Seidel loaded his car 30 years ago and moved to Colorado with a dream for a restaurant and not much else. Today, Snarf’s is the industry’s fastest-growing sandwich concept.
A bout the only thing Jimmy Seidel had when he moved from Chicago to Boulder, Colorado, 30 years ago was a business plan for a sandwich concept and $65,000 in the bank. That, plus a remarkable amount of faith that he could create a better res- taurant. He certainly didn’t have any restaurant experience. When he got to Boulder he poured everything into his idea, including every cent of that bank account. Seidel had to borrow money from his skeptical parents just to pay rent. Seidel’s first site was a 650-square-foot “shack” badly in need of just about everything. Oh, and about a half-dozen restaurants had moved into that shack over the previous decade, only to close. “Everybody said it was a cursed location,” Seidel said in an interview. Naturally, Seidel’s restaurant, Snarf’s Sandwiches, broke even from Day 1. Fast-forward to 2025, and that tiny shack has evolved into one of the country’s fastest-growing restaurant chains and made its debut on the Technomic Top 500 Chain Restaurant Report. Snarf’s finished 2024 with 47 locations—it now has 50— while system sales grew 53% to $75 million. Perhaps more impressively is the way it’s stood out in the sandwich sector. Total sandwich chain sales last year declined 0.4%, according to data from Restaurant Business sister company Technomic. Among quick-service sandwich brands like Snarf’s, total sales declined 3.25%. It’s not just Subway, either. The median sales change last year in the fast-food sandwich space was a decline of 3%. All of which makes Snarf’s performance stand out. And it validates the reason Seidel packed his things in a 1980 Cadillac Seville and made the 15-hour drive to Colorado. “I thought I could make a better sandwich than was out there,” Seidel said. But first he had to overcome his own inexperience and an awful lot of doubt.
BY JONATHAN MAZE
JONATHAN.MAZE@INFORMA.COM
JIMMY SEIDEL WITH SOME OF HIS SANDWICHES. | PHOTOS COURTESY OF SNARF’S SANDWICHES.
JULY 2025 RESTAURANT BUSINESS
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