Snooze, an A.M. Eatery is nearing 70 restaurants and has hired Amy Hom as chief operating officer, its second major executive change in under a year after CEO Josh Kern joined the Denver-based brunch brand in October 2025.

Hom arrives from Barcelona Wine Bar and started last month. Her mandate, she said, is operations discipline at a moment when the chain is trying to restart expansion.

The timing matters because Snooze is losing ground inside a category that's otherwise booming. According to Technomic data, Snooze is one of the few brunch brands whose sales growth has shrunk in recent years. Category leader First Watch, by contrast, is forecast to grow sales by 71% between 2022 and the end of 2026.

What does this change for Snooze?

Kern said in an interview that the company is "back on a growth trajectory" after a slowdown, with plans to open six or seven new restaurants in 2027, most likely in Phoenix and California. That pace is modest for a 70-unit brand — roughly a 10% unit increase in one year.

The leadership team frames the constraint as operational, not demand. Kern argues the brand has to prove each existing restaurant works before adding new ones.

"We feel that there's so much white space for the brand, but you have to be very careful. We have to have great restaurants today and earn the right to open new restaurants," Kern said. "That's the difficult part of a funky brand like Snooze that's a niche within the brunch and breakfast category. So, getting the right people in here for consistent operations is critical, and allows us to grow."

Hom's stated priorities from day one: listen to team members, focus on execution, and ramp up creative innovation. She framed the job as a consistency problem in a fast-moving menu environment.

"We are in an industry right now that has to be extremely nimble," Hom said. "So, things are constantly being innovated and turning on a dime. We need to stay ahead of that. For us, right now, it's about accountability. … When people leave Snooze, there's a little more skip in their step, so how do we stay consistent with that?"

Menu and beverage engineering come first

As the brunch category has grown, so have guest expectations — the menu is no longer just pancakes and eggs-any-style. Snooze's answer is beverage-led, even though it was early to daytime alcohol.

The chain was pouring mimosas years before First Watch added alcohol to its menu at all, but Kern said the program needs a refresh given how much the daypart has changed.

"We're the OG of adding cocktails to the morning daypart, but there's so much innovation now in this category, like mocktails, flavored coffees, smoothies — you name it," Kern said. "We're really leaning into that area and just recently relaunched our mimosas program."

The waitlist problem

Snooze isn't only competing with other full-service breakfast chains. Kern pointed to drive-thru coffee operators like Dutch Bros, which sell a fast morning fix with no table wait.

He called the waitlist the brand's "Achilles heel." Twenty years ago, when Snooze launched, a line out the door signaled buzz. Now that same line is a friction point against faster rivals.

"Now there's so much competition and we've got to get better in terms of managing expectations of when people get seated," Kern said. "People are busy and their time is constrained. They have a soccer game to get to in the afternoon."

With a new CEO and COO in place, a relaunched mimosa program and a six-to-seven-unit pipeline for 2027, Snooze is betting that tighter operations — not just its party-at-brunch positioning — close the gap with First Watch before the category's growth window narrows.