64 | Business World Magazine |
February 2014
of a food-service brokerage company in
Philadelphia until late 2012, when he and
his partner sold the business. Arooga’s
was his company’s largest food-service
customer and he was a frequent visitor to
the restaurants.
He loved the Arooga’s concept and
business model and convinced Huether
that the time was right to launch the fran-
chise initiative.
After all appropriate franchise docu-
ments were updated, Arooga’s partici-
pated in the International Franchise show
at the Javits Center in Manhattan last
summer, and, in Huether’s words, “really
started the process of going down the fran-
chise route.” Arooga’s has subsequently
been very diligent in selecting partners as
legacy franchisees, and will announce the
first signed agreements this spring.
“We still want to continue to open cor-
porate stores as well. We think it’s impor-
tant to have our skin in the game,” he says.
“But we also have systems that we’ve de-
veloped and that we follow in our stores,
and we thought, ‘We can reproduce this
and it will work in other markets.’
“It’s a way to grow the business by uti-
