Kauai
Kauai has always been about making tasty and healthy food accessible to everyone. Our passion is to help our wellness focused customers with an offering of healthy tasty options whether it be a passionate vegan, to guy or girl who just wants something on the go that is not full of sugar or saturated fat, and tastes great. The accessibility of our products is key and that is why you will find us in Virgin Actives, petrol stations, schools, malls, airports and in selected Checkers around the country. The 2022 merger with Virgin Active, now makes Kauai part of a rounded wellness offering, where Kauai is now part of a group that offers fitness, nutrition, and mental well being products and services.
To be awarded a franchise in one of the fastest growing sectors (wellness) with the sectors’ health food restaurant market leader, applicants will need to be a hands on franchisees with sufficient capital and a passion for customer service, healthy living, and with the ability to work long hours and manage restaurant team(s). Our successful franchisees are those who enjoy following a detailed operations system that is tried and tested, and who never over look the details that make the difference.
Started by three Californian college friends in 1996 who came to Cape Town and noticed a lack of healthy food and then proceeded to open the first Kauai. Today Kauai operates under the Virgin Active Group, with the mission to make healthy eating easy and accessible, and offer customers a total wellness package within the one group. The focus is on real food, which is food that’s made with honest ingredients and free from unnecessary additives. In the background there is a strict and well formatted business model that ensures the premium products and ingredients are well controlled to ensure profitability. To this day Kauai still owns roughly 50% of all stores and shares all the business lessons learnt to their franchisees who share the identical business model.
Finding the right people will make or break any company. An enormous emphasis on personal development of the people at Kauai starts with the recruitment, training, field support, reviewing and rewarding. All together we have a management team of 10 individuals some who cross pollenate their positions within Virgin Active including our CEO, Dean Kowarski (who is also the Virgin Active global CEO).
Our management team has a vast amount of experience and expertise in running their departments with careers in Woolworths, SAB, Nando’s, Dairy Queen, and Tiger Brands. Dean is an ardent businessman who strives to live a healthy lifestyle and is passionate about health and wellness issues and good food. He has vast experience across many business disciplines. In addition to his numerous business interests, he is the founder of Nü Health Food Café, and in March 2015 he joined Kauai as CEO and main shareholder.
Our franchise executive Guy Le Ray-Cook has been with the brand since year one and came from a franchise consultancy background along with overseas experience of growing a franchise brand in new markets. His team of field support and training personnel is made up from experienced players who have either worked their way up from the stores, or come from other leading industry players and give best in industry support.
A tried and tested life style brand that brings franchisees the comfort that what they are doing is adding to their customers well being. We continually look for ways to improve the business model by squeezing cost centres without effecting the customer experience and we do this using our 150 plus company owned stores to test and challenge new ideas. The franchisee will therefore benefit not only from fellow franchisee financial and other benchmarks but also from the company owned stores as guidelines to compare to their own actual performance.
As people continually questioned their lifestyles and eating habits and whether they should improve them, we have recently seen the largest growth in new customers in our 30 year history. This should lead to any existing or new franchisee benefitting from above average industry sales growth, so the timing to buy a Kauai franchise has never been better.
Kauai franchisees have a passion for food and health and an acute ability to know where to focus to match this passion with good business sense especially around following the trained food and labour cost controls. They are passionate, hard-working individuals with a strong service orientation and commitment to be hands-on in their business. They understand and follow operational procedures, and enjoy leading and growing people. This is a tough business where people’s management skills are vital to their success, along with having a good understanding of the numbers.
Intensive training is provided with experienced and dedicated trainers. 8 Weeks of training is mandatory for all franchisees as it orientates the new franchisees on all aspects of the business. The training and support team is dedicated to setting up and supporting all franchisees for success. We have various training stores around the country conveniently placed for franchisees living in the major city hubs of SA.
Please refer to the Kauai website http://www.kauai.co.za for existing sites and areas we are currently looking to offer to franchisees. Finding the right site can take some time and the ideal size is between 70 to 90 meters squared in a highly visibly location where you will find high volumes of both breakfast and lunch time trade, preferable 7 days of the week.
Franchise Joining fees: R140 000.00 for Retail, and R90 000 for In Motion gym model and store within store models (exc VAT).
Approximate total cost of a store: Retail stores from R 2.8 million exc VAT. In Motion gym model and store within store model R1.4 million to R1.6 million exc VAT
Working capital: R 60 000 (plus lease deposit).
Minimum cash: From 50% of set up costs.
Details of on-going fees and/or royalties: Royalty fee: 6%. Marketing fee: 4% (1.5% for In Motion when in a gym).
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