Mike Saccone And John Schuster Open Third Chicken Salad Chick Restaurant In Durham

Mike Saccone and John Schuster are using Chicken Salad Chick's Durham opening to extend a franchisee-led growth story across North Carolina's Research Triangle, with the new restaurant scheduled to open at 6807 Fayetteville Road, Suite 120, on August 4. The company announced the Durham restaurant on July 23 and framed the launch as the partners' third local unit after earlier openings in Cary and Raleigh.

The most important part of the release is not simply another restaurant address. Saccone and Schuster are multi-unit franchise owners who came to the brand with more than 55 years of foodservice experience, including work at The Coca-Cola Company where they managed partnerships with restaurant concepts. That background matters because multi-unit expansion in a restaurant franchise is usually a bet on repeatable local management, not just brand appeal. The Durham opening gives the pair another chance to show whether the Chicken Salad Chick format can keep moving through connected suburban and urban trade areas without losing local hospitality.

Chicken Salad Chick said the Durham restaurant will offer in-restaurant dining, outdoor patio dining, takeout, third-party delivery and catering. The grand-opening plan also leans heavily into the brand's familiar local-store marketing model: the first 100 guests in line on opening day are due to receive free chicken salad rewards for a year, followed by several days of giveaway offers tied to meals and branded merchandise. For franchise operators, that structure is a reminder that a new unit opening is also an early test of guest capture, app adoption and local awareness.

Saccone said the Durham restaurant is an important milestone because the operators already have restaurants in Cary and Raleigh. He also said the team is promoting assistant manager Kate Overpeck to lead the new location. That staffing detail is worth watching because internal promotion is often one of the clearest signals that a franchisee has built enough bench strength to support additional locations. A third unit can strain a small operating group if every location still depends on the owners for daily management.

Chicken Salad Chick chief executive Scott Deviney said he had known Saccone and Schuster through their previous Coca-Cola work and welcomed their continued franchise expansion. The company also emphasized charitable activity around the opening, including a Friends & Family event raising money for Duke Children's Hospital. That fits the brand's broader foundation work, but it also gives the Durham restaurant a community-facing launch beyond the free-product promotion.

For the wider franchise market, the Durham opening illustrates a practical pattern in food franchising: experienced foodservice professionals are still buying into systems where the menu is focused, dayparts are clear and catering can add another sales channel. Chicken Salad Chick says it now has more than 340 restaurants across 24 states and continues to expand through franchise owners. The Durham unit is a local opening, but the operator story behind it is the stronger franchise signal.

The next measure will be whether the operators can keep guest experience consistent across three Triangle restaurants while developing local managers into durable leaders. If Overpeck's promotion works as described, the opening becomes more than a market-entry announcement. It becomes a case study in the management pipeline that every growth-minded food franchisee eventually needs.