Joe & The Juice Wants 1,000 Stores. Can It Stay Cool?

By Tam Goldsmith

Joe & The Juice wants to double to 1,000 stores. Franchising can get it there, but can it scale without losing what made the brand work?

The Danish brand has passed 500 stores and wants to double that number. Franchising can provide the local operators and capital to make it happen, but Joe & The Juice has built its success on something harder to scale than coffee, juice and sandwiches: personality.

Joe & The Juice has spent more than 20 years making a juice bar feel like somewhere people actually want to hang out. The music is loud, the stores are distinctive and the people behind the counter are expected to have some personality. It is a long way from the traditional coffee-shop formula, and that has helped a business born in Copenhagen travel remarkably well.

Now it wants to travel much further. Joe & The Juice passed 500 stores in 2026 and operates across more than 20 markets, with the company ultimately targeting 1,000 locations. Revenue reached DKK 3.3 billion in 2025, up 16.5%, while same-store sales increased 6%.

Those numbers give Joe a strong base for its next stage of growth. They also create an interesting problem: how do you double the size of a business when part of what customers are buying is the way the place feels?

Joe Sells the Experience

Juice, coffee and sandwiches are not difficult products for competitors to copy. Joe's advantage has been wrapping them in a brand customers recognise before they have even reached the counter.

The Scandinavian interiors are part of it, as are the music and deliberately informal service. Employees, known as Juicers, have traditionally played a visible role in the experience. Joe has also pushed the brand into fashion and culture through collaborations that make sense to the customers it wants to attract.

When the company reached 500 stores, it even chose to celebrate store 501 in New York through a collaboration with Levi's 501 rather than simply issuing another expansion announcement.

That might sound like marketing fun, but there is a serious business point behind it. Joe has spent years giving customers reasons to remember the brand beyond the drink in their hand. As the company expands through franchising, those details become part of what franchise partners are being asked to reproduce.

Culture Is Hard to Franchise

A franchisor can specify how a sandwich is made, which blender to buy and exactly how a store should look. Teaching hundreds of new employees in different countries how the brand should feel is a different job.

Joe has some useful experience here. The company has long placed emphasis on developing people internally, with employees progressing from stores into more senior positions. That helps preserve knowledge of how the business actually operates as it grows.

The challenge becomes greater when more locations are operated by franchise partners. Joe reached 100 franchised stores during 2025 and opened 33 franchise locations that year. Franchising is playing an increasingly important role in markets outside the company's core directly operated territories.

This makes partner selection critical. The best partner is unlikely to be simply the group offering to open the most stores. Joe needs operators capable of running a disciplined food and beverage business while understanding why customers chose Joe in the first place.

Local Partners Could Be the Answer

This is where franchising can become an advantage rather than a threat to the brand.

Joe does not need Copenhagen to understand every shopping centre, labour market and customer habit around the world. Experienced franchise partners can bring that knowledge with them.

In India, the company is working with Aditya Birla New Age Hospitality. In Greece, franchise partner Kraveit opened the country's first Joe & The Juice in Athens in May 2026, with another planned for Glyfada. The brand has also developed a significant franchise presence across the Middle East.

These partners know things a team sitting in Denmark cannot reasonably be expected to know in the same detail: where customers spend time, what property works, how people are recruited and how a brand needs to operate locally.

Joe supplies the name, products, systems and experience developed across hundreds of stores. The franchise partner supplies capital, local management and market knowledge. That division of responsibility is one of the reasons franchising can make international expansion considerably more practical.

The Second 500 Will Be Different

Joe also has substantial investment behind its growth. General Atlantic became majority shareholder in 2023, while Emirates International Investment Company took a minority stake in 2026 in a transaction that valued the company at $1.8 billion.

Getting from 500 to 1,000 stores, however, will require more than capital. Every new country brings different property costs, employment practices, customer habits and competitors. The larger the business becomes, the easier it is for small compromises at store level to become noticeable across the network.

The answer is not to make every location a perfect copy of Copenhagen. International franchising works because good local operators are allowed to use their knowledge while protecting the parts of the concept customers expect to remain consistent.

For Joe, that means being clear about what really makes a Joe & The Juice store a Joe & The Juice store. The recipes can be written down. The design can be specified. The harder work is recruiting people who can deliver the same energy and service while still making the business feel natural in Athens, Mumbai or Dubai.

If Joe gets that balance right, its franchise partners could become the people who protect the personality of the brand rather than dilute it.

What We Can Learn From This

Joe & The Juice shows why lifestyle brands should treat franchise partner selection as seriously as site selection when expanding internationally. The company should protect the handful of things that make Joe recognisable while giving experienced local operators enough freedom to build businesses suited to their own markets. Franchising can provide capital, property knowledge and local management without requiring Joe to operate every new store from Copenhagen. If those partners can preserve the character that made the first 500 stores successful, they could be the reason the next 500 work.