Big Chicken has opened its fourth university location at Jackson State University in Mississippi, operating inside the campus Legacy Food Court through a dining services partnership with SodexoMAGIC. The unit marks the first Big Chicken placement at a historically Black college or university and adds to a system that now counts more than 40 open locations across traditional restaurants, campuses, arenas, airports, and cruise ships.
The Campus Play
The Jackson State deployment fits a broader nontraditional venue strategy being pursued by Craveworthy Brands, the multi-brand franchisor and platform operator that counts more than 20 concepts and over 300 locations domestically and internationally. Earlier in September, Big Chicken opened at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta as part of a multi-concept Crave Kitchen build-out inside the John Lewis Student Center, where six additional Craveworthy concepts operate alongside it. The back-to-back campus activations signal an accelerating push into captive-audience, nontraditional venues — a channel that typically insulates operators from street-level traffic volatility and can deliver favorable unit economics relative to freestanding builds.
Jackson State's enrollment of more than 6,000 students, Division I athletics calendar, and all-day campus traffic align with the daypart coverage Big Chicken is programming at the location. The unit runs Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., spanning breakfast, lunch, and a late-afternoon snack window — a range that campus operators often cite as essential for driving check frequency beyond a single peak meal period.
Menu & Operator Context
The Jackson State menu covers breakfast (chicken and biscuit, egg-and-cheese biscuit builds, hash browns), a full signature sandwich lineup including the Shaq Attack and Uncle Jerome's Nashville Hot, crispy tenders and tender plates, sides such as mac and cheese and cheese curds, and hand-spun shakes. The breadth positions the unit to compete across multiple dayparts rather than relying solely on a lunch-dinner sandwich window, which is particularly relevant on campuses where meal-plan redemption patterns spread demand throughout the day.
SodexoMAGIC, the certified Minority Business Enterprise joint venture between Sodexo and Magic Johnson Enterprises, serves as the campus dining operator. Murat Bora, Regional Vice President of SodexoMAGIC, called the opening a reflection of the company's commitment to delivering nationally recognized brand concepts to its university clients. Jackson State President Denise Jones Gregory, Ph.D. framed the partnership as part of a broader effort to modernize campus dining, noting the institution's position as the first HBCU to carry the concept. Craveworthy CEO Gregg Majewski cited the campus's athletic culture and community identity as drivers of brand fit.
Growth Trajectory
For Craveworthy, the campus channel represents one of several nontraditional formats running in parallel with traditional franchise development. The Big Chicken system has dozens of additional locations in development across North America and international markets, extending a footprint that already spans licensed and franchised venues of notably different formats — a build-out approach that keeps the brand visible across high-traffic, non-street occasions while traditional unit growth continues. Operators and area development agreement holders watching the fast-casual chicken segment will note that campus and nontraditional venue expansion has become a consistent growth lever for mid-scale chicken concepts navigating a competitive landscape that includes both national QSR incumbents and emerging regional players.
The college and university foodservice channel has drawn sustained interest from branded concepts seeking predictable captive audiences, lower marketing costs relative to street-level units, and the brand-building benefit of reaching 18-to-24-year-old consumers during high-frequency dining occasions. For multi-brand platforms like Craveworthy, placing several concepts inside a single student union also distributes fixed infrastructure costs across multiple revenue streams — an efficiency that supports the economics of licensing or operator agreements in campus environments.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
