that the legacy big-box format — 3,500+ square feet, full drive-thru, full dining room — is being phased out in favor of leaner builds. Drive-thru only. Kiosk. Non-traditional sites in airports, on college campuses, inside travel plazas, and increasingly in the dense urban locations that legacy footprints couldn't fit into.

That last point matters more than it first appears. A smaller format isn't just cheaper to build — it gets the brand in front of a generation of consumers who don't drive to suburban strip malls. College campuses, walkable urban cores, transit hubs. These are the locations where Gen Z and younger millennials are forming their daily food habits, and they were largely off-limits to brands that needed 3,500 square feet and 30 parking spaces.

For franchisees, this is a meaningful shift on both sides of the equation. When the low end of an investment range moves from $527K to $142K, you're not just lowering the cost of entry — you're widening the pool of people who can credibly own one of these brands. A new cohort of operators (single-unit, owner-operator, smaller-market) becomes viable that wasn't before. And those operators get to build in locations that put them directly in the path of the next generation of consumers.

The open question is whether the unit economics hold up at the smaller scale. Item 19 doesn't tell us yet. Most of these smaller-format prototypes haven't been operating long enough to show up in earnings disclosures. But mature franchisors don't move their investment ranges this aggressively without internal testing showing the numbers work. The data we can't see is presumably driving the decisions we can.

For prospective franchisees: the smaller-format door is now wide open at brands that were previously out of reach. For existing operators: expect new neighbors.

2. The American palate is back on ice cream — and ice cream brands have a structural edge

Two chains crossed 1,000 US locations in the same filing window: Culver's (997 → 1,041) and Cold Stone Creamery (994 → 1,054). Both frozen-dessert-forward. Both crossed the four-digit threshold in the same year.

The American palate cycles. We've been through cupcakes, then cookies, and we're now solidly back on ice cream. (Full disclosure — ice cream is my personal favorite.) But there's a structural reason ice cream brands tend to win these cycles, beyond consumer preference.

Ice cream and frozen custard concepts have menu flexibility that cookie and cupcake concepts don't. Culver's built its 1,041-unit business around frozen custard and its famous burgers. Cold Stone, Handel's, and similar concepts can layer in cookies, baked goods, and seasonal items relatively easily. The ice cream supply chain — refrigeration, ingredient storage, mix-in stations — supports a wider menu than a cookie operation can.

Going the other direction is much harder. A cookie franchise wanting to add real homemade ice cream needs entirely new equipment, new ingredients, new training, new storage. The category constraint isn't symmetric.

That's part of why ice cream brands tend to be the ones still standing when the dessert cycle rotates back around. They're not pure-play dessert concepts — they're flexible food-service businesses with frozen dessert as the anchor. When consumer demand shifts, they shift with it.

Two brands crossing 1,000 in the same week tells me franchise capital is recognizing this. Watch this category for the next 12-18 months.

3. Boutique fitness is still adjusting — and may not fully recover

Orangetheory went from 1,298 to 1,224 US locations — a loss of 74 units year-over-year. This is the third consecutive year of contraction across HIIT-format studios.

I've been asking the question for a couple of years now: did COVID permanently damage HIIT training as a category? I'm increasingly convinced the answer is yes, at least in its previous footprint.

Three things happened during and after the pandemic that haven't reversed. First, a meaningful share of fitness-conscious consumers built strong home routines via apps, YouTube, and online content — and those routines stuck. Second, the gyms that did keep growing through the cycle were value-format chains like Planet Fitness, which charges around $15 a month against $159+ for an Orangetheory membership. That's a roughly 80% savings, which is hard to argue against in a tight economy. Third, premium personal training (in-studio with a coach, small-group HIIT, etc.) has shifted from "weekly routine for the upper-middle class" to "occasional luxury."

Combine those three and the math for boutique HIIT franchisees stops working at the unit count the category built during 2015-2019.

I don't think this means boutique fitness goes away. Premium fitness as a category will always exist — the question is at what scale. My read is that the shakeout still has another year or two to run, and the surviving operators will be the ones who locked in good real estate and built dense local communities. The marginal locations will continue to close.

Prospective fitness franchisees should be reading Item 20 carefully — specifically where the closures concentrate, by geography and by cohort year. The data will tell you which markets are saturated and which still have room.

What the rest of the 2026 FDDs are saying

These were three of the patterns I saw across 300+ new filings. There were more — Five Star Bath Solutions nearly quadrupled its footprint in a single year (home services is having a breakout cycle). Famous Dave's quietly removed its Item 19 earnings disclosure (always notable when that section disappears). Taco Bell finished the year two units shy of 8,000.

The 2026 FDDs are searchable on clearlyfdd.com, with year-over-year comparisons for every brand that has both a 2025 and 2026 filing in the library, and Clara — our AI assistant — sitting inside every FDD to answer follow-up questions with Item and page citations.

If you're evaluating a specific brand: start with the filing. If you're watching the industry: watch the filings in aggregate.

That's where the story is.

— Amy