CAVA Group, Inc. CAVA

The business

CAVA sells build-your-own Mediterranean bowls assembled in front of the guest on a fast-casual line. Buyers are the lunch and dinner crowd that would otherwise be at Chipotle, and the company is paid in cash at the counter before it pays suppliers or landlords. Revenue is almost entirely company-operated restaurant sales, so every incremental dollar comes from opening more restaurants or moving more traffic through the ones already open.

The engine is unit economics. A restaurant absorbs capital up front, then throws off restaurant-level profit at a 25.7% margin, which is why capital spending consumes most of operating cash flow and only 22.2% survives as free cash. What changed is the profit line: operating income went from negative $59.8M in FY2022 to $79.3M in FY2025, four consecutive years of margin expansion while the count climbed to 476.