Fast-casual sandwich brand Pickleman's Gourmet Café has named Jim Morey — a multi-decade operator whose resume spans Wawa, Outback Steakhouse, and McDonald's — to its executive advisory board, signaling a deliberate push to scale beyond its current 30-plus-unit Midwestern footprint.
Morey brings an unusually broad toolkit to the role. At Wawa, Inc. he cycled through EVP & Chief Marketing/Brand Officer, Chief Operating Officer, and Chief Financial Officer over more than a decade, touching marketing, IT, real estate, supply chain, and enterprise strategy. He previously held the VP–Finance seat at Outback Steakhouse under Bloomin' Brands and served as Senior Financial Director at McDonald's Corporation. His academic credentials include an MBA in Marketing & Strategy from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.
Unit Economics First
Morey's stated priority is store-level returns — the metric that separates scalable franchise systems from stalled ones. "If the individual store works and provides strong returns for the operator, everything else flows from that," he said. He pegged Pickleman's better-for-you positioning and operational consistency as the twin levers that make the unit economics viable, and set an ambitious public target: 10, 20, 30-plus new locations per year over the next several years. For a sub-40-unit regional brand, that trajectory would represent a material step-change in annual unit growth and franchisee recruitment velocity.
Founder and CEO Doug Stritzel framed the hire as a deliberate injection of multi-unit operating discipline. "Jim's done the job at scale — finance, ops, and brand — and he's laser-focused on store-level returns," Stritzel said. "This is exactly the kind of operator-first mindset we want guiding our next stage."
Franchise Development Context
Pickleman's, founded in 2005 in Columbia, Missouri, operates across Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Indiana, Nebraska, and Texas with a menu built around fresh sandwiches, soups, salads, and pizzas. The concept competes in a crowded better-for-you fast-casual sandwich segment alongside larger incumbents, where area development agreements and franchisee support infrastructure increasingly determine which brands attract multi-unit operators. Morey's advisory role appears aimed squarely at professionalizing that infrastructure before the brand attempts a significant unit-count acceleration.
For prospective franchisees, Morey pointed to an existing operational playbook as a key differentiator. He described a "nuts-and-bolts" system already validated by current operators — the kind of turnkey infrastructure that lowers the barrier for hands-on franchisees entering the system. That framing aligns with broader franchise development trends in the fast-casual segment where brands increasingly compete on franchisee ROI and support depth rather than brand recognition alone.
The appointment of a board-level operator with Morey's cross-functional background — spanning QSR, casual dining, and convenience — is a credibility signal the brand can use in area development agreement conversations with prospective multi-unit franchisees. Whether Pickleman's can convert that advisory horsepower into signed development deals and opened units will determine whether the 30-plus-units-per-year ambition materializes. Investors and franchise recruiters tracking Midwest fast-casual expansion will be watching unit counts closely over the next 12 to 18 months.
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.
