When Ray Blanchette and his Sugarloaf Hospitality team found themselves in charge of TGI Fridays at the start of 2025, the work started at ground zero.
Months prior, the casual chain had declared bankruptcy after years of store closures and financial underperformance.
“We had to set up a global infrastructure really from zero, because [the chain] exited bankruptcy,” says Blanchette, who is serving as TGI Fridays CEO for the second time. “All the infrastructure had to essentially be rebuilt to support the global program.”
But Blanchette’s knowledge of the brand didn’t begin with a blank canvas. He joined TGI Fridays in 1989 as a kitchen manager in Philadelphia. Over 18 years, he worked his way up to president before leaving to run other companies. Blanchette returned as CEO from October 2018 to May 2023. Afterward, he formed Sugarloaf and became a franchisee.
His first move was forming a management advisory committee comprised of five international franchisees and two domestic franchisees, giving operators more ownership of the new management team and global brand strategy. The leadership partnership was much needed, as the franchise system at the time was “very fragmented” and “very pissed off” about negative news surrounding TGI Fridays, according to Blanchette.
TGI Fridays is now a 100 percent franchised system—including Blanchette as a franchisee himself—after all company-owned restaurants were either sold or shuttered during the bankruptcy process. It left the brand with about 400 restaurants worldwide, including approximately 85 in the U.S. For perspective, TGI Fridays had over 650 stores globally in 2023.
“Getting everybody back on board and believing that their investment is safe and that we can win together was step one,” he says. “And then getting the right organizational design to support our global franchisees at the highest level around the world was step two. But you’re running all these parallel work streams simultaneously, so really getting the franchisees excited about the brand again, I would say, is probably the number one thing that we accomplished.”
TGI Fridays’ future plans have since been formalized into the “1-2-3 Strategic Vision,” a comeback targeting more than 1,000 locations globally and $2 billion in annual revenue by 2030. The framework focuses on brand activation, store expansion, franchisee profitability, and nurturing the employee base.
The good news, Blanchette says, is that most of the world was insulated from TGI Fridays’ bad publicity. Mature international trade areas like the Philippines, Peru, Greece, Japan, and Mexico experienced meaningful growth and significant same-store sales increases.
The U.S. and the U.K. were the two most impacted markets, but Sugarloaf has taken action.
The company purchased the entire U.K. fleet in the fourth quarter. As part of the transaction, 33 stores were saved and 16 shuttered permanently. Sugarloaf acquired the assets from a group that bought the distressed restaurants less than a year ago, but mismanaged operations and didn’t invest capital, Blanchette says.
The CEO believes that if Sugarloaf hadn’t intervened, all of the units would’ve shut down, killing a business that began 40 years ago in the country.
“We’ve already put a team in place on the ground in the U.K.—an ops team that we’ve got a lot of confidence in,” Blanchette says. “We know that we’ve got to address the value equation. Previous ownership got very aggressive with pricing and priced themselves out of the middle market where we compete. And so we’re going to address value, we’re going to address quality. We see a lot of the quality of the products are not to the TGI Fridays’ standard. And so we’re going to address the menu right out of the gate. We’re going to address the value proposition right out of the gate.”
Blanchette is concerned with revitalizing the brand in the U.S. as well. One big swing to end the year was an immersive holiday takeover campaign in which stores were fully transformed into winter wonderlands. One of Blanchette’s restaurants in Methuen, Massachusetts, served as the testing ground. Once he saw families walk in and kids’ faces light up, he said to himself, “This is going to work.”
The CEO is proud to say all franchisees participated, which was quite the feat given where TGI Fridays was at.
“So just imagine if you’re a franchisee that’s been struggling for several years, and now the CEO comes to you and says, ‘I got an idea and it’s only going to cost you between $50,000 and $10,000 per restaurant on just the decorations and the glassware. We’re going to do this whole holiday immersion,”’ Blanchette says. “I think people were like, ‘All right, he’s officially lost his mind. What the hell is he talking about?’ But as we were doing it, and as it was starting to come together, the clouds were lifting and [the franchisees] were getting more and more excited about it.”
Blanchette expects the success to inform how TGI Fridays approaches other big events. One that immediately comes to his mind—the upcoming World Cup this summer.
“We’re in 42 countries. I’ve sat in some of those countries while their country was playing to see if they qualify for the World Cup,” Blanchette says. “And I mean, it literally felt like life and death to me. They’re just so vested in the World Cup that I got to believe there’s a way for us to activate that in a fun way.”
Growth worldwide appears imminent, thanks in part to Phil Broad, who was recently promoted to president of the global TGI Fridays brand after coming onboard as president of international franchising in April 2025. Over the past five months, the chain has signed development agreements for close to 150 restaurants, and Blanchette says, “We’re seeing more come in every day.”
TGI Fridays recently opened in Uzbekistan and has deals in place for Kenya and the Balkans. Older markets are seeing growth as well. When the brand completed its original development agreement for Peru in 1997, it was for two restaurants. Now there’s 24 stores in the country, and there are plans to surpass 30 outlets. In the Philippines, where TGI Fridays has been for 30 years, there are more than 30 restaurants. Twenty-eight are in Manila, the country’s capital city, and the chain is at the beginning stages of expanding into nearby provinces.
Blanchette sees much whitespace in Southeast Asia, as TGI Fridays isn’t in Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, or Singapore. Along with large growth opportunities elsewhere in the world, the CEO feels optimistic about the company’s 1,000-unit objective.
“If the underlying business is stable, then the attrition rate is going to reduce substantially,” Blanchette says. “And if you’re going to grow 30-plus units a year, just now without any new development agreements, we can easily more than double the size of this company over the next four or five years.”
The CEO envisions growth in the U.S. too as TGI Fridays begins to “change the narrative.” Nontraditional expansion will be a major pathway, such as hotels and airports.
“We’ve got a lot of people working hard around the globe,” Blanchette says. “We’ve got a lot of developing countries that we’re going to move into this year, and I know from firsthand experience that the jobs we create in these countries change people’s lives. And so that’s the purpose behind the mission, right? I want to go create these jobs. I want to give these people an opportunity to learn and grow and develop their careers within our brand.”
