Fast Food Chains That Will Be Opening Even More Stores In 2024

Despite a shaky, post-COVID economy with inflation influencing and impacting spending habits, fast food continues to be a business and culinary stalwart in the United States. After all, everybody still needs to eat, and even with price increases, fast food remains a relatively cheap way to feed oneself and their families. And as their regular prices rise, and as they attract customers with value menus, the companies behind the biggest of the fast food mega-chains are investing a lot of that revenue right back into themselves, embarking on multi-year plans to expand aggressively around the country and the world over the next few years.

While many fast food chains could go bankrupt in 2024, many more are doing just fine. Some of these familiar fast food entities, as well as some of the most exciting relative newcomers, plan to open dozens of new outlets or more in 2024 alone. Here are the restaurants that will be even more competitive and omnipresent in the coming months, as they're coming to your town (and dozens of others) with new pick-up, dine-in, and drive-through outlets.

One of the most prominent rising stars in fast food this past decade has been Shake Shack. The chain, founded by New York restaurateur Danny Meyer, seeks to take fast food, often maligned and associated with low-quality, cheap ingredients, to a new level. Whether from a new menu sections built by AI or its classic offering of burgers and dogs, Shake Shack serves food that's have never been frozen. It even includes blends that have been processed by high-end butchery Pat LaFrieda from antibiotic-free, vegetarian diet-fed, humanely treated cattle. It's a careful, and heavily involved formula, but it's one that's worked, as the chain has exploded since its 2004 origin into a collection of 328 restaurants around the United States. 

In 2024, Shake Shack will expand even more, planning to grow by more than 15% by year's end. In the first three months of the year, eight new Shake Shacks opened for business, the first strike in a planned string of 80 new outlets. It will continue to open in major metropolitan areas, as has been the model thus far, while placing stores in cities and countries not yet blessed with a Shake Shack. New locations in suburban areas of New Jersey and Illinois include the first drive-through-enabled Shake Shacks in those states, while the chain will expand its operations in California's Orange County and Pam Desert regions. The restaurant will also open its first outposts in Pittsburgh and Canada, with a flagship branch planned for Toronto.

Joining the ranks of Jamba, Frutta Bowls, and myriad other chains that serve up blended fruit and related products very quickly, Tropical Smoothie Cafe opened its first location in the actually tropical Florida back in 1993. It didn't really start growing until it found its first franchisee five years later, and then steadily expanded — store number 500 opened in 2016, and store number 1,000 followed in 2021. 

That growth pattern of the '10s and '20s is the one Tropical Smoothie Cafe plans to keep following. After opening 176 new locations in 2023 — 70% with the aid of existing franchise operators — the chain received a massive cash infusion and wave of corporate support via a purchase by private equity firm Blackstone. The new owners got down to work and set about moving the chain into more markets as quickly as possible, signing the paperwork on 258 new franchise agreements. Those stores should be open by the end of 2024 and into the early months of 2025. Tropical Smoothie Cafe is quickly expanding in Utah, Mississippi, and Pennsylvania, while wading into southern Illinois and nontraditional locations, such as a shop in the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

Into the crowded fast food sub-section of Southern-style fried chicken came Raising Cane's . The first location opened in Louisiana in 1996 and unlike competitors like Popeyes and KFC, with bone-in chicken and myriad side options, Raising Cane's boldly sells only boneless chicken fingers and a small menu of add-ons:  fries, coleslaw, and toast. By late 2023, the chain had slowly but surely grown into a system of 700 restaurants in 40 states. That includes a concerted expansion effort in 2023, which saw the opening of a new store every three days on average, and in 15 brand-new markets to boot. 

Raising Cane's will keep up the brisk, ambitious pace in 2024, with plans to open a total of 90 new chicken shops by the time 2024 ends, meaning it will reach 900 locations before long. That includes a large, flagship-style location set to open in Nashville, joining similar lofty Raising Cane's stores in Times Square, Las Vegas, and Miami Beach, as well as doubling its footprint in New York City.

Krispy Krunchy Chicken doesn't operate out of the traditional fast food environment of freestanding locations with drive-through windows and seating areas for customers. Instead, the Louisiana-founded server of spicy, Cajun-inspired fried chicken, chicken strips, fried fish, and traditional sides, leases space in public places where hungry people tend to congregate, such as in gas stations, convenience stores, casinos, college student unions, and truck stops. 

It's cheaper to open and operate a Krispy Krunchy Chicken as opposed to other, standalone fast food restaurants, and the chain has grown to occupy nearly 3,000 locations in 47 states through the end of 2023. That was a very big year for the chicken company — in 2023, 481 new Krispy Krunchy Chicken spots opened up. A new one sprung up at a rate of more than one per day, and in 2024, the growth will be even more pronounced. Krispy Krunchy Chicken aims to get 700 new outlets up and running by 2025, primarily with the aid of franchisees.

