Kilwins has never made this particular list before. This year it did. Entrepreneur magazine named the confectionery and ice cream franchise to its 2026 Top Brands for Multi-Unit Owners ranking, a list that isn't judging cookies or customer reviews but the actual mechanics of what it's like to own several locations of a brand at once, incentives, support systems, and how much friction there is in scaling from one store to five.
Brian Britton, Kilwins' CEO, called the recognition an exciting milestone and a reflection of the opportunity the company has spent years building for its franchise partners, framing it less as an award for what Kilwins already is and more as validation that the multi-unit path actually works inside this particular system.
The timing lines up with something the brand has been building toward for a while: Kilwins Select, a smaller-footprint version of the traditional shop, trimmed down to a simplified build-out and a curated product lineup rather than the full in-store experience. It's designed specifically for high-traffic retail spots where a full-size Kilwins wouldn't fit or wouldn't pencil out financially, and it exists largely because the brand wants more people to be able to open more than one location without the second or third store requiring the same investment as the first.
Nearly 200 locations in, most of them owned by people who started with one and kept going, is exactly the kind of track record that gets a brand onto a list like this in the first place. More than half of Kilwins' operators eventually become multi-unit owners, and the numbers behind that pattern are part of the pitch: average annual unit volume across the system runs above $946,000, and franchisees have renewed their agreements at a 99 percent rate over the past 15 years, the kind of retention that's hard to fake if the economics weren't actually working for the people running the stores.
Attracting the next wave of multi-unit operators, though, and actually keeping track of them as interest turns into signed agreements, is a different problem than opening one more store. Gorilla Dash offers a Recruitment feature designed to help franchise brands manage that pipeline, keeping prospective multi-unit owners organized as a system like Kilwins works to convert recognition like this into real growth.
