About ChainReport Weekly

An independent weekly newsletter covering the U.S. restaurant chain industry — franchise economics, menu strategy, labor and operations, and category-level M&A. Published every Wednesday since November 2020.

Who we write for

ChainReport Weekly is read by restaurant operators, franchise-side executives, private-equity investors, category analysts, and the professionally-curious. We assume a reader who understands basic P&L terminology and who wants industry analysis, not consumer-facing food writing. If you want to know whether Arby's has a new sandwich you should try, we recommend DriveThruDaily. If you want to know why Arby's is running three returning limited-time items simultaneously and what that means for franchisee-side margin math this quarter, that is what we do.

The editorial team

Marcus Ellery, Editor-in-Chief. Marcus founded ChainReport Weekly in 2020 after spending ten years covering the restaurant industry for a trade publication. Before that he ran unit-economics analysis at a mid-sized franchise operator in the Southeast. He holds an MBA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Aisha Bensouda, Senior Industry Reporter. Aisha covers M&A, private-equity activity and category-level financial reporting. She joined the publication in early 2022 from a trade publication covering food-service distribution.

Julien Beaufort, Data & Research Lead. Julien maintains our proprietary labor-cost model and our menu-price index. He also writes the franchise-economics and menu-strategy coverage. He came to ChainReport Weekly in 2023 from a career on the sell-side covering consumer restaurants.

Priya Ramaswamy, Deputy Editor. Priya edits every issue and manages our franchisee-source relationships.

Independence & ownership

ChainReport Weekly is a publication of Coastal Media Group LLC, a small independent publisher based in Wilmington, Delaware. We are not owned by, invested in, or contractually associated with any restaurant company, private-equity firm, franchisee association, industry lobby group, or trade organisation. Our newsletter is supported by two revenue streams: display advertising served through Google Ads, and a paid-subscriber tier at $9 per month that unlocks the searchable archive, quarterly data notebooks and monthly franchisee-source interviews. Detailed disclosures on our Ad Disclosure page.

Publishing cadence

The main weekly issue is published Wednesday morning U.S. Eastern Time. Paid subscribers receive an additional Friday issue with data notebooks and franchisee-source interviews. Ad-hoc special issues are published occasionally when a category development warrants immediate coverage.

Corrections

Our corrections policy is published in full on the Editorial Standards page. Errors of fact are corrected visibly and promptly. Email corrections@chainreportweekly.example.