Stacy Brown was a stay-at-home mother raising four children when she turned her door-to-door meal delivery service into a multimillion-dollar restaurant concept. Chicken Salad Chick recently landed at Number 37 on the Inc. 5000 list, with $90 million in sales over the past three years and a growth rate of more than 6,000%. With 62 locations currently open, Brown plans on opening 30 to 40 new restaurants annually over the next few years.
“Although I now use the term ‘founder,’ that word didn’t exist for me nine years ago,” said Brown. “At that time, I was known as, ‘ The woman stupid enough to open a restaurant that only serves chicken salad.’ Thankfully, after a lot of hard work with my late husband, Kevin Brown, and many passionate team members, ‘founder’ is a title I now embrace passionately.”
Back in 2008, when her four children were between the ages of two and seven years old and she was working full-time to care for them at home, Brown started making chicken salad in her kitchen and selling it door to door. Then the Health Department called to let her know that what she was doing was illegal, and she was forced to shut the budding business down.
