Biggby vs Scooter's Coffee Franchise: Cafe or Kiosk

If you’re cross-shopping coffee franchises and Biggby and Scooter’s Coffee both keep coming up, you’ve probably noticed they don’t really compete for the same real estate. Biggby is a Michigan-born cafe brand that leases space inside existing strip centers and adds a drive-thru lane where it can. Scooter’s builds a small, purpose-made drive-thru building from the ground up and skips the cafe altogether in most locations. Same product category, two very different construction projects.

That difference in physical model is the whole story here, so this isn’t really a “which coffee brand is better” comparison. It’s a cafe-economics-versus-kiosk-economics comparison, and the two brands land in genuinely different places on cost, footprint, labor, and how dependent you are on finding the right piece of real estate. We pulled current figures from both franchisors’ own franchising sites and cross-checked them against recent FDD-based reviews, cited below, because the two source types didn’t always agree.

FranchiseFeast doesn’t sell franchises and has no referral arrangement with either brand named here. Every number below is cited to a franchisor’s own site, a recent FDD-based review, or a dated trade report. Where sources disagreed, we say so instead of quietly picking the number that looked cleanest.

Two different bets on what a coffee shop should be

Biggby’s core offer is a sit-down cafe with a drive-thru bolted on where the lot allows it. The company’s own franchising site describes its standard “Lobby & Drive-Thru” format as two points of purchase, indoor counter service plus a drive-thru window, built into a roughly 1,200-square-foot inline space inside a strip center. That’s a real estate strategy built around existing retail corridors: find a vacant unit, build out the interior, and let the drive-thru lane be a bonus rather than the whole business.

Scooter’s Coffee skips that step entirely. Its standard building is a 664-square-foot freestanding kiosk, purpose-built for drive-thru transactions, sited on its own small lot rather than tucked into somebody else’s shopping center. There’s no walk-up lobby to speak of. The footprint is designed around a single drive-thru lane moving cars through fast, which is why Scooter’s kiosk sizing is standardized system-wide rather than varying by whatever inline unit happens to be available in a given market.

Biggby has been narrowing that format gap on its own terms. Since 2018 the brand has also offered a modular, factory-built option called BCubed, assembled off-site in Alpena, Michigan and installed on a prepared lot in about six hours, running roughly 400 square feet, plus a separate site-built drive-thru-only format running 400 to 800 square feet. Tony DiPietro, Biggby’s VP of emerging market development, told Restaurant Dive in 2023 that flexibility is the point: “we want to have flexibility in our model, therefore our franchise owners have flexibility because that’s the pinch point, real estate.” Biggby built multiple formats so a franchisee isn’t stuck waiting for one exact type of real estate. Scooter’s took the opposite approach: standardize one drive-thru box and repeat it.

The real cost gap: cafe buildout vs kiosk buildout

The construction difference shows up directly in Item 7. Biggby’s own franchising site puts its whitebox lobby cafe format at $242,200 to $610,000 total investment, a range dominated by leasehold improvements ($105,000-$269,000) and furniture and equipment ($62,000-$165,000), the costs of finishing out somebody else’s shell space. Scooter’s drive-thru kiosk runs $1,163,650 to $1,345,750 on the same franchisor’s own site, and that number is dominated by site improvements and building construction, roughly $725,000 to $772,000 of the total, because a kiosk franchisee is paying to put up a structure from bare ground rather than finish an existing one.

That’s the cafe-versus-kiosk question in one comparison: Biggby shifts cost away from construction and onto rent, since a leased inline space carries ongoing occupancy cost a freestanding kiosk lot doesn’t. Scooter’s shifts cost the other way, front-loading a bigger one-time construction bill for a building the franchisee typically owns outright.

Biggby’s modular BCubed format runs $457,750 to $826,000, and its site-built drive-thru-only format runs $484,200 to $973,000, both per the company’s own site. Either one lands closer to Scooter’s endcap format ($658,898 to $1,068,525, also from Scooter’s own site) than to either brand’s cheapest option. Compare “Biggby drive-thru-only” to “Scooter’s endcap” and the gap mostly closes. It’s the pure cafe-versus-kiosk comparison where the numbers pull furthest apart.

Royalty, ad fund, and the math that runs for years

Royalty looks like a wash at first glance: both brands charge 6%. Biggby applies its 6% to gross sales (5% for a small group of Michigan operators who purchased before January 1, 2025, under a grandfather clause), while Scooter’s applies its 6% to net sales. The ad fund is where the ongoing math actually diverges. Biggby’s contribution is the greater of $100 per week or 3% of gross sales, which resolves to a flat 3% for any location doing more than about $173,000 a year, meaning nearly every open Biggby location is paying the percentage, not the floor. Scooter’s currently charges 2% of net sales for its ad fund, though its franchise agreement allows the company to raise that contribution up to 4%.

