Sean Black joined Happy Belly (HBFG-CN) about four years ago with a clear goal in mind.

“When I joined, we’re at about a million dollars a year business. And now we’re certainly approaching $100 million a year in business in about four years: that’s how we built it,” Black, the restaurant company’s chief executive officer said to FoodNX during an interview.

But he is not standing still at this level of success. “Our long-term goal is to build it to 1,000 restaurants doing a billion dollars a year in revenue. That’s our goal in Canada.”

To achieve the goal, the firm is in heavy-growth mode and its latest venture is opening 15 Yolks restaurants in Alberta.

“Our brand is Happy Belly, it’s a consolidator of emerging brands. We go out, find great growth brands that have great growth potential, and work to move them forward. We play the quarterback position: we give them the support whether it’s marketing operations, our knowledge of our team,” Black said.

“We’ve built and grown and sold some of Canada’s biggest brands.”

High-end breakfast operator

With Yolks, he said the market for an elevated breakfast experience was not being addressed.

“Yolks is a brand that it was referred to me as a better breakfast concept in the country. I went out to Vancouver, met the founder and the partners. Loved what they were doing and said, ‘Why don’t we scale this brand together?’ Partnered with them, and we started expanding it into Ontario.

"We’ve now expanded it into Quebec, and now Alberta will be the fourth province that we will be actively operating in shortly.”

Black — who previously worked at Quebec-based MTY Group as chief development officer, as well as co-founding brand incubator and operator Crave It Restaurant Group — has a clear strategy to grow the company.

“What we saw was a niche that was being missed, which was operating brands, typically between one, two locations to 10, 15, 20 stores. It’s a great concept, but they’re looking for help scaling it, whether it’s capital or resources or just knowledge,” Black said.

As part of the strategy, Happy Belly looks to partner with the original owner who has the vision to grow but maybe not the experience.

“Typically, we like finding founders that just need support and we come in as a partner. We help them scale it and get it to become a much larger brand.”

Happy Belly also recently acquired 50 per cent of the Ghost Taco fast casual restaurant chain and it’s moving to open two HEAL locations in Halifax.

Moving south of the border

Today, the company has 10 brands including iQ FOOD CO., Joey Turks Island Grill and HEAL Wellness, which is an acai bowl and smoothie shop restaurant soon expanding into Lubbock, Texas.

“We’re under construction in our first restaurant in the U.S. with one of our brands called HEAL. We’ve got deals for 10 of them, which was our initial deal in Texas and but we’re just doing a crawl, walk, run approach in the United States,” he said.

“We’re going to do the first few stores; measure the success rate, make sure we’re on good footing, and then continue to expand them, one at a time.”

Strong financial growth results

Quick-service restaurants (QSR) sales totalled $63.1 million in fiscal 2025, up 108 per cent versus the prior year ($30.30 million for 2024). The revenue increase was attributed to organic baseline restaurant growth, and an increased restaurant count, which reached 77 operating restaurants in 2025 versus 43 in the prior fiscal year.

This represented a 79 per cent increase in operating restaurant count, according to its latest financial results.

The growth plan is on track and set to explode over the next few years.

“We’ve got almost 700 stores sold in our development pipeline, so we’ve got very predictable growth for the next several years,” Black said.

“Our goal this year was to open 30 to 50 restaurants across Canada, and we will deliver on that.”