Spicy Pickle Franchising Inc. plans to open its first Spicy Pickle-branded café in Vancouver and expand its 12-outlet BG Urban Café chain across the Lower Mainland.
The move comes months after Spicy Pickle rebranded the Bread Garden chain of restaurants as BG Urban Café.
The Denver-based company plans to open its first Spicy Pickle in Calgary in mid-2012, with a Vancouver location being added soon after, the company’s chief development officer, Peter Wright, told Business in Vancouver October 25.
“We’re looking for real estate locations and franchise partners in Vancouver,” he said. “The first Spicy Pickle in Vancouver could be company-owned or it may be a franchise.”
Spicy Pickle has had ambitious expansion plans for what is now the BG Urban Café chain for the past few years. (See “Resilient Bread Garden chain set for ambitious expansion” – issue 1011; March 10-16.)
The company estimated in March 2009 that it would have 17 outlets by year’s end.
Even that, however, would have been fewer locations than Bread Garden had in its heyday in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Spectra Group of Great Restaurants Inc. expanded the chain to 20 locations, including a few short-lived locations in Denver.
“Denver was done as a joint venture with a party out of Texas,” former Spectra CEO Peter Bonner told BIV in 2009.
“They were to provide two things: half the capital and all of the management. It turned out that they could do neither, so we ultimately withdrew from that market.”
Spicy Pickle, which trades on the loosely regulated OTCBB stock exchange, operates dozens of restaurants in the U.S.
Glen Korstrom
@GlenKorstrom