110 Business View - August 2015
store number three in 24 months; and store number
four, immediately after that. In 2008, Ben’s Soft Pret-
zels also started a relationship with Notre Dame Uni-
versity. “We’re not the official pretzel of Notre Dame,”
admits Jones, “but we are the only fresh-baked pret-
zel at Notre Dame. We do all of the football and all of
the basketball games. That really helped spur a lot of
growth for us, because we had a lot of people coming
to Notre Dame games who tried the product and loved
it.”
By the end of 2012, Krider and Jones felt confident
that they were ready to franchise. They sold their first
franchise in March 2013. It was one of their original
locations and it went to a couple who had been asking
them for two years if they could buy a business. Today,
just two years later, Ben’s Soft Pretzels owns nine cor-
porate stores and has over 30 franchise locations in
Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Florida.
One shouldn’t, however, ascribe the trio’s new-found
prosperity as merely a consequence of good luck. A
lot of thought and research went into the process of
deciding whether to found a company to begin with,
and then, what components would be necessary to
make it a success. Jones, in particular, was skeptical,
at first. Krider remembers hearing him remark, “Who
wants to have just a pretzel?” But Jones explains why
they went ahead with their plan, albeit, with no former
experience in the restaurant business - a business, by
the way, that his dad had warned him against going
into for many reasons, including having to work with a
product (food) that can spoil and go bad.
“There were two key elements to our business,” he
says. “One was that we felt that we had a recession-
proof product, because even when times are tough,
people are still going to go out and do something with
their children. Maybe they can’t afford to buy a few
hundred dollars worth of clothes, but they can afford
to spend a few dollars for a pretzel and a dip. So, we
felt that there were not going to be any socio-economic
FRANCHISE
