Dutch Bros vs 7 Brew: Neither Is Open to New Franchisees

You’ve probably landed here because Dutch Bros and 7 Brew look like the same business from the driver’s seat: a small building, a couple of drive-thru lanes, employees hollering greetings through a window, and a menu built around flavored energy drinks and over-the-top customer service. If you’ve been eyeing one as something you could open yourself, it’s natural to wonder about the other too, and to assume the ownership path is roughly the same for both.

It isn’t. Dutch Bros stopped selling franchises in 2017 and says so plainly on its own site today. 7 Brew still runs an active franchise system with a current Franchise Disclosure Document, real fees, and a real royalty structure, though its own support page currently states it isn’t taking new franchise applications either. One brand closed the door permanently. The other left it ajar, then pulled it most of the way shut while it figures out how fast to grow. That distinction is the whole story here, and it’s worth getting straight before you spend time building a plan around either name.

FranchiseFeast doesn’t sell franchises and isn’t paid by either company named in this piece. Every figure below traces to a franchisor’s own site, a company’s SEC filing or press release, a Franchise Disclosure Document, or a dated trade-press report, all cited at the bottom of this page. Where sources disagreed with each other, and on 7 Brew’s numbers they disagree more than usual, we say so instead of picking whichever figure looked cleanest.

Is Dutch Bros or 7 Brew a franchise? The short version

7 Brew is. Dutch Bros isn’t. That’s the entire answer to the question that probably brought you here, and it’s worth sitting with for a second because it changes what kind of research is even useful to you.

If you’re comparing these two brands as potential businesses to own, only one comparison is real right now. Dutch Bros doesn’t have an Item 7 investment range to evaluate, doesn’t have a franchise fee to negotiate, and doesn’t have a sales team to call, because it isn’t selling franchises to anyone outside the company. 7 Brew has all three of those things on paper, spelled out in a Franchise Disclosure Document that gets refiled every year. What it doesn’t currently have is an open door for a brand-new applicant, at least not through the standard inquiry process its own site describes.

Why Dutch Bros stopped franchising, and why it hasn’t reopened

Dutch Bros franchised the normal way from 1999 onward, then started narrowing the path in 2008, when the company began selling new franchises only to employees who’d worked inside the business for at least three years. That policy alone pushed most outside capital out of the running years before the door fully closed. By 2017, Dutch Bros stopped awarding franchises to anyone, employee or outsider, and every location built since then has been company-owned, with the internal “operator” role, an employee-promotion track that replaced franchise ownership entirely.

The company hasn’t just held that line, it’s also buying back individual legacy territories one at a time. In May 2026, Dutch Bros announced it would acquire a 29-shop franchise territory in the Phoenix East Valley after the franchisee, who’d run it for close to two decades, decided to retire, converting those shops to company operation. As of March 31, 2026, Dutch Bros ran 1,177 total locations across 25 states, 844 of them company-operated and 333 still under legacy franchise agreements that predate 2017. That legacy count isn’t on a clean downward slide, existing franchisees can still open new shops under those older agreements, and the total actually grew slightly over the past year, from 317 franchised shops in the first quarter of 2025 to 333 a year later, per the company’s own quarterly filings. What isn’t happening is any new franchisee entering the system from outside. At its March 2025 Investor Day the company set a goal of 2,029 shops by 2029 and put the long-term market it could eventually serve at more than 7,000 shops, built almost entirely on the company-owned model, with the shrinking legacy franchise base making up a smaller share of that total every year even as its absolute count holds close to flat for now. If someone offers to sell you a Dutch Bros franchise, or a listing site shows you a “Dutch Bros franchise cost” figure, they’re describing a product that hasn’t existed for nearly a decade.

7 Brew’s real numbers, and the catch worth knowing about

7 Brew is the brand most people land on next, and for good reason: it’s the closest thing on the market to Dutch Bros in format, energy, and menu, and unlike Dutch Bros, it actually has franchise paperwork. The company grew from 38 locations in 2022 to 321 by the end of 2024, a 744.7% increase in unit count over three years, while systemwide sales jumped from $52 million to $502 million over that same window, according to Franchise Times’ 2026 ranking that placed 7 Brew at the top of its “Fast & Serious” growth list. By mid-2026, 7 Brew’s own site puts the count at more than 700 stands across 38-plus states.

