Hi and welcome to 1 Smart Business Story, where the writers and editors of Inc. will share a compelling story of an entrepreneurial venture, designed to inspire, entertain, and give you something to think about for your own entrepreneurial pursuits.  
 
Today: How has Todd Graves, the founder and co-CEO of Raising Cane’s, built the fast-food chain into a juggernaut that’s surpassed KFC in the U.S. and is gaining on Chick-fil-A and Popeye’s?  
 
In a word: Simplicity.  
 
Read on to discover:  

What’s your go-to Raising Cane’s combo meal? Let me know what you think about Graves, Inc., and anything else by emailing me at [email protected].

Graves’ recipe for creating a legion of Caniacs and passing KFC to be America’s third-largest chicken chain.

BY ROB WALKER

Raising Cane’s was already having a banner 2025 when founder Todd Graves got some surprising news: The chicken finger chain had surpassed KFC in annual U.S. sales, making it the number-three quick-serve chicken chain, behind Chick-fil-A and Popeyes. Even Graves, who is not lacking in self-confidence when it comes to his business, was momentarily given pause. “Wait, what?” he remembers thinking. Outselling Colonel Sanders? The worldwide brand we all grew up with? “We’re bigger than them in the U.S.?”

Graves couldn’t have been that surprised, though. We’re speaking in a dining room in his 5,500-square-foot guesthouse, decorated like a stylish hotel, in a tony Baton Rouge, Louisiana, neighborhood. Through a window, you can see the 53-year-old’s custom-built, $400,000 treehouse. This year, Raising Cane’s revenue is expected to exceed last year’s total of $5.1 billion (more than double what it was in 2021). It’s also adding close to 100 new locations to bring its total to nearly 1,000 in 43 states. Cane’s restaurants have an average unit volume of nearly $6.6 million, more than double the fast-food chicken restaurant average. Apply that unit volume across 1,000 locations and Cane’s could be on pace to exceed $6 billion in sales next year.

The chain’s cultural profile has soared too. Celebrity endorsers and fans— “Caniacs,” as devotees are called—now include the likes of Cardi B, Post Malone, Snoop Dogg, and Eli Manning. Jessica Alba and Kevin Hart were among those spotted in the Raising Cane’s suite at this year’s Super Bowl in New Orleans, where the Louisiana-born Graves was on the host committee. Also this year, the company announced it would open a U.K. flagship in London in 2026, the first of several locations in the country and part of a broader international push. On its most recent billionaires list, Forbes estimated that Graves’s 92 percent ownership of Raising Cane’s pushed his net worth to $22 billion.

A gracious and courteous host, Graves kept his personal presentation simple, wearing dark jeans and a plain dark T-shirt, and was matter-of-fact about his success so far—and why it’s not enough. As he tells it, a business built on underdog striving is likely to stay relentlessly tuned in to internal goals rather than outside validation. “We don’t celebrate enough,” he says. “It’s always just keep going, keep going, keep going.”

Certainly, when Graves opened the first Raising Cane’s, in 1996, as a 24-year-old graduate of the University of Georgia, few would have predicted that the modest chicken finger joint near the North Gates of Louisiana State University would prove to be a smash. To the contrary, his business proposal for a chicken finger restaurant received the worst grade in a college business class. Most banks turned him down; he borrowed from friends and family, took out a loan from the Small Business Administration, and used his own savings from stints as a boilermaker in an oil refinery in California and a salmon fisherman in Alaska to launch. (The restaurant’s name came from his yellow Lab. The current branding and ads feature his current Lab, Cane III.)

From the beginning, Graves had a simple, core idea. Fast food has always been about balancing choice and convenience, and by the 1990s, many players in the category were expanding their offerings, partly as a way of addressing the “veto vote”—the one member of the family who doesn’t want a burger (or whatever) tonight. The pervasiveness of this trend was one reason the professor gave Graves such poor marks: A successful fast-food brand depended in part on variety. A glance at, say, a McDonald’s menu might involve burgers, fries, chicken nuggets, breakfast items, McFlurrys, salads, wraps, and more.

Graves seized on chicken fingers, but his insight had as much to do with simplicity as it did with chicken—a power-of-less approach that has resonated with the larger shifts in consumer behavior. In a fast-food landscape of overstuffed menus, each option fighting for attention, Raising Cane’s stands out by giving consumers a single option that doesn’t demand their time, energy, or decision-making. The menu has never changed: Chicken fingers, crinkle-cut fries, coleslaw, Texas toast, and its signature Cane’s Sauce is basically your only meal choice. (There is also a sandwich variation—three chicken fingers on a bun.)

