[Craveworthy Brands has rolled Wing It On!'s bone-in wings and boneless bites into all 20 Fresh Brothers Pizza locations across Southern California, giving the Connecticut-born wing concept its first West Coast presence in a single-day launch. The move adds 20 units to Wing It On!'s system count without any new-site construction, a low-capital growth lever increasingly attractive to multi-brand operators managing a large portfolio.
The Co-Brand Mechanics
Under the arrangement, guests at every Fresh Brothers unit in Los Angeles, Orange County and San Diego can now order Wing It On!'s full wing lineup — five sauces, two dry rubs and house-made dips — alongside Fresh Brothers' existing menu of handmade pizzas, salads, pastas and its new Crustwich sandwiches. All dayparts are covered: dine-in, takeout, delivery and catering channels are active, with online ordering available at launch. Because both brands sit inside Craveworthy's 300-plus-unit, 20-concept platform, the operational integration bypasses the licensing friction typical of third-party co-brand deals.
Gregg Majewski, CEO and founder of Craveworthy Brands, called the pairing a portfolio-leveraging play rather than a simple menu add. "Fresh Brothers gives us a strong platform to introduce Wing It On! to an entirely new market," said Josh Halpern, chief business officer at Craveworthy, noting that the model accelerates brand growth by deploying proven concepts into existing footprints rather than through area development agreements or greenfield builds.
Wing Competition Pedigree
Wing It On! enters Southern California with measurable competitive credentials. The brand has collected nine awards across four consecutive National Buffalo Wing Festivals — including first-place finishes in the Medium Traditional category in 2022, 2023 and 2025 — and returns to the Buffalo, N.Y., competition Aug. 29–30 to defend that standing. Matt Ensero, co-founder of Wing It On!, emphasized that the brand's festival track record is central to its positioning in a crowded wing segment where chains such as Wingstop and Buffalo Wild Wings command significant market share. "We compete against the best wings in the country and win," Ensero said.
The timing of the SoCal launch — days before the festival and on the leading edge of football season — is deliberate. Wings and pizza are among the highest-indexed items for group occasions, watch parties and game-day off-premise orders, making the combined SKU set a natural fit for catering and delivery volume that Fresh Brothers already captures.
Multi-Brand Platform Play
For Craveworthy, the co-brand model signals a replicable growth template across its wider portfolio. Rather than pursuing standalone franchise development for every concept, the company can route emerging or established brands through sister units where customer overlap and kitchen capacity allow. Fresh Brothers, founded in Los Angeles in 2008, has spent nearly two decades building a loyal Southern California following around fresh-made dough and clean-label ingredients — the kind of existing brand equity that reduces the marketing cost of introducing a secondary concept to a new region.
The broader foodservice context favors this approach. Co-branding and virtual brand layering have gained traction as operators seek to maximize revenue per square foot without proportional increases in occupancy or labor costs. Craveworthy's intra-portfolio version of that strategy sidesteps the royalty and supply-chain complexities that arise when unrelated brands attempt the same. Whether the model can produce meaningful comp-sales lift at Fresh Brothers units — or simply widen Wing It On!'s brand awareness ahead of standalone franchise development on the West Coast — will be the metric worth watching as football season progresses.
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.
