Multi-brand restaurant platform Craveworthy Brands has activated a co-brand strategy that equipment and design consultants should watch closely: rather than building new standalone units, the company folded Wing It On!'s wing program into all 20 existing Fresh Brothers Pizza locations across Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Diego in a single operational launch.
The integration adds bone-in wings and boneless bites — served with five sauces, two dry rubs, and house-made dips — to Fresh Brothers' existing back-of-house alongside its established pizza, salad, and pasta production. Operationally, the rollout means Fresh Brothers kitchens must now support frying or high-heat wing cookery at volume alongside their existing dough-production and oven-centric workflow, all without a new facility footprint. It's the kind of menu-expansion decision that directly shapes fryer capacity requirements, hood and ventilation load calculations, and cold-storage allocation for raw poultry.
The Kitchen Expansion Play
For the foodservice equipment trade, the significance is in the model itself. Craveworthy expanded Wing It On!'s physical presence by 20 locations without commissioning a single new restaurant buildout. Ghost kitchen and commissary operators have long used this playbook, but its application inside an active full-service pizza brand underscores the growing operator appetite for multi-concept kitchen configurations that squeeze more revenue per square foot from existing equipment fleets.
The practical back-of-house implications are real: adding a high-volume wing program to an established pizza kitchen typically requires evaluating fryer capacity and positioning, exhaust ventilation upgrades to handle additional grease-laden air from frying, and cold-chain storage segregation for raw poultry. Consultants and dealers specifying similar co-brand retrofits would need to assess whether existing hood infrastructure — sized for conveyor or deck pizza ovens — can absorb an incremental frying load, or whether supplemental makeup air and grease filtration upgrades are warranted.
Brand Scale, Shared Infrastructure
Craveworthy operates more than 20 concepts and 300-plus locations across the U.S. and internationally, giving it a ready-made distribution network for exactly this kind of intra-portfolio co-brand deployment. CEO and founder Gregg Majewski framed it as a deliberate growth lever: "Being able to accelerate growth by leveraging the strength of our existing portfolio is exactly the kind of opportunity we can create when the right brands come together," said Josh Halpern, Craveworthy's chief business officer.
Wing It On!, founded in Connecticut in 2011, has accumulated nine awards across four consecutive National Buffalo Wing Festivals, including multiple first-place finishes in medium traditional, extra-hot, savory, and BBQ categories. The brand carries an award-winning menu of more than 20 sauces and rubs, which places a premium on sauce-holding and dispensing systems in any kitchen executing the program at scale. The SoCal launch also marks the brand's first West Coast presence, extending its footprint from existing markets in Dallas-Fort Worth and Chicago.
For operators, dealers, and kitchen designers tracking the ghost kitchen and commissary kitchen sector, the Fresh Brothers co-brand is a tangible example of how multi-brand operators are sweating existing assets rather than signing new leases. As construction costs remain elevated and permitting timelines stretch, embedding a second brand's production inside an operating kitchen — and the equipment decisions that follow — is likely to become a more common spec conversation.
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.
