Emerging Brands

How Angie's Food Concepts aims to become the Walmart of restaurants

Fast food has an affordability problem and Tony Christofellis, who co-founded the Salad and Go chain, believes he knows how to fix it.
Angie's Lobster
Angie's Lobster opened in Las Vegas this month, the first outside Arizona. | Photo courtesy of Angie's Food Concepts.

Tony Christofellis believes he has solved the biggest problem facing the fast-food industry today: Affordability.

Fast-food menu prices have risen steadily over the past four years, while quality has gone down and consumers are getting fed up, he said. They’re choosing to cook at home, or in some cases even trading up to fast-casual or casual-dining deals where the quality of food is better and prices are only a dollar or two more than McDonald’s or Wendy’s.

Christofellis, however, says he is building a new model for restaurant operation that will be a true disruptor in the industry.

He knows a bit about disruption.

Christofellis was the co-founder of Salad and Go, a drive-thru salad concept built around a highly efficient model of small, mostly seating-free restaurants served by central kitchen production facilities where everything was made in house. Christofellis sold his stake in Salad and Go to a private-equity firm in 2021. (Now former Wingstop CEO Charlie Morrison is leading Salad and Go and that chain has about 140 units and counting.)

Christofellis, meanwhile, has moved onto something new.

He and some other investors that were behind Salad and Go have put about $26 million into the now-growing Angie’s Food Concepts, a multi-brand restaurant company named for Christofellis’ mother and based in Arizona.

At Angie’s, Christofellis is applying some of the learnings from Salad and Go. But he thinks the model can apply to a lot more than just salad.

Like, say, lobster.

That’s not typically an ingredient associated with Arizona. But Christofellis wanted to start with a food that had “wow factor.”

“Lobster is the ultimate luxury food, so if you can make that as affordable as a chicken meal, consumers will accept your model,” he said.

The first Angie’s brand to launch in 2021 was Angie’s Lobster, which now has eight units with several more coming this year.

Angie's Food Concepts

A lobster roll for $9.99 at Angie's Lobster, and the Greek salad with chicken at Angie's Prime Grill. | Photo courtesy of Angie's Food Concepts.

Angie’s Lobster specializes in wild-caught seafood, but the specialty is the Maine lobster roll. A chilled lobster roll is priced at $9.99, which is a shockingly low price, given many restaurants are paying upwards of $34 per pound for frozen Maine lobster.

Angie’s is able to get it for about $18 per pound because the company has pretty much cut out the middleman. And that’s fundamentally Christofellis’ modus operandi: vertical integration.

Rather than buying lobster the traditional way from a distributor, who goes through a processor that has sourced from a wharf that bought lobster off the boat, Angie’s buys direct from fisherman. The company operates a 63,000-square-foot processing plant in Maine, where the lobster is flash-frozen and shipped to the central production facilities that serve Angie’s restaurants.

“It was a huge investment for us, but the savings are astronomical,” he said.

And though the food costs of a lobster roll are high at Angie’s Lobster, the company balances it out by cutting costs elsewhere.

The restaurants, which range in size from about 950- to 3,000-square feet, need little in the way of labor. Guests pay digitally and pick up through the drive-thru. There’s no fancy, branded packaging. It’s served in a paper tray with no lid and one napkin, no straw, in a plain brown bag.

Almost all other ingredients, from sauces to drinks, are made in the central kitchen facility—without preservatives, Christofellis notes, and from high-quality ingredients, like prime beef, organic lettuce and chicken raised without antibiotics.

In fact, the only things Angie’s doesn’t make in house are the fries and the buns (the latter are made by a gourmet baker), and the Diet Coke and Sprite.

But here’s one thing he did differently. At Salad and Go, ingredients were almost entirely prepped in the central kitchen and delivered to restaurants for salad assembly.

At Angie’s, the main proteins are butchered and prepped in the central kitchen facility, but cooked in the restaurants. In addition, some ingredients that are just not as good when prepped ahead, like diced tomatoes and onions, are also prepared in restaurants.

“Anything that affects quality is decentralized,” he said. “Those aren’t super labor-intensive things to do.”

Yet, Angie’s still maintains speed through the drive-thru by cooking that meat using double-sided clamshell grills, similar to a McDonald’s, Christofellis said. Using that equipment, steak and chicken can be grilled perfectly every time, with no skill involved.

“Those clamshell grills are a huge game-changer for us,” he said.

Angie’s also saves on occupancy costs, he said. Stores are really busy, so occupancy cost as a percentage of sales is lower than a Salad and Go.

Angie’s Lobster now boasts an average unit volume of $2.7 million, he said.

“In the end, our four-wall margin is about 21%,” said Christofellis. “We still get to the magic number everyone wants to get to right now. We just get there much differently.”

With the Lobster brand underway, next came Angie’s Prime Grill, the second brand, which now has two locations.

Christofellis described Angie’s Prime Grill as “Chipotle meets Salad and Go.”

Angie's Prime Grill

A grilled burrito at Angie's Prime Grill. | Photo courtesy of Angie's Food Concepts.

On the menu are warm bowls, grilled burritos and salads (made with organic lettuce, as was originally the case at Salad and Go). But it’s not necessarily Mexican.

Christofellis’ heritage is Greek, so he set out to create “the best Greek salad the world has ever seen.” But there’s also a warm Greek bowl, which he argues is even more flavorful, using healthful brown rice and extra virgin olive oil.

A grilled chicken Greek bowl with Persian cucumbers, organic tomatoes, red onions, pepperoncinis, kalamata olives and feta is $7.79 with a drink, which Christofellis contends is even lower than Salad and Go, and better quality.

In test now is a third concept called Angie’s Burger, which was created to use the trimmings from the USDA prime steak used at Angie’s Prime.

The menu is being tested out of the other Angie’s units. So far an eight-ounce Prime Steakhouse Burger has been a best-seller, priced at $9.99 with a drink.

Last week, Christofellis also started testing a three-ounce burger—designed to compete more directly with brands like In-N-Out or Shake Shack—for $3.19.

“Once we’ve figured out the burger business, we’ll do some standalone stores,” Christofellis said.

Next up: Christofellis is taking on Chick-fil-A.

In October, Angie’s plans to test a chicken concept that will offer a fried-chicken sandwich meal starting at $5 that will be designed to compete with a meal that would likely be about $11 at Chick-fil-A.

“For a lower- to middle-income American, to spend $11 at lunch is not affordable, and they’re just not doing it,” he said.

Fundamentally, his goal is to give inflation-stressed consumers better options.

“We’re creating the juggernaut that will give lower to middle-income consumers high-quality food at the lowest possible price,” he said. "We want to create an ecosystem where, if you're a front-line American and you want something to eat, you'll go to Angies, which, like Walmart, offers everyday low prices."

By the end of the year, Angie’s expects to reach 15 locations total. The company opened the first Angie’s Lobster in Las Vegas earlier this month, where Christofellis plans to fill in that market—which can be served from the central kitchen in Arizona.

Those production facilities can support up to 200 restaurants, he said.

Christofellis has targeted Texas and Florida as the next markets in 2025. There, the company will likely build production facilities as it grows.

Angie’s is projecting to open 20 restaurants next year, and all will be company-owned. (Christofellis believes franchising is fundamentally not efficient.)

“We are creating—not the next big thing, not the next Chipotle. But we’ve created the big thing that will define the industry for generations to come,” he said. “We’re the only ones that have cracked the code and have the infrastructure, culture and experience to solve the biggest problem facing fast food today, which is affordability.

“And affordability isn’t going away,” he added.

UPDATE: This article has been updated with some new information from Angie's Food Concepts.

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