Item 19 data on six juice and smoothie franchises: Smoothie King's $627,210 median on 1,087 units, Playa Bowls' $1,094,086, and what each sample omits.
Quick answer Smoothie King discloses a $627,210 median on 1,087 franchised units, the largest and least filtered Item 19 sample in the category. Playa Bowls reports a higher $1,094,086 median, but on 223 traditional outlets that exclude seasonal locations and every store opened during the year. Entry costs start at $208,700.
Playa Bowls franchisees posted a median of $1,094,086 in gross sales for calendar 2025. Main Squeeze Juice Co. franchisees posted $401,489. Both brands sell cold, fast, health-coded food out of a small retail lease, and both charge a 6% royalty. The gap is 2.7x, and very little of it is explained by the concept.
Most of it is explained by which units each franchisor chose to put in the table.
Six brands in this category filed a most-recent FDD with an Item 19 revenue figure you can actually use. Here is what they disclose, and on whom.
| Brand | Item 7, single-store format | Franchise fee | Item 19 median | Sample | Whose units |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Poke Bowl United | $224,000 to $506,000 | $45,000 | $1,660,863 | 9 | Company outlets, all in New York City |
| Playa Bowls | $281,960 to $1,055,594 | $35,000 | $1,094,086 | 223 | Franchise outlets, operational and traditional only |
| Smoothie King | $329,850 to $683,715 | $30,000 | $627,210 | 1,087 | All franchised units |
| Jamba | $480,850 to $941,300 | $20,000 | $624,754 | 488 | All traditional franchises |
| Main Squeeze Juice Co. | $427,050 to $656,500 | $49,500 | $401,489 | 22 | Qualifying franchised stores |
| Everbowl | $208,700 to $390,950 | $39,950 | not published | 58 of 95 | Franchised stores, heavily filtered |
Sorting that table by the median column gives you the wrong ranking. Sorting it by the last column gives you the right one.
That Item 7 column needs a note, because the ranges circulating for this category are routinely quoted wrong. Several of these brands file more than one investment table, and the widely repeated spans splice the cheapest line of one to the priciest line of another. Smoothie King’s inline and end cap format tops out at $683,715. Its free-standing drive-thru is a separate filing, $639,950 to $1,278,900. Quoting “$329,850 to $1,278,900” as one range describes no store anyone builds. Format choice moves more capital here than brand choice does.
Smoothie King’s fiscal 2025 Item 19 covers 1,087 franchised units and labels them exactly what they are: all franchised units. The arithmetic behind that number is disclosed line by line. The system closed the year with 1,242 units, 1,200 of them franchised. Of those, 1,116 had been open for the full 13-month reporting period. Twenty-nine came out for mechanical reasons the FDD names: not scheduled to be open daily, closed more than eight weeks, or not running the required POS. That leaves 1,087, or 91% of the franchised system.
The median is $627,210 and the average is $662,015. A 5.5% gap between those two is small, which tells you the distribution is not badly skewed by a handful of monsters at the top. The range is another matter: $142,703 at the floor, $2,278,731 at the ceiling. The top 10% of units carry a $1,042,045 median. The bottom 25% average $422,136.
No brand in this category discloses more units, and none applies fewer filters. So when a competitor’s median beats $627,210, the useful first question is not what that brand does differently in the store. It is how many of its units are in the table. The full fee stack is in our Smoothie King franchise cost breakdown, and the closest head-to-head sits in Tropical Smoothie vs Smoothie King.
The label on the Playa Bowls table reads “Operational Franchise Outlets” and “Traditional Outlets,” and three separate exclusions are packed into that phrasing.
“Operational” drops every outlet that opened during the year. Playa Bowls opened 85 franchised outlets in 2025, and none of them appear. “Traditional” drops seasonal and non-traditional locations, which matters more than it sounds for a brand that grew out of the Jersey Shore. Twenty-seven of the 250 operational franchise outlets are classified as Other Outlets, and Playa Bowls discloses those separately at a $489,501 median. “Franchise” is the straightforward word in the label: company outlets get their own table.
The honest read is two-tiered. A year-round Playa Bowls in a normal retail location has a credible shot at seven figures, and the disclosed quartiles back that up. The top quartile of 55 outlets averaged $1,639,605, and even the bottom quartile averaged $668,207 against a floor of $423,386. A seasonal Playa Bowls is a different business with a median under half a million. Both are franchises of the same brand. Only one of them is inside the headline number.
That is the mechanism covered in Item 19 average vs median and survivorship bias, operating at the segment level rather than the statistic level. The food and beverage brand list carries the Item 7 range and unit counts for every filed FDD we hold.
Jamba’s fiscal 2025 median across all traditional franchises is $624,754 on 488 stores, which lands $2,456 below Smoothie King’s. Two systems, near-identical median unit volume, very different deals underneath.
Item 7 is where they separate, and Jamba files four tables rather than one. A non-traditional Jamba runs $249,025 to $825,200. A traditional store without a drive-thru is $480,850 to $941,300. Add the drive-thru and it becomes $517,000 to $960,700. The $1,811,400 top end that gets quoted around belongs to an Auntie Anne’s co-branded location, a format most candidates are not evaluating.
One line in Jamba’s table is worth more than its median. Drive-thru stores posted a $622,111 median across 35 units; stores without a drive-thru posted $626,724 across 453. The drive-thru does not move volume in this system. It moves cost, by roughly $36,000 at the low end of Item 7.
Jamba’s sample also leaves out 32 traditional franchises that permanently closed during fiscal 2025, all open at least 12 months before closing. That exclusion is standard and disclosed. It is also about 6% of the traditional base, and no Item 19 here has to show what those stores were doing on the way down.
