While some wonder how the chicken crosses the road, Raising Cane’s is figuring out just how chicken fingers can cross the pond. The nation’s fast-growing restaurant chain is set to open its first U.K. location next year.
Arriving in London’s West End in late 2026, Raising Cane’s flagship U.K. location will mark the privately held company’s first non-franchise international expansion and its first European foray, with an undisclosed number of U.K. locations to follow.
“Our vision is to grow restaurants all over the world and to be the brand that is known for craveable chicken-finger meals and be really, really good at it,” Raising Cane’s co-CEO and COO AJ Kumaran told Fast Company ahead of the announcement.
Beyond just chicken fingers and the restaurant’s fan-favored limited menu, Raising Cane’s is rapidly growing, with sales upward of $5.1 billion last year, marking world domination as an understandable next step.
While the company debuted franchised stores in the Middle East in 2015, the U.K. expansion marks its first fully company-operated international venture.
Coop d’état
This year, Raising Cane’s became the second-fastest growing restaurant chain in the United States, with plans to open nearly 100 new locations this year on top of last year’s record-breaking 118 new spots.
By the end of the year, the chain expects a total of 1,000 locations to be open, with Kumaran ambitiously looking for it to become a top 10 U.S. restaurant brand by the end of the decade.
In its Dallas office, the company is planning on quadrupling in size ahead of its move to a new support office in nearby Plano, Texas, next year.
“We like to beat our own milestones and do better than what we’ve done before,” Kumaran, who joined the company in 2014, says. “To grow restaurants all over the world has been our vision since day one of our existence.”
Chicken fingers come to London
While details on the store’s design are yet to be released, Cane’s flagship U.K. location will open at 21-22 Coventry St., between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square, in a mid-20th-century commercial building in the city’s storied theater district.
Like all other Cane’s locations, the restaurant’s inside decorations will feature local graphics that represent the location’s community. For instance, in U.S. stores, restaurants tend to feature local iconography, such as the team colors of the town’s high school.
For its Times Square location in New York City, the design team included homages to Elvis Presley, whose first movie premiered on-site. “We wanted to pay homage to that, and so we incorporated that into the design,” Kuraman explained. “Likewise, we are in the process of understanding what that looks like in London and specifically in these upcoming locations.”
The research process to make each store design unique begins with hiring local leaders to spearhead community authenticity, developing the restaurant’s “ethos.”
“We study every location that we go into,” Kuraman says. “We go to the utmost details about finding the history on what existed there, what the city is known for, what’s the relevance of the building that we’re walking into.”
As part of the expansion, the chicken-finger company is looking to set up a home base in London with its own local team. It’s also hiring for executive roles in the U.S. as part of its broader expansion plans.
Still, one thing is set to remain the same: the cult-favorite menu.
“We want to be chicken finger experts. It is our chicken fingers, our sauce, our freshly brewed tea that is custom-formulated for us, and a freshly squeezed lemonade that is made in our restaurants by our crew members multiple times a day. It’s in the fries and the toast and the coleslaw,” Kumaran added. “This is it. We’re not planning on changing anything.”