Chip City Cookies has promoted Nicolas "Nico" Gabriel Baizan de Aldecoa to president, elevating the internal hire just 11 months after he joined the 39-unit specialty bakery brand as senior director of retail operations. The move signals that the Enlightened Hospitality Investments-backed chain is betting on organic leadership development as it pursues its next phase of unit and revenue growth.
The Appointment
Baizan de Aldecoa stepped into the senior director role in August 2025 and quickly gained the confidence of CEO Fred LeFranc, who took the helm after EHI deepened its involvement with the brand. "We did not go find a leader. We grew one," LeFranc said in announcing the promotion. Baizan de Aldecoa's background spans family-owned restaurant and manufacturing enterprises, culinary leadership roles in New York and Chicago, and time working alongside renowned chef José Andrés — experience that blends multi-unit operations instincts with an understanding of food-quality standards.
Growth Mandate
Chip City was founded nine years ago in Astoria, Queens, and has expanded to 39 locations across New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Texas, and Virginia. That footprint makes it one of the larger independent specialty cookie concepts in the country, competing in a segment that has drawn sustained consumer interest in premium, freshly baked formats alongside better-capitalized rivals. The new president's stated priorities center on strengthening revenue performance and store-level profitability — the unit-economics discipline that growth-equity backers like EHI, the fund founded by Union Square Hospitality Group's Danny Meyer, typically demand before greenlighting aggressive unit growth.
Paulina Orillac, vice president at EHI and a Chip City board member, cited Baizan de Aldecoa's brand passion as a differentiator: "The team feels it, and our guests will too." That kind of operator-culture alignment carries outsized weight in labor-intensive bakery concepts, where dough handling, bake timing, and counter-service execution vary significantly by shift — and where hiring and retention pressures remain a persistent challenge across the foodservice industry.
What's Next
With a leadership structure now formalized under a president-CEO pairing, Chip City appears positioned for a more deliberate expansion push. The brand has not announced new area development agreements or a franchise program publicly, but the combination of EHI capital, a broader multi-state footprint, and a seasoned operations leader suggests the chain is building the infrastructure for accelerated unit growth beyond its current Northeast core. How quickly Baizan de Aldecoa can translate operational discipline into improved AUVs and site-level margins will be the metric that determines how fast that expansion clock ticks.
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.
