A five-year-old restaurant chain with an emphasis on everything small is taking on an ambitious expansion plan that will see the opening of around 300 locations this year.
Founded in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the company Small Sliders offers an abbreviated menu of small cheeseburgers, fries, and milkshakes, all prepared within a 750-square-foot modular building.
The company calls its buildings “cans” because they are pre-manufactured climate-controlled facilities with exterior bright, orange-colored aluminum walls.
The builders also feature both a streamlined drive-thru as well as a walk-up window.
The structures are typically built on less than 1-acre sites, a business model that has allowed Small Sliders to find available locations more readily for development.
Small Sliders currently has locations in both Louisiana and Mississippi, and according to a company press release has a “robust pipeline growth set across 13 states in the Southeast and the Midwest.”
A company website notes that planning for franchise locations is underway in Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona. The recent announcement of seven new locations in metropolitan Houston prompted the publication Hello Woodlands to praise its “niche model and cult following.”
The Nation’s Restaurant News last year named Small Sliders as one of the publication’s “Breakout Brands of 2023,” and subsequently noted that the company is “very much trying to appeal to younger customers, Gen Z specifically, as it expands.”
In a statement, Maria Rivera, Small Sliders chief executive officer, attributed the company’s pace of expansion to a strong franchise network and desire to “disrupt the status quo.”
By Garry Boulard