The published fee and investment figures are where things get messier than usual. FranchisePayback’s read of the 2026 FDD lists a $35,000 franchise fee and a total investment range of $941,000 to $2,284,000, with a royalty of 4.5% to 7% of gross sales plus a 2% ad fund. BizFranHub’s coverage of the same filing period lists the franchise fee at $75,000 under development and initial fees, with total investment running $894,000 to $2,178,500. VettedBiz puts the fee at $45,000, the investment range at $890,300 to $1,934,500, and the royalty at a flat 6%. All three cite the same underlying FDD family, and none of them fully agree. The most likely explanation is that some of these sources are quoting a single-unit initial fee while others are folding in development fees tied to multi-unit agreements, which several large 7 Brew franchisees, including Flynn Group’s newly signed 160-store deal from November 2025, are signing instead of one-off single-store agreements. Whatever the reason, the spread is wide enough that you shouldn’t treat any one number here as final. Request the current FDD directly from 7 Brew before you do any planning around a specific figure, the same advice we’d give for any brand, not just this one.

Where the sources agree is on the ad fund, a consistent 2% of gross sales across every aggregator we checked, and on the direction of the brand’s momentum. 7 Brew’s FDD reported average gross sales of $1,989,229 per location in 2024, and trade coverage puts 2025’s average unit volume above $2.6 million. Neither number is a projection of what a new location would earn, and 7 Brew’s own Item 19 disclosure, when you request it, is the only legitimate place to look for anything resembling actual unit economics. If you want a plain breakdown of what a royalty rate like 7 Brew’s actually costs a location over a year, our franchise royalty calculator walks through that math.

Here’s the part that matters most if this brand is why you clicked into this article: as of today, 7brew.com’s own support page states plainly that “we are not accepting new franchise applications or expressions of interest,” and adds that all current franchising information is published only in the annual FDD, with no direct contact for inquiries at this time. That’s a meaningfully different situation from Dutch Bros. Dutch Bros made a permanent structural decision in 2017 and has spent years unwinding what franchising it had left. 7 Brew still has an active FDD, is still signing new development agreements, and is still growing its franchised unit count, just seemingly through a smaller number of large, well-capitalized operators rather than a high volume of small individual applicants. Whether that pause lifts for smaller buyers, and when, isn’t something this article or any secondary source can tell you. Check the brand’s own site before assuming either outcome.

Format and footprint: how similar are these stands, really

The consumer resemblance between these two brands isn’t an accident of your imagination. Both run compact, drive-thru-forward buildings with little to no interior dining space, both lean hard on fast, high-energy counter service delivered through a car window, and both built loyal followings on flavor-heavy menus rather than a traditional cafe experience. That’s genuinely where the similarity ends, though, once you look at the buildings themselves.

Dutch Bros locations run around 950 square feet, per commercial real estate data, and most are still drive-thru only, though a secondary walk-up window shows up at a growing share of newer builds. The company is now testing something further: a walk-up-only format with no drive-thru lane at all, aimed at dense urban blocks where a drive-thru simply doesn’t fit. Its first shop built that way, a walk-up-and-mobile-order location in downtown Los Angeles, became the chain’s best-performing store within months of opening, with an order-ahead mix more than three times the systemwide average, according to trade coverage of the company’s early-2026 results. 7 Brew runs tighter, at 500 to 700 square feet, built specifically around dual drive-thru lanes with no walk-up option and no pedestrian-facing window at all. If you’re drawn to Dutch Bros because you like the idea of foot traffic alongside the drive-thru, that’s not the 7 Brew model. If you want a pure, high-volume, car-only transaction machine, 7 Brew’s tighter footprint is closer to that than Dutch Bros’ larger building.

Which buyer actually fits here, and what to do next

Because only one of these two brands even runs a franchise system, this isn’t really a side-by-side choice the way most franchise comparisons are. It’s closer to two different answers to two different questions. If what you want is to eventually run a Dutch Bros location, the only real path is joining the company as an employee, building a multi-year track record, and being considered for an internal operator role, which functions more like an internal promotion than a franchise purchase. That’s a legitimate path for the right person, but it isn’t a franchise, and none of the figures in this article apply to it.

If what you want is an actual franchise agreement in this same drive-thru coffee category, 7 Brew is the more direct answer, with a real caveat. Its current application pause and its apparent preference for large multi-unit development deals suggest the brand may be more reachable right now for an established multi-unit operator with real capital behind them than for a first-time single-store buyer. If that’s not your situation, or if 7 Brew’s door stays closed longer than you want to wait, brands like Scooter’s Coffee and Ziggi’s Coffee run comparable drive-thru-forward formats and are both actively accepting applications as of this writing. Our Dutch Bros franchise breakdown covers those and a couple of other active alternatives in more depth, and our drive-thru coffee franchise guide walks through the site-selection and construction math that applies across this whole category, not just to 7 Brew specifically.

For the full method behind how we source and verify every figure on this site, see our editorial methodology page before you take any number here, from either brand, into a conversation with a lender or a franchise attorney.