Beyond pure stubbornness, Raising Cane’s was built on a fervent premise: Successful businesses don’t need to offer everything. In a way, this flies in the face of traditional thinking about the need for constant novelty and variety. “I was like, no,” Graves says. “Believe in doing one thing, and do it better than anybody else.”

The rise of Raising Cane’s to juggernaut status hasn’t all been simple, of course. For starters, embracing simplicity created an intense focus on consistency: If you’re just going to do one thing, day in and day out, you’d better do it reliably well every time. The chicken fingers are made of never-frozen chicken tenderloin, hand-breaded daily. “We go through 16 different [supplier] companies and multiple, multiple plants” to source tenderloin cuts nationwide, Graves explains. “The chicken has to taste the same.” This is also true with the coleslaw and fries. There is exactly one variety of Cane’s Sauce, a creamy-tang mix that has built a loyal following. (Some on TikTok order 32-ounce cups of the stuff.) 

A consistent menu has its perks. Graves has always been an operations fanatic, interested in the competitive advantages of efficiency and strong customer service. Raising Cane’s gradually expanded its footprint, first across Louisiana, then to Mississippi and Texas, and then throughout the southern U.S. Though the company began franchising in 2004, it now owns most of its locations outright, partly to make it easier to ensure consistency.

Thanks to its track record, Raising Cane’s started gaining better lending terms to grow more aggressively. In 2014, Graves brought in AJ Kumaran, a veteran fast-food exec, to streamline operations as chief operating officer; three years later, Kumaran added co-CEO to his title. “Best operator I’ve ever seen,” Graves says. That was critical.

Kumaran helped devise the alternative to the franchise model, a “partner program” that ties qualifying managers’ success to the company’s, partly by what amounts to a profit-sharing arrangement. With some 200 managers in the program and counting, this helps keep values aligned throughout the chain.

From his first locations, Graves has always emphasized “restaurant atmosphere.” (“I didn’t know what the word culture was back then,” he says.) Music was allowed in the kitchen and uniforms were casual, in contrast to chains such as McDonald’s. Graves says the company has kept this spirit as it’s scaled. Emphasizing hires who are motivated, hardworking, and culturally aligned, Raising Cane’s says it invests heavily in training and developing its “crew members.” Most employees report a good working experience, with a 4.1 out of five stars rating on Glassdoor, and pay rates are considered competitive or above average for fast food.

Graves, who has a reputation for visiting stores regularly, has said that happy, empowered employees directly lead to happy, loyal customers. The company’s internal and external mantra, “One Love,” embodies this: one simple focus, one passionate approach to customer service, and one cohesive company spirit.

The company’s bottom-line goals have also gotten sharper. Kumaran helped develop its first five-year plan in 2015, to grow from sales of around $500 million to $1.5 billion. “We ended up blowing past that goal,” Kumaran says, partly through new openings, but also through increased same-store volume and operational efficiency. “We have more metrics than what you could ever think about,” he adds. For example: “I know how many seconds it takes for the credit card machine to print a receipt, because if it takes a couple extra seconds, that’s a couple extra seconds that I’m wasting.” 

Raising Cane’s doesn’t exactly cook to order—it “cooks to flow.” It essentially anticipates orders, making turnaround time faster in a way that’s made possible by the focused menu. “Let’s say there are 10 cars coming through,” Kumaran explains. “We know what the first car is ordering: chicken finger meals. We know what the 10th car is ordering: chicken finger meals.” They may order four or six or three, but they’re getting chicken fingers. “So we will consistently drop four to six to eight chicken fingers at a time.”

To ensure consistent quality, Raising Cane’s uses no heat lamps or holding cabinets; when a chicken finger meal is ready to go, it is served to someone or within minutes it goes in the trash. But the higher the volume, the more you can cook to flow. “Keep going, keep going, keep going,” Kumaran concludes. 

Graves has always taken a direct hand in shaping the brand image of Raising Cane’s, though not so much with traditional advertising. Instead, he has emphasized more granular connection. Partly that comes from friendly service. Partly it comes through its store design. I visited a location in the New Orleans suburb of Chalmette, and while it was covered in decorations advertising its status as the official chicken fingers of the Saints (supporting the local NFL team here is mandatory, even when it’s terrible), there were also photos and references to Chalmette-specific landmarks, such as a nearby battlefield. 

And partly the community vibe is spread through donations to charities in its markets across the U.S., to the tune of $165 million-plus over the years. Avoiding standard tactics like value promotions or limited-time deals or novelty food offerings, Raising Cane’s has concentrated on cultivating its most devoted fans through a Caniac Club loyalty program, rewarding repeat customers with exclusive offers, discounts, and merch.

