Raising Cane's Will Open 12 Restaurants in November, Nearly Doubling Its Pace

Raising Cane's plans 12 restaurant openings in November, a pace that will nearly double the seven debuts it recorded in October. The batch includes first entries into three markets: Brick, New Jersey; Fayetteville, North Carolina; and Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

The remaining openings will land in Utah, Florida, Michigan, California, Connecticut, Illinois and Alabama. The company did not break down how many of the units are company-operated, a notable omission given that Cane's runs an overwhelmingly company-owned model and bears the capital cost of each build itself.

"Opening 12 new Restaurants in November is another exciting milestone in Raising Cane's continued growth as we expand our footprint to even more communities across the country," a company spokesperson said in a statement. The spokesperson cited the new markets as "highly anticipated" and framed the push as establishing Cane's as "a go-to destination for Craveable Chicken Fingers from coast to coast."

What does the growth trajectory look like?

The November burst extends an aggressive year. The chain opened seven restaurants in August, when it marked its 30th anniversary, and five in July. In June it opened its first airport location, at Gate B19 in Terminal B of Dallas Fort Worth International Airport.

The expansion rests on unusually strong sales growth for a segment where most chains have struggled. According to Technomic, Raising Cane's posted a 32% sales increase in 2024. In 2025, sales rose another 10.6% while unit count grew 10.3%, finishing at $5.48 billion across 913 locations.

The ranking math is stark. Cane's is now the 16th-largest U.S. chain by sales, up two spots from 2024 and 30 spots from 2018, when it had $1.18 billion in sales and 400 locations. That is a near-quadrupling of sales and a doubling of units in seven years.

Founder Todd Graves has publicly stated a target of breaking into the top 10 restaurant brands in the United States. Closing a gap of six ranking positions will require sustaining double-digit growth at a moment when the broader Top 500 chain segment is slowing as consumers pull back on dining.

Can the pace hold?

The company frames November as a milestone, not a peak. Yet the statement offers no unit target for 2026, no average-unit volume figure and no detail on development costs for the new markets, so the economics of the acceleration remain undisclosed.

What the numbers do show is that growth is running on both engines at once: sales per existing dollar of business and new units are rising at nearly identical rates, 10.6% and 10.3% respectively. That balance suggests the gains are not purely new-store math. Still, Cane's has not disclosed same-store sales separately, which limits any read on mature-store momentum.

The category context helps. Technomic's Top 500 data shows coffee, beverages, snacks and chicken among the few thriving sectors in 2025, and Cane's sits squarely in the strongest of them. Whether that tailwind survives a tighter consumer spending environment will shape how quickly the chain converts 12 openings in one month into a durable path toward the top 10.