Everbowl is the lowest entry cost in the category at $208,700 to $390,950 against a $39,950 fee. Its Item 19 covers 58 of 95 franchised stores. Among the 37 exclusions are seven stores whose vendors stopped shipping inventory after the stores failed to pay what they owed. A franchisor is entitled to exclude units that could not sell the full menu. A buyer should still register that seven of 95 franchisees were behind with suppliers in a single year.
Everbowl also publishes no all-unit median. It publishes halves. The top 29 stores averaged $563,871 with a $481,923 median; the bottom 29 averaged $374,615 with a $369,810 median. The boundary between the two halves falls between $424,142 and $427,881, so the real all-unit median sits in that band, roughly $55,000 below the $481,923 figure that tends to get quoted from the top-half row.
Main Squeeze Juice Co. discloses 22 qualifying stores out of 28 franchised, which is too thin to rank on but straightforward about being thin. The median is $401,489 against a $371,108 average, and the range runs $101,476 to $567,856. A top-quartile store averages $516,930. A bottom-quartile one averages $209,721. At 28 total units, a single soft market moves the entire disclosure.
Poke Bowl United reports a $1,660,863 median, higher than anything Playa Bowls discloses. It comes from nine company outlets, all of them in New York City, inside a system of 12 outlets total, 10 company owned and two franchised. Nothing in that table describes a franchisee.
The brand is also the only one here that discloses a cost line at all: 22.58% food, 21.41% payroll, 19.44% gross profit against average gross sales. Those percentages are the most useful data in the whole category, and the FDD’s own notes say the outlets behind them pay no royalty and no brand fund contribution. Add 7% of sales back and the margin picture moves.
Every other brand on this list discloses revenue and stops. Building a margin model from these documents means working from Item 6 and Item 7 and validation calls, using the method in franchise unit economics analysis.
Run each median through royalty and ad fund before anything else touches it.
Smoothie King charges 6% royalty plus a 3% ad fund, so 9% of $627,210 is $56,449 gone before rent. Playa Bowls charges 6% plus 2%, and 8% of $1,094,086 is $87,527. Jamba charges 6% plus an ad fund of 3% to 5%, which on $624,754 works out to somewhere between $56,228 and $68,723 depending on where that fund lands. Main Squeeze, at 8% of $401,489, gives up $32,119.
Playa Bowls leaves the most gross dollars in the store after fees, by a wide margin, and that is the correct read of $1,094,086 as long as the location you are signing is year-round and traditional. Smoothie King owns the most reliable number, because 1,087 units is a sample you can plan a decade against. Those are two different questions and a serious buyer answers both before signing anything. The açaí side of the category runs on the same rules with a shorter track record.
Pull the two or three brands you are actually weighing into a side-by-side comparison and read the sample definitions next to each other. In this category the definitions decide the ranking more often than the medians do.
Get the full 12-section FDD analysis — $49
Real franchise data, real Item 19 numbers, personalized to your capital and location. Comparing 2–3 brands? The 3-pack is $99.
Browse franchises · pick your brand Or see a real sample report →
Get this comparison as a spreadsheet.
We'll email you the full comparison spreadsheet: every brand in this category with its Item 7 investment range and royalty, side by side. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
✓ Check your inbox
The comparison spreadsheet is on its way.
The only franchise report written entirely for the buyer. 12 sections covering financial risks, legal obligations, and a personalized recommendation.
Browse Franchise Library See a real sample report →
$49 per brand · $99 for a 3-brand pack
best smoothie franchisesjuice bar franchise costPlaya Bowls franchise costSmoothie King franchise revenueacai bowl franchiseItem 19 comparisonhealthy food franchise
About this analysis The franchise data in this article is drawn from VetMyFranchise's structured analysis of 2,300+ Franchise Disclosure Documents filed with U.S. state regulators. See our data & methodology.
Between $208,700 and $1,278,900, depending on brand and format. Everbowl is the cheapest entry in the category at $208,700 to $390,950 with a $39,950 franchise fee. Smoothie King runs $329,850 to $683,715 for an inline or end cap location and $639,950 to $1,278,900 for a free-standing drive-thru, which is why its published range looks so wide. Playa Bowls discloses $281,960 to $1,055,594 for a single shop.
Item 19 in this category tells you almost nothing about profit. Five of the six brands with a usable disclosure publish revenue and stop there. The only cost lines disclosed anywhere in the category belong to Poke Bowl United, which reports 22.58% food and 21.41% payroll across nine company outlets that pay no royalty. Build a margin model from Item 6, Item 7, and validation calls instead.
Playa Bowls reports the higher median at $1,094,086 against Smoothie King's $627,210, but the two samples are not comparable. Smoothie King's covers all 1,087 qualifying franchised units. Playa Bowls' covers 223 year-round traditional franchise outlets and excludes 27 seasonal and non-traditional ones plus all 85 outlets that opened during 2025. A year-round Playa Bowls in a normal retail location does clear seven figures on the disclosed quartiles.
1,242 units as of December 29, 2025, of which 1,200 are franchised and 42 are company operated. The system opened 81 franchised units during that fiscal year. Thirty-three units permanently closed during the reporting period and are excluded from the Item 19 tables, which the FDD discloses directly.
Everbowl, at $208,700 to $390,950 with a $39,950 franchise fee and 95 franchised stores. Nautical Bowls is close behind at $220,200 to $439,850 with a $20,000 fee across 70 units, though it does not disclose a median in a form that supports ranking. Low entry cost in this category tracks with thinner disclosure, so price the diligence work in.
This page is part of VetMyFranchise. View all pages: llms.txt · llms-full.txt