Honeygrow’s store closures helped fuel its fast-casual expansion rebound

Closing stores cost Honeygrow jobs and shifts in the short term, but it also gave the Philadelphia fast-casual chain room to reset before its next growth push. After shutting five locations in 2018, including three in Chicago, one in Washington, D.C., and its Minigrow site in New York, Honeygrow was left with 28 restaurants across Pennsylvania, Maryland, Boston, Delaware, New Jersey and Virginia.

That kind of retrenchment is rarely celebrated in restaurants, where expansion is often treated as the only sign of health. Honeygrow’s history shows the opposite can be true. The company first opened in 2012 and had seven locations by early 2016, including sites in Hoboken, New Jersey, and Wilmington, Delaware. That January, it also temporarily closed its original Center City Philadelphia store for five to six weeks for upgrades and technology improvements, a sign that the brand was willing to interrupt business to fix the basics.

The payoff came later. Restaurant Business reported in late 2023 that Honeygrow was a 40-unit chain and had been gearing up to more than double in size within five years. By 2025, WTOP reported that the company had more than 40 locations systemwide, including 17 in Maryland and Northern Virginia, with a seventh D.C.-area location in Bowie, Maryland. Honeygrow has said it now has more than 40 locations nationwide.

For line cooks, servers, shift leaders and managers, the lesson is simple: a store that cannot support enough labor, training, equipment or scheduling becomes a strain on the people working inside it long before it shows up on a balance sheet. A reset can mean fewer chaotic shifts, clearer roles and less turnover on the floor. In a business built on thin margins and high turnover, that matters as much as unit count.

Honeygrow is moving faster again now. A 2026 report said the chain planned to open 18 new locations this year, targeting New Jersey, Middletown, Delaware, Ohio and Boston, while also negotiating in Detroit. Justin Rosenberg, Honeygrow’s founder and chief executive, has said the company has been self-funding growth with little debt since 2020, and that it aims to keep growing unit count by about 30% a year on the way to roughly 3,000 locations nationally.

Honeygrow’s smaller-footprint Minigrow concept, built for dense urban markets like New York City, also shows how restaurant operators test formats before deciding what can scale. The larger point for the industry is that growth built on cleanup is often sturdier than growth built on momentum alone.