Honeygrow is as much a passion as a business for Justin Rosenberg, founder of the restaurant chain. Rosenberg was a financial analyst and then a manager of energy services for shopping center investment firm PREIT when he began to feel the stirrings for something new — and very different. “I am a creative at heart,” Rosenberg said. “For me it was about finding happiness in my life.” At the time, Rosenberg happened to be pursuing a diet rich in salads and stir-fries. He began working on a business plan for a restaurant and also took a weekend job in the restaurant kitchen of a chef friend. “I really wanted this to be focused on culinary and create-your-own, chef-driven salad concepts and stir-fries,” said Rosenberg.
Since opening its first restaurant in Philadelphia’s Center City in 2012, the company now operates 15 restaurants in the Northeast, with more on the way. Honeygrow serves up fresh-fruit snacks and desserts in addition to the salads and stir-fries. The produce is fresh and often locally sourced, and the sauces and dressings are made from scratch. Honeygrow makes a point of using high-quality meats and seafood. The employees complete a sort of culinary-school boot camp that teaches them kitchen knife skills and provides instruction on sautéing in a wok.
Healthy fast-casual dining of this sort has become an intensely competitive sector. “One of the things that sets Honeygrow apart is that it offers both salad and stir-fry menu options,” said Douglas Green, a managing principal at MSC Retail and a leasing representative for Honeygrow. The typical salad-based concept relies heavily on the lunch crowd, but the addition of a hot menu option will help draw dinner traffic too, a great selling point for landlords, Green says. Given this reality, Honeygrow places a premium on locations where it can reliably generate robust lunch, dinner and weekend business.
“We are very focused on an urban customer — but that doesn’t mean that we are not going to the suburbs, because we are,” said Green. Honeygrow has seen a spike in new-store growth recently, with eight of its 15 stores having opened last year alone. But Rosenberg has declared no expansion targets for this year and next. “I am not looking to open stores just to open stores,” he said. “It has to be the right real estate and the right market.” Rosenberg is devoting a fair amount of his time to researching markets that will be a good fit. Much of that is concentrated on the Northeast for now, though Rosenberg says he is considering other markets as well.
Honeygrow operates primarily in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware, though in the fourth quarter the company opened its first restaurants in the District of Columbia and Baltimore. Its 16th restaurant is scheduled for Brooklyn, N.Y., early this year. “Right now we are entering markets with the idea of not just doing one or two stores,” said Rosenberg, noting that the operation of multiple stores in a single city makes strategic sense from an efficiency-and-cost perspective.
Leasing inquiries may be directed to Douglas Green, managing principal, MSC Retail, at dgreen@mscretail.com.