Noodle Box’s Dave Milne was inspired by his travels to bring Asian market-style noodles served in boxes to Australian takeaway diners and there are now 76 outlets down the east coast of Australia.
Milne believes that the financial constraints on business generally have opened up more opportunities through closures of other outlets such as clothing retailers.
“But what’s hard is some shopping areas with one or two anchors have a certain allocation for food franchises and that means we might not get a site, or we could end up with an empty tenancy next to us. There are a lot of great food concepts, particularly in the 70 to 100 square metre arena – this is very competitive. You have to be pretty quick. We’ve had to adapt and introduce a 50 square metre model to make it more competitive.”
Franchise location: Launching a smaller sized model has increased the brand’s chances of securing good sites; Noodle Box has targeted Surfers Paradise and Milne believes the smaller footprint will bring more opportunities.
He is banking on bigger being better too: Melbourne’s Chadstone centre is the site of the largest Noodle Box, still under construction, at 140 square metres, almost double the standard model.
Yet while shopping centres are a focus, only four of the outlets are in food courts. “It works but it needs to be a strong food court with night trade, we prefer to have two servings, lunch and dinner, and a transient area like Myer Brisbane or Cairns Central, where there is activity going on through the evening,” explains Milne who agrees there is definitely more room for negotiation now with landlords.
He says experienced landlords know they will trade through this tough time and some have a good grasp of how their tenants are trading.
Franchising opportunities: But the brand is not just in major cities; regional cities such as Geelong and Ballarat support the business but are focused less on takeaway and have more of a dining offer.
“We have a fair mix of tenancies. In Brisbane smaller centres with two anchor tenants are doing really well. In Victoria there are more strip shops, and in NSW and Sydney sites are hard to find. “In takeaway areas there is quite often seating provided but some big centres can be expensive if the outlet is not in the right spot.”
Increasingly in the last 18 months as a response to the tightening market Noodle Box sites are being built and run as company stores before franchisees are signed up. “Company stores have trading history, it’s not so blue sky, franchisees like it,” reports Milne. And so do the financial institutions.
“It’s definitely tightened up in terms of a typical couple mortgaging their house and going through the accreditation process. Banks like history, so we’ve started to build more stores.”