But if the chain reached a turning point in expansion when it revved up growth with direct location ownership in the mid-2010s, it went through a marketing shift in 2020. That’s when Graves connected with Snoop Dogg.

Graves still sounds bemused as he recounts this turn of events, which essentially boiled down to the rap star wanting to meet “the Cane’s guy.” The Cane’s guy was happy to, and invited Snoop to hang out at his treehouse. Graves had an idea he thought could benefit them both. “I said, ‘Man, I’ve always wanted somebody famous like you working our drive-through. I think people will freak out, and it’s actually good too for your image—you see this celebrity, but humbly working fast food.’ ” They tried it and, sure enough, videos of the encounters went viral, boosting Snoop’s latest album, and Raising Cane’s.

Since then, the Cane’s guy has met plenty of celebrities, including others who have done drive-through shifts. Many are fans of the brand. “That’s when I tapped into the celebrity fan base,” Graves says. In 2023, the brand partnered with Post Malone to custom-design a Raising Cane’s restaurant in Midvale, Utah, near his home, and another one in Dallas, in collaboration with his favorite NFL team, the Cowboys. On April Fool’s Day this year, Cardi B released a video hyping a fake Raising Cane’s x Ipsy “Moisturizing Sauce” face cream cooked up by the two brands. 

Graves insists he is the kind of person who would “never” approach a celebrity, but he seems to have become comfortable around star athletes and entertainers. He figures they’re interested in perspectives of successful people in other fields, just as he is, and he maintains that the resulting relationships are genuine. When we met, he was just back from a quick trip to Nashville to attend the opening of Post Malone’s new bar there. “I didn’t go there to get pictures and say, ‘Oh, I was at Post Malone’s deal,’ ” Graves says. “I went there to support a friend.”

There’s one more factor affecting Raising Cane’s growth: Americans have gone chicken crazy. U.S. chicken consumption has grown steadily since the 1960s, according to the National Chicken Council—a trend that factored into Graves’s initial chicken finger focus—and chicken has been the most-consumed form of animal protein since 1992. This year, per capita consumption is expected to reach 104 pounds, a spike of 21 percent since 2010. Sales at chicken fast-food restaurants exceeded $53 billion in 2024, up 9 percent over the previous year. 

Raising Cane’s is far from the only player in this game of (mostly fried) chicken. Chick-fil-A has expanded rapidly over the same time frame, as has Wingstop. Popeyes has continued to grow—and famously kicked off a multichain chicken sandwich war that became a pop culture phenomenon. McDonald’s and Wendy’s have lately introduced crispy chicken tenders. Wings (including boneless varieties) and hot-chicken variations are trendier than ever; even grilled-chicken specialist El Pollo Loco recently saw quarterly sales rise. Investors have flocked to newcomers and familiar veterans in the category: Roark Capital paid around $1 billion for a majority stake in Dave’s Hot Chicken; the old-school Bojangles chain has been exploring a sale for an estimated $1.5 billion, triple what it sold for in 2019.

Raising Cane’s is “taking advantage of the out-performance of chicken,” particularly over beef, says restaurant industry analyst John A. Gordon, founder of Pacific Management Consulting Group. He also praises the company’s strong management and its brand concept that feels “new” (in contrast to, say, KFC’s). “The company was put together well,” he says.

Graves cheerfully acknowledges that choosing chicken as his focus was fortuitous, but he does not behave like someone worried about his luck running out. The current long-term goal is to double revenue and become a top 10 fast-food chain, with $10 billion in sales, more than 1,600 locations, and 150,000 employees. That’s a lot of chicken fingers.

The strategy to get there is, in essence, double down again. Graves says he has no interest in going public or taking on a major investor. He also waves away any possibility of new menu items, even in overseas markets. On the contrary, he suggests regrets about the chicken sandwich option: “To tell you the truth, man, I kind of wish we didn’t even have it on the menu. It’s like 3 or 4 percent of sales. And it slows us down,” he says. “I wish we didn’t have it, but I won’t take it away now.” In other words, after all this time, he finds the minimalist menu at Cane’s to be just a little too complicated. 

The remarkable thing about Graves, really, is his ability to maintain clear focus for nearly three straight decades. “I got the vision at restaurant number eight,” he says, when all his locations were in Baton Rouge and he paused to really consider his future. “I came up with the vision to have locations all over the world, and be the brand for quality chicken finger meals, a great crew, cool culture, and active community involvement. And that’s guided everything.” We may live in an era when success is often defined by constant innovation and change—but Graves has a different goal. “When you go to Cane’s,” he says, “you get Cane’s.”

This story originally appeared on Inc.com.