Chaiiwala has told the trade that its busiest month of openings to date shows it can roll out at scale. The Indian street food café franchisor lists more than 115 UK stores on its own franchise page, quotes an investment range of £180,000 to £300,000, and has spent 2026 adding drive-thru, shopping centre and motorway service formats to the estate.
Chaiiwala was founded in 2015 and began franchising the same year. It has been a British Franchise Association member since 2018, and the BFA’s franchisor listing puts the network at around 135 stores worldwide, of which roughly 108 are in the UK, 24 in Canada and three in Dubai. The company’s own franchise page gives a higher UK figure of more than 115. Both numbers come from the franchisor, and neither is independently verifiable: Companies House records no franchised outlet count. That gap between published and verifiable figures is worth understanding before comparing any of the coffee shop franchises recruiting in the UK.
The formats doing the work
The openings run across four formats rather than one. In August, the brand opened an express café of 320 sq ft at Roadchef Magor on the M4, its first Roadchef site in Wales, after earlier motorway openings at Watford Gap in 2025 and Sandbach. It also runs a container format, opened a drive-thru in Blackburn earlier in the year, and has added shopping centre sites including Nottingham’s Victoria Centre. Sohail Ali, co-founder of Chaiiwala, said travel sites were an exciting growth opportunity for the brand, allowing it to bring affordable Indian street food dishes to high-footfall destinations.
What the franchisor publishes about the offer
Chaiiwala’s franchise page puts the typical cost of a site at £180,000 to £300,000, varying with the site, the fit-out and the position, and describes a system covering site selection, fit-out, training, supply chain and marketing. Figures in that band sit at the upper end of the range set out in our guide to what it costs to open a franchise in the UK. The BFA listing carries a lower entry figure of £150,000+, which is the start-up cost recorded against its membership rather than a current quotation. Neither page publishes the initial franchise fee or the ongoing management service fee separately, and there is no disclosure document in the UK that would compel it.
Good to know
There is no franchise register in the UK and no statutory pre-contract disclosure requirement, so a network size and an investment range are whatever the franchisor publishes about itself. Where two official-looking figures disagree, as Chaiiwala’s 115+ and the BFA’s 108 do, both are the franchisor’s own numbers reaching print by different routes, and the date attached to each is what makes them usable.
Roadside and travel sites as the growth route
The pattern in the 2026 openings is that the brand is following other operators’ footfall rather than building its own. A Roadchef concourse, a motorway services building and a shopping centre unit all come with a landlord who has already solved the catchment question, which is the same route Greggs, Chopstix and Subway have taken into roadside and travel sites. Site selection of this kind is one of the first decisions in opening a coffee shop in the UK. For a franchisor, it also changes who the franchisee is: a services operator or an existing multi-site partner, rather than a first-time owner with a single high street unit.
What comes next
Chaiiwala has said it is working towards 500 sites globally, with more than 20 already trading in Canada and a Dubai presence alongside the UK estate. The number worth watching is the UK count and the date attached to it, since the franchisor’s own page and its BFA listing are currently seven stores apart. The other is the split between company-operated sites and franchised ones, a distinction explained in our guide to how franchising works in the UK, which neither source publishes and which decides whether a busiest month of openings is a franchising result or a company one. Operators weighing a site of their own can compare franchise opportunities across the UK.