Wendy's is in a precarious spot in 2024, as it's simultaneously growing and shrinking. In May of this year, the chain announced that sales were up in its 6,000-odd American stores by a margin of 0.6%, and globally (7,200 stores altogether) by 0.9%. That's not enough growth to the corporate headquarters' liking, however — during an investors' earnings call, Wendy's disclosed that it would shut down a total of about 100 restaurants during the calendar year. In the first quarter of 2024, 27 Wendy's already closed for good.

However, the chain is reallocating resources and giving itself a slow, soft reboot. Because while it shut down more than two dozen restaurants, it also opened 35 new ones in early 2024. That was just a sample of an overreaching plan to launch somewhere between 250 and 300 new Wendy's restaurants in 2024, with about a third of those gracing the U.S.

It's likely that those new restaurants will take on the new Wendy's construction model, known as "Global Next Gen." Featuring a more modern architectural look and design, the newfangled Wendy's are built to cater to customers' needs in the digital age, including shelving for mobile orders, a walk-up window, spots for delivery app drivers to park, and self-service ordering stations.

McDonald's pioneered the entire concept of fast food. After Ray Kroc took over the small but bustling burger business operated by the McDonald brothers in the 1950s, he oversaw its expansion into a global brand selling American-style burgers, fries, shakes, and the best fountain soda to an immensely welcoming audience. No restaurant chain has more outlets worldwide than McDonald's does, with 41,882 total outposts around the globe, with about a third of those situated in the United States.

In the face of dozens of upstarts and competitors in the quick-serve sector overall and burgers specifically, McDonald's plans to stand its ground and to just keep growing. In 2023, the company's corporate office announced a plan to open restaurant number 50,000 by 2027. That works out to just over 8,000 new McDonald's restaurants opening up in just four years' time. On a late 2023 earnings call with investors, McDonald's brass revealed that it wants to spend about $1.5 billion in 2024 to open a total of 2,100 new locations before the year is out, with 500 of them coming to the already fairly saturated U.S.

Not only is Cava a fairly new restaurant on the American fast food landscape, it also represents a cuisine that's never significantly gone national in the quick-serve realm. Cava serves a menu of traditional and modern Mediterranean-inspired dishes, utilizing feta, hummus, falafel, tzatziki, tahini, and Kalamata olives in its bowls, salads, and pita sandwiches.

After its team of Greek-American founders opened one restaurant in 2010, the restaurant quickly grew into a chain. According to a study by Yelp, it's the fastest growing new restaurant brand in the U.S., with a 54% rise in customer attention between 2022 and 2023, and it's of particular interest to consumers in Georgia, California, Colorado, and Pennsylvania. Also in 2023, Cava added 72 new restaurants to the chain, pushing it past the 330-outlet mark. In 2024, Cava plans to open around 50 spots, the latest strike in a plan that will eventually expand the company to 750 restaurants, because that's how many locations a brand new production facility in Virginia will be able to service.

Opening in 2003, the first Slim Chickens operated out of a failed sushi joint in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Owner Greg Smart grew the chicken-centric fast food restaurant — which sells poultry in the form of tenders, wings, sandwiches, and as the basis of bowls and alongside waffles — very slowly, expanding to a second location in 2005 and allowing in franchisees much later, in 2014. 

By the summer of 2019, when a chicken sandwich war between Chick-fil-A and Popeyes rocked the fast food world and demonstrated a massive demand for the burger alternative, Slim Chickens comprised 84 restaurants, mostly in the South and Midwest. Over the next few years it grew bigger each year, opening five, 28, and then 31 restaurants. 

Slim Chickens enjoyed its most expansive year ever in 2023, opening up 53 new outlets in 10 new markets, including a stand at the big and busy Istanbul Airport in Türkiye. Emboldened by all that upward momentum, Slim Chickens is primed to open many more restaurants. The 250-unit chain will open at least 70 shops in 2024, which represents a fraction of the 400 deals that it's signed with developers and franchisees. After recently moving into new markets like Nevada and Wisconsin, Slim Chickens will focus on building drive-through-only restaurants and setting up shop inside of other businesses and locations, such as college campuses, sports venues, and train depots.

Chipotle helped create and popularize the fast-casual format, which offers sit-down restaurant quality (and in-house seating) at a price and formality level just slightly elevated from that of the usual fast food. One of the fastest-growing restaurant chains of the 2000s, the 1,000th Chipotle Mexican Grill started selling burritos, tacos, and burrito bowls in 2010; Chipotle no. 3,000 came along just 12 years later. At the time, the company revised its previously stated goal of eventually operating 6,000 restaurants in North America, in favor of going for 7,000.

As of 2024, Chipotle is on its way to hitting that number, with 3,465 locations in the United States. In 2023, for example, the company added 271 restaurants to the chain, and most of those were outfitted with a drive-through, takeout feature called the "Chipotlane." As 2024 unfolds, Chipotle expects to continue apace, opening somewhere between 285 and 315 new stores. Most of those restaurants will come to the U.S., although the year will see Chipotle open its first locations in Asia, with store openings planned for Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.

