This is an estimated pre-tax owner-operator benefit range, not an official sweetFrog profit disclosure. The base scenario is about $17,000 per mature U.S. franchised outlet. A manager-run owner's residual could be materially lower because the range may include the economic value of work performed by an active owner.
The $1,000–$53,000 range is an independent analytical scenario. It is not an Item 19 financial performance representation by MTY Franchising USA, Inc. It combines sweetFrog Gross Sales figures from the 2026 Franchise Disclosure Document with a broad Internal Revenue Service sole-proprietorship margin benchmark and explicitly labeled sensitivity assumptions. Actual results can differ materially because of location, format, sales volume, product cost, labor, occupancy, financing, owner involvement and execution.
Legal franchisor: MTY Franchising USA, Inc., doing business as sweetFrog.
Item 19 status: Gross Sales only; no operating profit, net income, owner compensation or cash-flow disclosure.
FDD cohort: 185 existing U.S. franchised stores measured from December 1, 2024 through November 30, 2025.
Benchmark: IRS Tax Year 2023 Schedule C restaurant data; BLS May 2024 food-service-manager wages.
Formats: sweetFrog offers Traditional, Kiosk/Counter and Vehicle models, but Item 19 does not report format-level results.
Date checked: July 15, 2026. A matching official public-hosted copy of the FDD was not verified, so FDD citations are unlinked.
Median Gross Sales
All 185 reporting mature U.S. franchised outlets; revenue, not owner earnings.
Measured outlet coverage
About 91% of U.S. franchised stores open at fiscal year-end met the Item 19 inclusion rules.
Current percentage fees
5% royalty plus 1% non-traditional or 2.5% traditional advertising fee.
IRS net-income proxy
Schedule C net income less deficit divided by receipts for a broad restaurant category.
Manager labor benchmark
May 2024 median annual wage for food service managers in food services and drinking places.
What does the sweetFrog FDD actually report?
Officially, Item 19 reports Gross Sales, not owner earnings. For the December 1, 2024–November 30, 2025 measurement period, the median was $514,782 and the average was $529,775 across 185 mature U.S. franchised outlets. The disclosure combines eligible formats rather than showing Traditional, Kiosk/Counter and Vehicle economics separately.
The population excluded stores that opened for the first time during the fiscal year, outlets temporarily closed at year-end and outlets whose sales were estimated rather than reported as actual Gross Sales. MTY Franchising USA, Inc. states that the franchisee sales reports were not audited. Eighty-two of 185 stores, or 44%, met or exceeded the average; 93 stores, or 50%, met or exceeded the median.
How widely did official median Gross Sales vary by cohort?
The bottom-20%, all-outlet and top-20% medians are revenue observations, not profit or take-home pay.
Interpretation: the top-20% median was almost three times the bottom-20% median. This system variation is the strongest same-brand evidence for why a single earnings number would be unreliable.
Source: 2026 sweetFrog Franchise Disclosure Document, Item 19, pages 77–78. Gross Sales means revenue after sales tax, discounts, allowances and returns.
A $514,782 median does not tell a buyer how much cash the owner receives. Item 19 supplies no food cost, payroll, rent, utilities, insurance, repairs, merchant fees, depreciation, interest, manager pay or owner-compensation data. Those missing costs are why this article uses Mode C rather than presenting an “official owner salary.”
What annual owner earnings do the evidence-led scenarios produce?
The independent scenarios produce approximately $1,000, $17,000 and $53,000 of estimated pre-tax owner-operator benefit per year. These are Conservative, Base and Upside analytical cases—not probabilities, franchisor projections or guaranteed outcomes—and apply to the mixed-format mature outlet population disclosed in Item 19.