Run each brand’s own disclosed average sales through its own fee structure and the gap gets concrete. Biggby’s 2025 Item 19 shows drive-thru locations averaging $747,227 in gross sales; at 6% royalty plus 3% ad fund, that’s roughly $67,250 a year in combined brand fees, 9% of gross. Scooter’s 2025 Item 19 shows kiosk locations averaging $914,719 in gross sales; at 6% royalty plus its current 2% ad fund, that’s roughly $73,180 a year, 8% of gross, but the same math at the contractual 4% ceiling climbs to 10%, or about $91,470. Biggby’s combined rate is fixed today; Scooter’s has more room to rise. Neither figure is a promise of what any specific location will earn. They’re published averages run through published fee schedules, nothing more.

For the fuller mechanics of how royalty and ad fund percentages compound over a multi-year agreement, and how to model that cost against your own projected sales, see our franchise royalty calculator.

What each brand’s Item 19 actually says about unit economics

Both brands publish financial performance representations in Item 19 of their FDDs, which is more than plenty of franchisors do. Here’s what each discloses, cited to the specific filing.

Both franchisors calculate the EBITDA row from a narrower store sample than the sales rows above it. Biggby’s gross sales figures come from 300 drive-thru and 58 non-drive-thru stores; its EBITDA figures come from a smaller subset, 213 and 40 stores respectively, that reported complete expense data. Scooter’s does the same: its gross sales figures come from 605 kiosk and 51 endcap stores, while EBITDA draws from 555 and 47 stores respectively. That’s standard FDD practice at both companies, not a sign either one is hiding weaker locations, but it’s why the sales and EBITDA rows don’t share one identical store count.

The pattern worth noticing: within Biggby’s own system, drive-thru locations out-earned non-drive-thru locations by about 28% in average gross sales and ran a meaningfully higher EBITDA margin, 13.1% versus 8.8%, on the company’s own 2025 disclosure. That’s a real, brand-specific data point suggesting the drive-thru lane is pulling real weight inside the Biggby model, not just adding construction cost. Scooter’s kiosk stores, which are drive-thru by design, posted an average EBITDA margin of 14.1% on its 2025 filing, in the same neighborhood as Biggby’s best-performing format.

Support posture, territory, and growth trajectory

Neither company publishes a specific territory-protection radius on its public marketing pages, which is normal. Territory rights live in Item 12 of the FDD, not on a franchising website, so ask for that section directly and read it before assuming a map you’re shown in a sales call is contractually binding.

What each company says publicly points to a different operational bet. Biggby frames its multi-format lineup, lobby, drive-thru-only, modular, as a deliberate answer to real estate scarcity, letting a franchisee fit whatever building type the available lot allows. Scooter’s has built the opposite kind of infrastructure: a vertically integrated supply chain running through six distribution centers that deliver directly to its 900-plus stores, built to support one standardized format at national scale rather than several formats at once.

The growth numbers reflect those two strategies. Biggby has grown from roughly 420 franchised units at the close of its 2024 fiscal year (per its 2025 FDD) to about 460 by the end of 2025 and 488 by June 2026, still concentrated enough that Michigan alone accounts for around 59% of the system. Scooter’s added 83 stores in 2025 alone on its way to a 900-store milestone announced in February 2026, spread across 32 states. A wide, thin national footprint is Scooter’s current growth signal. Deep density in one region, plus a track record of adapting building format to available real estate, is Biggby’s.

Which model fits which buyer

If your capital is closer to $250,000-$600,000 and you have a specific inline retail space in mind, Biggby’s cafe format fits that situation. You’re taking on a landlord relationship and finishing out somebody else’s shell, which caps your one-time construction bill but adds ongoing rent exposure a freestanding building doesn’t carry. It suits an operator who wants a walk-in retail presence, not just a drive-thru transaction, and who’s comfortable operating in or around Biggby’s Michigan-heavy base, or building awareness from scratch somewhere it hasn’t gone yet.

If your capital runs closer to $1.1 million-$1.35 million and you’d rather control a piece of ground outright than lease inside someone else’s center, Scooter’s kiosk format is the more direct fit. You’re paying more up front for a standardized, repeatable building the company has refined across hundreds of locations, backed by a supply chain built to support exactly that format at scale. It suits an operator prioritizing transaction speed over cafe ambiance, and one who clears Scooter’s higher net worth ($500,000) and liquid capital ($250,000) thresholds.

Biggby’s own drive-thru-only and modular options, and Scooter’s endcap format, sit in the middle of both cost ranges, worth remembering if the two pure formats above don’t match your budget. For a wider set of coffee brands lined up on the same fee, royalty, and footprint categories, our coffee franchise comparison covers Scooter’s, Biggby, and four other active franchisors side by side. If you’re still weighing a franchise route against building an independent shop, our franchise economics versus going independent breakdown covers that decision on the cost side.

Whichever format you’re leaning toward, request the current FDD directly from the franchisor before you commit to a number from any article, including this one. For the full method behind how we source and verify every figure on this site, see our editorial methodology page.