Who Owns Chick-fil-A?

S. Truett Cathy opened a small diner called the Dwarf Grill in Hapeville, Georgia, in 1946, in the years right after World War II. The restaurant served a working-class area near a Ford assembly plant. Cathy ran the business with his brother Ben and built it into a modest local operation over the next two decades.

In the early 1960s, Cathy developed a boneless chicken breast sandwich cooked on a pressure fryer, which produced a fried-chicken taste in a fraction of the usual cooking time. He trademarked the name Chick-fil-A in 1963. The first Chick-fil-A restaurant opened in 1967 inside Greenbriar Mall in Atlanta, one of the earliest food-court restaurant concepts in the country.

The chain grew steadily through malls in the 1970s and 1980s before shifting toward freestanding drive-thru locations in the 1990s. Truett Cathy kept the company private and closed on Sundays from the very first restaurant, a policy tied to his Southern Baptist faith that continues today. The company introduced the chain's famous "Eat Mor Chikin" cow advertising campaign in 1995, created by the Richards Group.

Dan Cathy took over leadership in the 2000s and pushed faster expansion outside the Southeast. By 2015, Chick-fil-A had passed KFC as the top-selling U.S. chicken chain despite having far fewer locations. Andrew Cathy became CEO in 2021, the same year the chain's average unit volumes reached record levels.

Under Andrew Cathy the company has moved more aggressively into international markets and new formats. It opened its first permanent United Kingdom restaurants in 2025, entered Singapore in late 2025, and continued building in Canada, where it first expanded in 2019. The company announced a $1 billion international investment plan. In 2025 it also launched Daybright, a beverage-focused restaurant concept, and began testing a new store format in the Northeast.

The company's franchise disclosure document for 2025 showed system-wide sales of $23.92 billion, up from $22.7 billion in 2024, with a net addition of 179 franchised and corporate restaurants for a total of 2,863 plus more than 400 licensed units.