The IRS Tax Year 2023 row for “Restaurants (full & limited service) and drinking places” reported $77.217 billion of business receipts and $2.610 billion of net income less deficit across 653,372 nonfarm sole proprietorship returns. Dividing net income less deficit by receipts produces a 3.38% broad-industry proxy. The Conservative and Upside cases use 0.38% and 6.38%, which are the benchmark minus and plus three percentage points. That spread is an editorial sensitivity assumption, not IRS or sweetFrog performance data.
| Scenario | Gross Sales anchor | Margin assumption | Estimated owner-operator benefit |
|---|---|---|---|
|
Conservative Bottom-20% Item 19 median |
$277,664 | 0.38% | $1,057 about $1,000 |
|
Base All-outlet Item 19 median |
$514,782 | 3.38% | $17,403 about $17,000 |
|
Upside Top-20% Item 19 median |
$825,062 | 6.38% | $52,645 about $53,000 |
How large is the modeled owner-operator benefit range?
Each case changes both the official sales cohort and the independently assumed margin.
Interpretation: the model is highly sensitive to both sales position and the true store-level margin. A modest change in either variable can materially change the owner's result.
Sources and calculation: 2026 sweetFrog FDD, Item 19, pages 77–78; IRS nonfarm sole-proprietorship statistics, Tax Year 2023 Table 1. Calculations use full-precision inputs and are rounded only for the displayed summary.
- Includes: a broad Schedule C net-income measure after reported business deductions. It is used as an all-in proxy rather than a sweetFrog margin.
- Owner labor: a sole proprietor's own labor is not recorded as a deductible wage to the proprietor, so the estimate can combine business residual and compensation for work performed.
- Interest and depreciation: these can be included in Schedule C deductions; the result is not EBITDA.
- Debt principal and personal income taxes: excluded. The article does not estimate after-tax take-home pay.
- Capital expenditures: not treated as a recurring annual cash expense in the model; tax depreciation is different from actual replacement spending.
- Franchise fees: not subtracted again from the IRS all-in margin. Double-charging them would be inappropriate, although the broad IRS population does not isolate sweetFrog franchisees.
How does active ownership change the result?
Active ownership can materially increase the economic benefit retained by the owner, but part of that benefit is compensation for labor rather than passive business profit. Item 15 says sweetFrog is not seeking principals who merely want a passive investment, recommends substantial owner time and requires full-time on-premises supervision by a qualified owner or trained manager.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics food service manager profile reports a May 2024 median annual wage of $63,040 in food services and drinking places. At the $514,782 Item 19 median sales level, that wage alone equals approximately 12.2% of Gross Sales before payroll taxes, benefits or recruiting costs. This comparison shows why a manager-run model can produce substantially less residual owner cash than an owner-operated model.
- Owner-operator
- The owner may serve as the qualified full-time Manager. The modeled amount should be called owner-operator benefit because it may include both residual business profit and labor value.
- Manager-run owner
- A hired manager's compensation is an operating expense. The FDD does not disclose a compatible store-level profit figure from which that cost can be cleanly deducted, so no precise manager-run earnings range is supportable.
- Passive investor
- The FDD explicitly says the franchisor is not seeking principals who are merely pursuing passive investment. No passive-income figure is disclosed or estimated here.
The $63,040 BLS wage should not be added mechanically to, or subtracted mechanically from, the $17,403 Base scenario. The IRS sole-proprietorship population contains varied staffing structures, and its net-income figure does not identify whether a paid manager was present. The wage is a labor-value benchmark that demonstrates scale, not a sweetFrog expense disclosure.
Which franchise fees most directly affect earnings?
The principal current percentage burden is 6.0% of Gross Sales for a non-traditional unit and 7.5% for a Traditional unit. The 2026 FDD specifies a 5% Royalty Fee, a 2.5% Advertising Fee for Traditional Franchised Businesses and a 1% Advertising Fee for non-traditional Franchised Businesses. The advertising rate can be increased to as much as 3% on 30 days' notice.
Other recurring obligations include a $55 monthly POS help-desk fee when applicable, a $45 monthly sweetFrog Loyalty Program fee for the first POS plus $20 for each additional POS, a $6 monthly gift-card location fee, transaction-based gift-card fees and an annual meeting registration fee of up to $1,000. A data fee of up to $100 per month is disclosed but was not being charged as of the FDD date. These figures are official obligations, but Item 19 does not show their aggregate effect on outlet profitability.
Source: 2026 sweetFrog Franchise Disclosure Document, Item 6, pages 28–35. The official sweetFrog costs and fees page separately describes the Traditional, Kiosk/Counter and Vehicle investment formats; initial investment is not an annual operating expense and is not subtracted from one year of sales.
