Sweet Frog

Sweet Frog Enterprises, LLC.

Type	Private
Industry	Chain restaurant/Franchise
Founded	Richmond, Virginia (2009 (2009))
Founder	Derek Cha and Annah Kim
Headquarters	Richmond, Virginia, United States of America
Number of locations	350+ stores (2/2016)
Area served	regional - East Coast, South, Mideast, Midwest, West Coast
Key people	CEO J. Patrick Galleher, CMO Matt Smith, CFO Brian Partlow
Products	Frozen yogurt and Sweet Frog merchandise
Website	www.sweetfrog.com

Scoop & Cookie promoting Sweet Frog's first Chicago area restaurant in Frankfort, IL.

Sweet Frog (stylised as sweetFrog - Premium Frozen Yogurt) is a chain of frozen yogurt retail stores owned and operated by Sweet Frog Enterprises, LLC. Sweet Frog customers create their own soft-serve frozen yogurt with numerous flavors and toppings from which to choose. Derek Cha, who immigrated to the United States from South Korea at the age of 12, is the founder of Sweet Frog. He started the first Sweet Frog store in Richmond, Virginia in 2009,^[1] at a time when the United States economy was in recession, and frozen yogurt was most popular on the west coast of the United States. Much like Chick-fil-A, and In-N-Out Burger, Cha founded Sweet Frog on Christian principles.^[2] The "FROG" part of the name, according to Cha, is actually an acronym for "Fully Rely on God".^[3][4]

The Sweet Frog stores' interiors are distinctively painted pink and green, and the typical store consists of seven or eight frozen yogurt machines, toppings bars and Sweet Frog merchandise, much of which is centered on Sweet Frog's mascots "Scoop" and "Cookie".^[5]

Growth

Derek Cha started Sweet Frog with only one store in 2009, and in four years Sweet Frog has grown to over 215 stores in 25 states in the U.S., with more stores located internationally in the Dominican Republic, the United Kingdom and Egypt.^[6] In its first 3 years of operations, over 60 Sweet Frog stores were opened.^[7] By the Spring of 2012, it was reported that Sweet Frog had 100 stores.^[8] Cha's goal was to have 200 Sweet Frog stores by the end of 2012.^[9] An 24 April 2013, article in RichmondBizSense reported that Sweet Frog had 240 stores at the time of that writing, which would include corporate-owned, licensed and franchised locations. It added that Sweet Frog had grown from 130 stores only seven months earlier in October 2012.^[10] Cha has much greater ambitions – by 2020, he hopes to have 1,000 Sweet Frog stores in the United States and an additional 1,000 stores in international locations, and he has aims for Sweet Frog to be more than a frozen yogurt store.^[11]

On April 17, 2012, Boxwood Capital Partners, LLC announced that it had made a growth capital investment in sweetFrog Enterprises, LLC.^[12] Boxwood's minority investment is being used to help fund Sweet Frog's expansion plans across the country and internationally.^[13] Subsequent to the investment, James Patrick Galleher, the Managing Director at Boxwood Capital Partners became the Board Director of Sweet Frog Enterprises, LLC.^[14]

In 2014, sweetFrog was listed #22 on the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing private companies in 2014 with revenues of $34.4 million.^[15]

On February 2, 2015, it was announced that Boxwood Capital Partners, LLC had acquired sweetFrog Enterprises, LLC.^[16]

According to sweetFrog corporate office representatives, the table below shows the Year (column 1), how many stores Sweet Frog opened during that year (column 2) and the total number of stores that Sweet Frog had open and was operating by the end of that calendar year (column 3):

♦ denotes as of Oct 27, 2015

Sponsorships

On April 18, 2016, it was announced by BK Racing that sweetFrog - Premium Frozen Yogurt would be sponsoring David Ragan and the No. 23 sweetFrog Toyota Camry for the Toyota Owners 400 at Richmond International Raceway.^[17]

See also

• List of frozen yogurt companies

References

External links

• sweetFrog