Todd Graves

Founder and CEO of Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers, the Baton Rouge-born restaurant brand he launched in 1996 and grew from a single campus restaurant into a large U.S. chicken-finger chain.

Raising Cane’s Built a Billion-Dollar Chain by Refusing Menu Expansion

Raising Cane’s founder and CEO Todd Graves tells Masters of Scale that the chain’s growth to nearly 1,000 restaurants came from refusing much of the conventional quick-service playbook. He argues that a narrow menu built around chicken fingers, company ownership rather than franchising, resistance to private-equity-style cost cutting, and continued reliance on human service are not constraints on the brand but the operating choices that made it scalable.

Masters of ScaleMay 8, 202614 min read