Why is the evidence confidence Limited?
Confidence is Limited because the only same-brand financial performance evidence is Gross Sales, while the earnings margin comes from a broad external tax dataset. The FDD supplies a large and clearly defined sales cohort, but it does not disclose store-level expenses, format mix, owner hours, paid-manager prevalence, occupancy, cost of goods, labor ratios, debt structure or owner distributions.
| Uncertainty | Why it matters | Evidence treatment |
|---|---|---|
| Format mix | Traditional, Kiosk/Counter and Vehicle units can have different sales, rent, labor and advertising rates. | Item 19 results remain combined; no format-level earnings claim is made. |
| Broad IRS category | The benchmark covers full-service restaurants, limited-service restaurants and drinking places, not frozen-yogurt franchises alone. | Margin is labeled an external proxy and receives Limited confidence. |
| Owner labor | Schedule C does not deduct a proprietor's wage, so net income may compensate both capital and labor. | Results are labeled owner-operator benefit, not passive profit. |
| Unaudited sales reports | Item 19 was prepared from franchisee reports that the franchisor says it did not audit. | Official sales figures are preserved with the stated limitation. |
| Outlet movement | Item 20 shows 203 franchised U.S. outlets at year-end 2025, compared with 216 at year-end 2023. | The change is treated as a diligence signal, not proof of profitability or loss. |
Item 20 reports six franchised openings, two non-renewals and seven outlets that ceased operations for other reasons during 2025, ending the year with 203 franchised outlets and no company-owned or affiliate-owned outlets. Because there were no company-operated stores, there is no same-brand corporate-store profit proxy to improve the estimate. The FDD also reports nine franchise owners who ceased operating under a Franchise Agreement and 14 owners who transferred an outlet during the year. Those counts do not disclose the financial cause of any event.
Source: 2026 sweetFrog Franchise Disclosure Document, Item 20, pages 79–85. For regulatory context, the Federal Trade Commission Franchise Rule Compliance Guide explains the framework for financial performance representations.
What should a buyer verify before relying on this range?
A buyer should replace the broad scenario assumptions with actual outlet-level evidence before making a decision. The most useful checks are written Item 19 substantiation, format-specific profit-and-loss statements and interviews with current and former U.S. franchisees whose stores resemble the proposed location.
- Request the Item 19 substantiation spreadsheets and confirm which Traditional, Kiosk/Counter or Vehicle outlets are represented in each cohort.
- Ask comparable franchisees for annual food and paper cost, payroll burden, occupancy, utilities, merchant fees, insurance, repairs, technology fees and local marketing.
- Separate owner wages, owner draws, distributions, retained earnings and business net income in every profit-and-loss discussion.
- Determine whether the owner works as the required full-time Manager and, if not, obtain a local all-in manager-compensation quote including payroll taxes and benefits.
- Ask about seasonality, store age, temporary closures, remodel spending, equipment replacement and whether the reported year included unusual events.
- Review Item 20 contacts for current, former and transferred outlets; ask why stores closed or changed hands without assuming the reason was financial.
- Model interest and principal payments separately. Do not treat pre-tax operating cash as after-tax personal take-home pay.
What is the most defensible earnings view?
The strongest defensible annual range is approximately $1,000–$53,000 of estimated pre-tax owner-operator benefit per mature U.S. outlet, with a Base scenario near $17,000. It is scenario-based, not an official sweetFrog earnings result. The most important driver is the combination of Gross Sales and the true store-level margin; the largest unresolved uncertainty is the absence of format-specific expenses and owner-role data in Item 19.
A manager-run owner should not assume the range is passive income. The $63,040 BLS food-service-manager wage benchmark shows that paid management can consume a material share of store economics, while Item 15 emphasizes active participation. Before relying on any figure, a buyer should reconcile the 2026 FDD Item 19 substantiation with comparable franchisee profit-and-loss statements and interviews, using consistent definitions for Gross Sales, business profit, owner labor compensation, debt service and personal taxes.
All monetary figures are U.S. dollars. Calculations are pre-tax and are not forecasts, guarantees or valuations.