Dutch Bros Builds Growth Formula That Keeps Delivering

Dutch Bros is growing quickly, macroeconomic headwinds be damned.

The beverage chain delivered its eighth consecutive quarter of transaction growth in the second quarter, raised full-year guidance for the second time this year, and continued building a national expansion engine that now has roughly 90 percent of the development pipeline needed to reach 2,029 shops by 2029 already in place.

The brand finished Q2 with 1,225 shops. AUV was at $2.19 million.

Strong sales have come from several directions at once, including menu innovation, an expanding food program, digital engagement, and new-market performance that continues to exceed expectations.

Those results arrive as more companies chase beverage occasions, creating a category packed with new competitors. Dutch Bros CFO Josh Guenser believes the company’s momentum comes from stacking multiple growth drivers instead of relying on any single initiative.

Sales and unit growth

The company reported 32 percent revenue growth in the quarter, company-operated same-shop sales growth of 8.3 percent, and systemwide same-shop sales growth of 5.8 percent. During the earnings call, CEO Christine Barone said Dutch Bros recorded its 13th consecutive quarter of positive comparable sales and opened 48 new shops.

Food continues to play a larger role in that expansion.

Dutch Bros completed the rollout of its new food program across company-operated shops during the second quarter and has begun extending it into franchise locations capable of supporting the hot-food platform. The initiative targets a larger share of morning visits by giving customers another reason to stop at Dutch Bros during breakfast occasions.

Guenser says the rollout has performed as expected since testing began.

“We remain excited about the food program. It is delivering right in line with our expectations,” he says. “Our teams and our customers are loving it. We actually see that lift quite early and quite rapidly. Our teams are so excited they’re sharing it with customers and we see that as soon as we launch in our shops.”

Barone noted during the earnings call that the company intentionally built food to capture occasions it had previously missed. Customer feedback showed many guests loved Dutch Bros but occasionally visited competitors because they wanted breakfast sandwiches or other food items. The new menu gives the brand an opportunity to retain more of those visits while opening additional avenues for future menu development.

Innovation continues to extend well beyond food.

Dutch Bros recently introduced Myst, a plant-powered energy platform that debuted as a limited-time offer before quickly earning a permanent place on the menu. The product expanded the company’s already successful energy lineup led by Rebel and became one of the quarter’s biggest product launches.

For Guenser, the decision came after months of testing.

“As we were going through the Myst process of innovating and creating, it has been through quite some time,” he says. “We’ll test it in our shops to understand the operational complexities. We’ll get a lot of consumer feedback. We then do a market test before we then launch something even like this as an LTO.”

That preparation produced exactly the outcome the company expected.

“What we saw through the LTO program was exactly what we hoped and would expect,” Guenser says. “It is driving some incremental occasions. We do see some trade within the overall categories. But we see our energy platform grow as a result of adding this.”

Expansion efforts

Expansion continues to accelerate alongside those sales initiatives.

The company continues to see exceptional new-shop productivity and remains confident in opening at least 185 shops during 2026.

“We have been working over the past few years to really enhance our whole development process,” Guenser says. “We’ve been investing and focused on that process for some time now and have had continued confidence in our ability to achieve that goal. We really wanted to share having as much in the pipeline really just to reinforce the reason that we have so much confidence in our ability to get [2,029 shops] in 2029.”

The company continues to evaluate conversions, acquisitions, and franchise purchases as additional ways to grow its footprint.

Dutch Bros recently announced plans to acquire up to 65 former Salad and Go locations, adding to previous conversion efforts that included Clutch Coffee sites. The company also acquired a group of franchise restaurants in Phoenix after the longtime operator decided to retire. The company said during the earnings call that these opportunities supplement traditional development and allow Dutch Bros to accelerate growth in markets where it already has strong brand awareness.

“We continue to see incredible amount of opportunity ahead and whitespace ahead for us to continue our growth,” Guenser says. “We have converted shops in the past. We’ve actually converted a variety of different concepts over our history. So in our portfolio, always, we are looking at a mixture of conversion as well as ground up builds.”

Phoenix, in particular, stood out because of the company’s familiarity with the market.

“Salad and Go presented itself as an opportunity to get a hold of quite a few sites where we’re looking at acquiring up to 65 sites as a part of their process,” Guenser says. “A lot of those being in the Phoenix market where we continue to see a lot of continued whitespace ahead of us. We perform really well in this market. It’s our home market here with our headquarters now in the Phoenix area.”

Customer relationships

Growth also depends on maintaining close relationships with customers long after their first visit.

Dutch Rewards accounted for more than 73 percent of transactions during the quarter, giving Dutch Bros one of the industry’s highest loyalty participation rates. Customer segmentation has become a meaningful contributor to sales as the company expands its use of personalized offers and digital marketing.

“What it allows us to do is talk to customers in a very efficient way,” Guenser says. “Behind the scenes is us unlocking data capabilities, increased insights around that data that we have, so that when we’re providing offers they are the most relevant for the customers we’re targeting.”

The opportunity is still expanding.

“I’d say we’re still in the early innings of unlocking that capability,” Guenser says. “We see that as an opportunity to continue unlocking transaction growth over the longer term and doing that in a way that allows us to drive greater level of efficiency on the discount levels that we’re offering to drive people back into our shops.”

Mobile ordering represented roughly 16 percent of transactions during the quarter. Guenser says the company has no specific mix target because the objective is simply giving customers another way to visit Dutch Bros.

“We rolled out Order Ahead specifically because we wanted to create the capability for our customers because they were asking for it,” he says. “We’re happy to have people come through and visit Dutch Bros any way they’d like to. We’re not trying to target them coming through an individual channel, but want to make sure that we’re giving them every opportunity when they want to come to Dutch Bros.”

Inside the restaurants, Dutch Bros continues to invest in operational consistency.

Executives discussed a new shop scorecard that tracks business, customer, and employee performance across the system, allowing operators to compare results and identify best practices.

Guenser says the tool builds on one of the company’s strongest competitive advantages.

“We know we lead the industry in pleasant and friendly service,” he says. “Our teams deliver an incredible experience, and we want to continue providing the right level of data and insight for our teams to be able to continue executing consistently and understand where maybe one shop could lead in a certain area versus others so that we can learn across the board.”

The scorecard brings multiple performance indicators together in one place.

“It provides them with business insights and metrics to understand how we’re overall performing, provides them with people metrics to understand how their team is doing, and then provides them with customer metrics to understand how the customer is feeling when they come in,” Guenser says.

As beverage competition continues to expand across the industry, Guenser believes Dutch Bros’ advantage comes from combining hospitality with a product lineup customers cannot easily find elsewhere.

“I do believe what sets us apart from others is the incredible service that we offer that our teams in the field are delivering every single day,” he says. “We are the category creators of customized energy, so I do believe that our offering and our product lineup certainly positions us uniquely differentiated from many others out there. So when you take some of those together, I think we’re set up very well to continue competing in what has been a very competitive space.”