Mr. Geman: Spicy Pickle started in 1999 in Denver, Colo. It was conceived as an upscale sub shop started by two chefs who were working in an Italian restaurant at the time and believed they could improve on Denver's sandwiches, which, up until Spicy Pickle opened, were typical sub shops. They came up with a variety of panini, subs and salads, and a build-your-own menu with very extensive toppings, proprietary spreads on fresh-made bread. They developed a cult following and opened two more restaurants by 2001. I became involved with them in late 2002. We discussed making a franchise company out of the concept and worked on that for about a year and a half. Our first franchises were sold in late 2003. Spicy Pickle has been a franchise company for about six years, and we now have 37 stores in 11 states; 19 of them are here in Colorado, which is our home base. We have developments in Texas, Southern California, Nevada and the Chicago area. We have single restaurants in Cincinnati, Hattiesburg and Ashburn, Va. Spicy Pickle has an infrastructure of franchise people that includes training, operations, marketing, culinary, franchise sales, legal, real estate departments and administration. We're looking to continue to expand the Spicy Pickle concept, but we feel that we have the infrastructure to support more right now. And so about a year ago, year and a half ago, we started looking at some other concepts that were in the fast casual mode. We came across and eventually purchased a concept in Vancouver, Canada, called the Bread Garden Urban Cafes, which are in the bakery-cafe category as opposed to the sandwich category. We concluded that deal on Oct. 1, 2008. We are improving the menu to bring up the quality of the offerings at the Bread Garden Urban Cafes. So both concepts are really based on delivering a healthy, fresh-made food, artisan breads made from scratch daily, meats and poultry that are non-preservatives and interesting sandwich choices for the customers, with the add-on specialty coffee part for the Bread Garden.
Tickers included in this excerpt: SPKL.OB
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