Meritage Hospitality Group, a large Wendy’s franchisee, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and says it plans to keep its restaurants operating during the restructuring. The September 17 filing was made in the Western District of Michigan. Meritage’s announcement
Meritage said it operates 314 Wendy’s restaurants, along with a Bojangles restaurant and five independently branded concepts across 15 states. The filing concerns the franchise operator, rather than The Wendy’s Company.
The company intends to continue paying its approximately 9,000 employees and maintaining benefits, subject to court approval. It also said it was seeking debtor-in-possession financing to support the business during the case.
The financial strain was visible before the filing. In July, Meritage reported second-quarter sales of $150 million, down from $163.5 million a year earlier, when its portfolio included roughly 40 more restaurants. It recorded a $13.6 million quarterly net loss, including $13.8 million in one-time restructuring and closing costs. Meritage’s second-quarter report
Those figures make the sequence important: the operator had already been shrinking and restructuring before it sought court protection. The latest filing adds a court-supervised process to those efforts.
For diners, the company’s stated plan is continued service. For employees and suppliers, the next developments to watch are the court’s decisions on operating requests and financing. A plan to maintain operations is not a guarantee that every location will remain unchanged throughout the case.
Meritage’s July results had described an effort to improve the business through closures of underperforming restaurants, changes to operating hours and internal cost reductions. The bankruptcy now puts the company’s longer-term financial structure at the center of that work.
File photo: A Wendy’s restaurant in Bentonville, Arkansas, photographed in June 2023. The pictured location has not been identified here as a Meritage-operated restaurant. Photo by EEJCC, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0; image unchanged.