A great many fast food chains serve hamburgers and milkshakes — Freddy's differentiates itself from all of the others with its menu of made-to-order "steakburgers" and frozen custard, a richer, thicker, eggier, slow-churned ice cream variant. Positioning itself as an old-fashioned kind of eatery, Freddy's Frozen Custard and Steakburgers has only been around since 2002, but in recent years it's experienced some rapid growth. In 2023, the mostly Midwestern and Southern U.S. chain opened 62 new restaurants, the most it ever launched in a single year, and which allowed it to sail past the 500-outlet benchmark.

The Freddy's plan for 2024 and beyond is even more ambitious and expansive. The company signed in excess of 550 contracts with developers looking to open new stores. And of those outstanding deals, 140 new Freddy's spots have entered  at least an early stage of construction. By the end of 2024, Freddy's estimates that 65 of those brand-new restaurants will be open for business.

Starbucks has been very successful in bringing its Americanized version of European cafés to the rest of the world. In 2024, the espresso, coffee, and pastry chain was named the second-largest restaurant company on the planet. Its network now comprises 38,587 stores, what with 3,000 or so new openings in 2024, allowing Starbucks to pass Subway and trail only McDonald's in terms of most units globally.

That's a lot of Starbucks coffee shops, and the company won't be slowing down its expansion anytime soon. In late 2023, in a nod to its familiar drink ordering style, Starbucks publicly revealed its years-long growth plan, "Triple Shot Reinvention with Two Pumps." The coffee purveyor wants to build more than 16,000 new cafés by the end of the decade, reaching the 55,000-store milestone in time for 2030. By the time Starbucks' Pumpkin Spice Latte makes its fall 2024 comeback, the company should be close to completing one of the first phases of the expansion program. It aims to remodel 1,000 existing stores with ceiling tiles that better absorb the loud sounds of coffee shops along with opening 650 new shops.

The expansion of Jersey Mike's into a formidable national sub sandwich chain that can compete with Subway has been long in the works. Company founder Peter Cancro bought a small New Jersey sandwich shop in 1975, but it didn't really start growing until franchising started in 1987. As of 2014, 730 sandwich shops were open to the public with another 1,400 on the way. A full decade later, Jersey Mike's is a huge chain of more than 2,917 locations, operating in all 50 U.S. states.

And while Jersey Mikes has some menu items you should think twice about ordering, it's still looking to open as many new stores as possible over the next few years. With eyes pointing forward to one day being a 5,000-unit company, Jersey Mike's is set to launch 350 new shops in 2024, and then at least 400 more in each of the next two years. The chain will focus predominantly on domestic expansion, but it will venture outside of the U.S. in a significant way for the first time, having reached an agreement with a Canadian restaurant operator to open 300 locations by 2034, including five in Ontario scheduled to open this year.

As a fast food company with a disparate menu that includes burgers, tacos, and teriyaki bowls, and which used to have its own boy band, Jack in the Box isn't shy about moving into new, uncharted territory. Its recent expansion tactics have been tentative, opening a modest 20 new units in fiscal 2023. Those new stores are part of a slew of 389 new agreements Jack in the Box has put into place since early 2021, with 123 restaurants set to open in the immediate future, with the rest all popping up sometime between the next two and seven years.

Jack in the Box will expand even where it's already dominant, including California, where the company has about 900 restaurants, as well as into untested markets. The first Jack in the Box restaurants will open for business in Montana, Wyoming, Florida, and Arkansas. In a big international move, there are contracts in place for 22 new Jack in the Box restaurants across the northern region of Mexico, the company's first attempt to operate in that country since the 1990s. Moving forward, Jack in the Box will increasingly utilize a new building design as the company moves into a red and purple branding design, along with drive-through only stores optimized for both customers and delivery app drivers.

The reason so many more Del Taco restaurants are opening in 2024 and beyond, encroaching into the Mexican-inspired fast food realm synonymous with Taco Bell, is because its new corporate parent took an interest. Fellow California-prominent chain Jack in the Box bought the whole of Del Taco for $575 million in 2022 when the company consisted of around 600 outlets in 16 states. That number is set to grow in the coming months and years.

In 2023, Jack in the Box signed contracts with 138 franchisees looking to open a Del Taco restaurant. The taco-forward chain's expansion is targeted to expand quickly across the southeastern United States, including new spots in Texas, where there were previously no Del Tacos, and Florida. At the end of 2023, there were seven restaurants in that state; soon, 52 stores are set to open in Florida. The first Del Taco popped up in Virginia in 2024, with Montana and Wyoming set to receive their first outlets. Meanwhile, the company is experimenting with installing Del Tacos inside of truck stops and convenience stores. Twelve are already operational, with at least four more on the way.