Grewal Foods OC LLC in Irvine plans to relocate 15 to 20 of its 250 Orange County Subway restaurants over the next two to three years, said President Bob Grewal.
“Some of our locations are 20 years old, and as areas change and redevelop, we’re looking to relocate them,” he said.
Grewal’s OC operations are part of a family-owned group that’s the largest area developer for Milford, Conn.-based Doctor’s Associates Inc., Subway’s parent company.
Subway, founded in 1965 in Bridgeport, Conn., as Pete’s Super Submarines, today has about 45,000 locations in 112 countries. Some 26,000 are in the United States.
The Grewal family’s holdings include about 2,100 locations:
• About 250 here under Grewal Foods OC LLC.
• About 650 in Los Angeles County under OhCal Foods LLC.
• About 925 in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C., under OhCal MidAtlantic LLC.
• About 275 in Ontario, Canada, under OhCal Foods Canada LLC.
Bob Grewal said he projects systemwide sales of about $1.1 billion this year.
He and his father, Gurcharan “Charlie” Grewal, directly franchise 38 Southern California restaurants, and the family franchises the rest to others.
“I would not be where I am if not for him,” Bob said of his father. One of Bob’s uncles, Hardeep “Hardy” Grewal, is president of the L.A. operations; a cousin, Jesse Grewal, is president of the East Coast group; and another cousin, Herman Grewal, is president of the Ontario, Canada, restaurants.
Trends
Bob Grewal said the family is trying to tap trends in restaurants and real estate.
The Subway chain recently has been rebranding to focus on the healthy aspects of its food.
Grewal said that dovetails with food trends driven by more health-conscious consumers, and ties into geographic changes in areas where redevelopment or new projects are taking place. People living and working in those areas want new types of food, he said.
The company’s restaurant relocation searches are focused in new parts of Irvine that include the Great Park developments and the Orchard Hills area north of the city, as well as parts of Santa Ana.
“We would look at pretty much anything,” Grewal said.
Some of the company’s restaurant locations are in gas stations. “We help their business quite a bit,” he said. Other locations are inside John Wayne Airport and Tustin Toyota in the Tustin Auto Center.
Expansion
Grewal said the various operations ended up under multiple companies because, “When we started buying them, we were buying them from other people, and they already had them set up.”
The family started acquiring Subways with a purchase in Los Angeles in 1989.
“My uncle bought the first restaurant, and my dad followed two years later,” he said.
By 2006 the family had about 30 franchises, and it bought rights to Los Angeles from the area developer at the time. It bought rights to Orange County the following year from another area developer.
In 2009, it bought out an area developer in southwest Ontario, Canada.
It acquired the East Coast operations in February 2015 from Subway Development Corp. in McLean, Va., in a buy that doubled the company’s size and made it the largest developer in the chain.
The chain has about 150 area developers in its system, and ownership transfers continue, Grewal said. Some of the companies are several decades old and their owners, as in the case of Grewal’s East Coast acquisition, are preparing to retire.
“We want to buy more,” Grewal said. “I would love to.”
Marwaha Group Inc. in Anaheim is another family-owned OC-based Subway area developer, though it doesn’t have rights to OC. It has about 1,250 in California and Texas that include about 160 it directly franchises.
Bread, Butter
The family continues to develop new stores, in addition to relocating certain restaurants in all of the companies.
“We build depending on the need,” Grewal said. “There’s no limit set by Subway.”
The family has invested in other projects in the past—hotels and three used car dealerships in Los Angeles—though it sold those interests to focus entirely on the restaurants.
“Subway is our bread and butter,” he said. “It’s what we know.”
The family directly employs about 350 at its Irvine offices and in 22 franchised locations in OC. It has another 240 workers at its family-owned locations in Los Angeles.
The Grewal family and its franchisees combined are responsible for about 2,500 OC workers and more than 32,000 employees systemwide at its 2,100 restaurants.
Grewal said that several of its former employees have become franchisees in its systems.
“We’ve built our store managers into owners.”
