Jersey Mike's Founder Becomes Its UK Franchisee

Peter Cancro bought a single sub shop on the Jersey Shore in 1975, when he was 17. This month he opened another one, in London, as somebody else's franchisee.

Jersey Mike's opened its first UK restaurant on Nov. 9 at 1-4 Argyll Street, steps from Oxford Circus. It is the first shop under a master franchise agreement with Cancro to develop 300 restaurants across the UK and Ireland. The company expects four London locations by year-end, with Baker Street next in mid-November.

Cancro sold the chain to Blackstone in 2024, and Jersey Mike's went public this year in an offering that raised close to $1 billion, according to Nation's Restaurant News. It has about 3,400 units, 44 of them in Canada. Cancro now runs JM Submarines UK Ltd., the master franchisee.

"Having spent my career building this brand, it's incredibly rewarding to see Jersey Mike's open its first restaurant in the UK," Cancro said.

Here is why the arrangement matters. The master franchise is the hardest seat in international franchising. The master funds development, builds the operator bench and absorbs the learning curve in a market that has humbled plenty of American brands. Putting the founder in that seat is the strongest signal a franchisor can send that the first market cannot be allowed to wobble.

It also rhymes with a pattern we keep seeing: the people who built a brand coming back to own the operating risk. Burger King Spain's founder just bought his company back from Cinven.

Andy Skehan, Jersey Mike's president of international, told NRN the chain has about 14 priority markets and is talking with operators in Mexico, the Middle East, Korea and Continental Europe. "We've made a focus on quality over quantity, so we want to go at it in a very disciplined manner," he said.

The UK competition is thin in sandwiches and crowded everywhere else. Subway has more than 2,100 UK locations, down from 2,446 in 2019, according to Technomic data cited by NRN. Another U.S. brand, Houston TX Hot Chicken, plans a London opening in December.

Jersey Mike's says it sees room for about 7,500 international units someday. In London it has one.