Buying an existing Freshii

What Freshii says about existing restaurants

Foodtastic’s Freshii page, read Oct 22, 2026, is written for a prospective new franchisee. It gives franchise conditions and site criteria and has no section on resales, no list of restaurants for sale and no transfer terms. Its absence from the page does not mean resales are impossible, and it does not mean they are supported. It means a buyer has no published franchisor terms to rely on and should get them from Freshii directly.

Reading a Freshii listing

A listing for a trading restaurant is written by its advertiser, and its asking price is what the advertiser wrote, not a valuation. Ask what lease, equipment and sales history come with it. The projected build cost Foodtastic publishes is a different thing: the franchisor’s figure for building a location. Compare the two with care.

The franchisor and the transfer

Ask the seller for the franchise agreement and read its transfer clause before anything else. Ask whether the franchisor must consent, what the transfer fee is, and whether you would have to complete training (does a resale require retraining?). Ask also whether the restaurant must be renovated to a current standard, because a required renovation changes the real price (do I have to renovate a franchise resale?). Who has to approve a franchise resale explains the two approvals that run on separate tracks.

Disclosure before you sign

In Ontario, British Columbia and Manitoba, the franchise statute, where disclosure applies, has the franchisor deliver a disclosure document at least 14 days before the earlier of your signing the franchise agreement or any other agreement relating to the franchise and your paying the franchisor or its associate any consideration relating to the franchise. Each Act lists exemptions, and one of them covers the grant of a franchise by a franchisee — what disclosure a resale buyer gets explains how the rule works when the seller is a franchisee rather than the franchisor.

Ontario’s Arthur Wishart Act (Franchise Disclosure), 2000 shows what such an exemption looks like. Section 5(7)(a) says the disclosure duty does not apply to “the grant of a franchise by a franchisee” if all four conditions hold: the franchisee “is not the franchisor, an associate of the franchisor or a director, officer or employee of the franchisor or of the franchisor’s associate”; the franchise is for the franchisee’s own account; in the case of a master franchise, the entire franchise is granted; and the grant “is not effected by or through the franchisor.” Section 5(8) adds that a grant is not “effected by or through” the franchisor merely because the franchisor has a right, exercisable on reasonable grounds, to approve or disapprove it, or because a transfer fee must be paid to the franchisor — one set out in the franchise agreement or no more than the franchisor’s reasonable actual cost of processing the grant. Whether an Ontario Freshii resale comes with a disclosure document therefore depends on the facts of the sale, which is a question for a franchise lawyer before you sign.