In 2016, my wife, Vasiliki, and I started Canada’s first vegan fast-food chain, Odd Burger, in my hometown of London, Ontario. Within a few years, we had opened more restaurants throughout Ontario, and sold franchises in Ontario, B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan. In 2023, we launched a line of packaged goods, including chickpea burgers and vegan breakfast sausages, which we sold in grocery stores. We went public in 2021, and since then our sales have grown by 165 per cent. Today we have 17 restaurants and three food trucks nationwide. Last fiscal year we did over $5 million in overall sales.

But in spite of all this domestic success, we’ve had our sights set on the U.S. market for a long time—we knew that if we could tackle America, we could be ten times bigger. Our first foray into the U.S. was in 2022, when we considered opening a location in New York City—but real estate there was just too competitive to be our first inroad. Instead, we set up an American corporation and signed agreements with franchise developers in Washington State, who agreed to open 20 restaurants over eight years, and one in Florida to open 40 in the same timeframe.

It wasn’t easy; setting up a franchise in the U.S. is a lot more complicated than in Canada, because of how much things like legal reviews can differ from state to state. We were confident that the effort and cost would all be worth........

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