Operations
Biscuit Belly acquires 35 Maple Street Biscuit Company locations to triple footprint
Co-founder Lauren Coulter opens up about the "once-in-a-lifetime" deal — from how it will reshape the brand's growth strategy to the plan for winning over Maple Street's teams and guests.
July 22, 2026 by Cherryh Cansler — Publisher, FastCasual.com
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ClaudeBiscuit Belly built its name the slow way — one lease, one buildout, one biscuit sandwich at a time.
When the Louisville-based gourmet biscuit brand announced this week that it was acquiring 35 locations from Maple Street Biscuit Company, a subsidiary of Cracker Barrel, it marked the biggest departure from that playbook in the company's seven-year history. Financial details were not disclosed.
The deal will more than triple Biscuit Belly's footprint, pushing the brand past 60 units by the end of 2028, and accelerating its expansion across the Southeast far faster than new construction alone ever could.
For co-founder and Chief Biscuit Eater Lauren Coulter, the move wasn't a change in direction so much as a shortcut to a destination the brand had already set its sights on.
"The vision was always to become the biggest gourmet biscuit sandwich brand in the country," Coulter told FastCasual. "This acquisition just closed a big gap in the distance between here and there in one large move, instead of lots of small ones."
A rare kind of opportunity
Biscuit Belly has grown to 15 locations across the Southeast since its 2019 debut, largely by building restaurants from the ground up. Coulter said organic growth remains the company's default strategy — but Maple Street presented something the brand couldn't replicate through years of individual lease negotiations.
"Maple Street has 15-plus years of brand equity, loyal guests, and real estate in markets we'd have spent years trying to earn our way into, one lease at a time," she said.
Real estate and staffing, Coulter said, are two of the toughest hurdles any growing restaurant brand faces — and Maple Street arrived with both already solved. Because the two concepts share nearly identical restaurant layouts, converting a Maple Street location to a Biscuit Belly won't require a ground-up rebuild.
"It's really just an interior refresh, new signage and some new equipment," Coulter said. "We'll be able to open a location for a fraction of the time and cost it would normally take."
Coulter's husband, co-founder and CEO Chad Coulter, echoed that logic in the company's announcement, calling the acquisition of "one of the original gourmet biscuit sandwich concepts" a way to sidestep the two biggest headwinds facing growing brands: the time it takes to find and build new locations, and the difficulty of finding strong teams to run them.
Converting without losing momentum
Biscuit Belly plans to convert the 35 restaurants over the next 18 to 24 months, beginning with locations in the greater Cincinnati area and Richmond, Virginia, before rolling through markets in Tennessee, Florida, Georgia, Texas, Alabama and South Carolina by the end of 2028.
Pulling that off without stumbling, Lauren Coulter said, means pacing the work deliberately. No director of operations will oversee more than two back-to-back conversions, and a dedicated support team will stay embedded at each newly converted location to help general managers and DOs through the early days.
"We have learned from other brands that 'speed kills,'" she said. Still, she doesn't expect the rollout to go exactly as mapped out. "You know what they say about the best-laid plans. I'm sure we'll learn some new lessons as we start this process."
The harder challenge, she said, isn't logistical — it's cultural. "The real challenge is holding two brands' worth of training, systems and culture in your head at once and still showing up steady for both."
Winning over Maple Street's teams and guests
Before any signage changes, Biscuit Belly's leadership is focused on earning trust. The Coulters are visiting each Maple Street location over a two-week roadshow to meet teams in person, a deliberate choice after the founders spoke with other operators about what has — and hasn't — worked in past acquisitions.
"We aren't coming into their stores 'guns a-blazing' demanding change on day one," Coulter said. "That is an immediate way to lose trust."
The rollout includes a dedicated support line for Maple Street team members, accessible via QR code, where employees can submit questions anonymously that they might feel uncomfortable asking in person. The founders also recorded welcome and announcement videos so employees would hear the news directly from them rather than secondhand.
According to the companies' joint announcement, the transition is designed to preserve the community connections that have made the Maple Street locations local favorites, even as Biscuit Belly layers in its own menu, interiors and guest experience.
"What I hope everyone feels is that nothing that mattered is gone," Coulter said. "Same warm biscuit, same 'we're glad you're here,' just under a new banner."
Growing against the grain
The timing raises an obvious question: Why go on offense now, when many restaurant brands are pulling back on growth amid soft traffic and economic uncertainty?
Coulter admits she's typically risk-averse, and the current environment hasn't escaped her notice. But she said an opportunity this rare doesn't come around twice.
"I think the brands sitting on the sidelines right now are the ones that'll be scrambling for real estate and market share when things loosen back up," she said. "When an opportunity this rare shows up, 'the economy's uncertain' isn't a reason to say no. It's a reason to be the ones who show up prepared while everyone else waits it out."
She pointed to Warren Buffett's famous line — "Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful" — as the mindset behind the deal.
Staying independent
The acquisition was funded by a small group of investors, several of them former C-suite executives at publicly traded restaurant companies. Coulter emphasized, however, that she and Chad remain the largest investors in the latest funding round and retain majority ownership, a distinction she said matters.
"We aren't backed by PE and will still control our own destiny," she said, adding that the brand fielded plenty of interest from private equity firms over the years but never fit their model. "I guess we showed them not to doubt the Coulters."
What's Next
Biscuit Belly's conversion schedule, subject to change, runs through the end of 2028, moving market by market from Kentucky and Ohio this fall through Virginia, Tennessee, Florida, Georgia, Texas, Alabama and South Carolina over the following two years.
Additional details on the integration will be announced as the rollout progresses.
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