---
title: "Inspire Brands Now Oversees Arby's, Buffalo Wild Wings, and R Taco Brands"
url: https://burnaze.com/article/b542bf86-46e0-4f82-965c-55dd9db57772
source: "Franchising.com"
original_url: https://www.franchising.com/articles/inspire_brands_now_oversees_arbys_buffalo_wild_wings_and_r_taco_brands.html
author: "Multi-Unit Franchisee"
category: "Chicken"
industry: "Restaurants"
segment: "Chicken"
topics: ["Finance & M&A"]
published: 2018-02-07T08:00:00.000Z
modified: 2026-11-01T04:11:17.476Z
image: https://imgs.franchising.com/art/articles/3755_plate.jpg
---

# Inspire Brands Now Oversees Arby's, Buffalo Wild Wings, and R Taco Brands

**TL;DR:** Inspire Brands, a new company formed through the merger of Arby's and Buffalo Wild Wings, will oversee the Arby's, Buffalo Wild Wings, and R Taco brands. The company, co-founded by Arby's CEO Paul Brown and Neal Aronson of Roark, aims to build a portfolio of distinct brands with high-growth potential.

*By Multi-Unit Franchisee, originally published in Franchising.com on 2018-02-07. [Read the original](https://www.franchising.com/articles/inspire_brands_now_oversees_arbys_buffalo_wild_wings_and_r_taco_brands.html).*

## Story

Arby’s acquired Buffalo Wild Wings this week in a $2.9 billion deal while at the same time creating a new company called Inspire Brands that will house Arby’s, Buffalo Wild Wings, and RTacos, “while building a platform for future strategic additions,” a statement said. Inspire was co-founded by Arby’s CEO Paul Brown and Neal Aronson of Roark (the Atlanta-based private equity firm).

Brown will serve as chief executive officer of the new company that will be based in Atlanta with a support center in Minneapolis. “We believe the time is right to create a different kind of restaurant company – one with a broad portfolio of distinct brands across a full spectrum of restaurant occasions,” said Brown. “Our goal is to build an organization that leverages the benefits of scale, not only to save cost, but also to enable outsized investments in long-term growth initiatives.”

Inspire Brands seeks to build a family of powerful, distinct restaurant brands that each have high-growth potential, both domestically and abroad. The statement said the organization is designed to enable each individual brand to benefit from and build off the strengths of the others. The company is one of the largest owner-operators of restaurants with more than 4,600 company-owned and franchised restaurants and more than 150,000 team members across 15 countries.

The combined 2017 global system sales of its restaurants were more than $7.6 billion. Brown told *The Wall Street Journal* that Inspire Brands plans to buy as many as 10 additional restaurant chains, with system-wide sales between $1 billion and $4.

5 billion apiece.

## Entities

- Franchising.com (publication)
- Restaurants (sector)
- brand expansion (topic)
- restaurant industry (topic)
- Multi-Unit Franchisee (person)
- Arby's (company)
- Inspire Brands (company)
- Buffalo Wild Wings (company)
- Paul Brown (person)
- merger and acquisition (topic)
- consolidation (topic)
- Arby's acquisition of Buffalo Wild Wings (deal)

---
Originally reported by Multi-Unit Franchisee, Franchising.com (https://www.franchising.com/articles/inspire_brands_now_oversees_arbys_buffalo_wild_wings_and_r_taco_brands.html). Summarized by Burnaze (https://burnaze.com/article/b542bf86-46e0-4f82-965c-55dd9db57772).