Arby’s and Buffalo Wild Wings merge
By Canadian Packaging staff
General Arby’s Restaurant Group Buffalo Wild Wings Inc. Inspire Brands Inc. R Taco Roark Capital GroupNew business to be called Inspire Brands.
Arby’s Restaurant Group has completed a $2.9 billion acquisition of Buffalo Wild Wings Inc., renaming the combined entity as Inspire Brands Inc.
Inspire Brands is owned by Atlanta-based Roark Capital Group, and has over 1,700 restaurants and franchises, as well as a combines 2,900 restaurants of Arby’s and Buffalo Wild Wings, and 26 R Taco restaurants. The R Taco restaurants—formerly known as Rusty Taco—were acquired by Buffalo Wild Wings in 2014.
In 2017, Arby’s, Buffalo Wild Wings and R Taco had sales in excess of US $7.6 billion.
“We believe the time is right to create a different kind of restaurant company—one with a broad portfolio of distinct brands across a full spectrum of restaurant occasions,” says Inspire co-founder and Arby’s chief executive officer Paul Brown. Neal Aronson of Roark Capital Group is the other co-founder of Inspire.
Adds Brown: “Our goal is to build an organization that leverages the benefits of scale, not only to save cost, but also to enable outsized investments in long-term growth initiatives.”
Inspire looks to “build a family of powerful, distinct restaurant brands that each have high-growth potential, both domestically and internationally.”
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