NEW ORLEANS, March 17, 2014 – Smoothie King Franchises, Inc., the premier smoothie and nutritional lifestyle center, announced today its new Veggie Blends, aimed to help guests get their greens in a delicious, convenient way. Using carrots and kale, Smoothie King’s three new smoothies — Berry Carrot Dream, Apple Kiwi Kale and Carrot Kale Dream — are packed with good for the body vitamins and minerals, are under 300 calories and feature a fresh, fruity taste to fool the taste buds of both adults and children.

Smoothie King’s new Berry Carrot Dream smoothie blends carrots with strawberries, orange juice, bananas and apple juice, creating a sweet and tangy way to get a daily dose of Vitamin A. Apple Kiwi Kale blends superfood kale with apple juice, kiwi juice blend and bananas, resulting in a Granny Smith apple taste that is loaded with fiber, iron, Vitamin K, Vitamin A, Vitamin C, calcium, antioxidants and organosulfur compounds. Finally, Carrot Kale Dream features carrots and kale blended with orange juice, bananas, apple juice and vanilla protein, creating a Dreamsicle-like orange and vanilla flavor.

“At Smoothie King, our mission is to inspire a healthy and active lifestyle for our guests. Nearly three-quarters of adults are not eating enough vegetables and our new Veggie Blends encourage guests to incorporate more vegetables into their diet in a way that tastes great,” says Wan Kim, owner and CEO of Smoothie King. “As we continue to demonstrate our leading position in the smoothie category, we are confident Veggie Blends will be a strong traffic-driver for our more than 650 corporate- and franchise-owned locations around the world.”

With the addition of carrot and kale to Smoothie King’s menu, guests now have the option to add the nutrient-rich vegetables to any of their favorite smoothies, including Kids’ Kups.

“In test markets, we received positive feedback from parents that added carrots or kale to their children’s favorite smoothies,” says Chris Webb, director of company store operations at Smoothie King. “We’ve had guests add kale to our Blueberry Heaven and Pure Recharge offerings and carrots to Orange Kabam. It’s a great way to further enhance the nutritional value of any of our already nutrient-rich smoothies.”

To find out more about Veggie Blends or see the full menu of offerings from Smoothie King, visit www.smoothieking.com. To learn more about the benefits of owning a Smoothie King, or for more information and to register for a Discovery Day, please visit www.smoothiekingfranchise.com or contact Natalie Johnson at natalie.johnson@smoothieking.com or (985) 635-6984.

Media Contact

Ashley Rodriguez – Fish Consulting
arodriguez@fish-consulting.com
571.312.6174

NEW ORLEANS (February 6, 2014) — New Orleans Pelicans Owner Tom Benson and Smoothie King Owner Wan Kim announced today a multi-year agreement reached between the Pelicans and Smoothie King to name the New Orleans Arena the “Smoothie King Center.”

“Smoothie King and the NBA are a perfect fit,” said Wan Kim, CEO of Smoothie King which created the original nutritional smoothie in 1973. “Both organizations are global brands that continue to grow in status and stature. Smoothie King supports the NBA and the New Orleans Pelicans franchise, and we think this partnership reflects our joint interests in nutrition, health and athletics from an international to a local perspective.”

New Orleans Pelicans and Saints Owner/Chairman of the Board Tom Benson said, “When we purchased the franchise and became the Pelicans, we were establishing a new winning tradition for our hometown NBA team. Introducing our home court as the Smoothie King Center is one of the goals we set when we purchased the team and we’re excited to partner with a locally-incepted company in Smoothie King. They are an international brand with more than 600 locations in the United States and Asia and they have experienced that growth while remaining local. The NBA, Smoothie King, and the Pelicans are committed to excellence on and off the court.”

Pelicans Owner/Vice Chairman of the Board Rita Benson LeBlanc said, “This is an exciting time for the franchise as we introduce the Smoothie King Center and prepare to host the 2014 NBA All-Star Game, where New Orleans will once again be an international stage to host the league’s most exciting event of the season. As a venue, the Smoothie King Center will continue to be enhanced with custom, state-of-the-art improvements into next season. The Smoothie King Center will complement the recent renovation of the Mercedes-Benz Superdome and Champions Square, giving fans three of the premier venues for sports and entertainment. In addition, both the Pelicans and Smoothie King brands are passionate about healthy living and supporting athletics at all levels. We look forward to working together to enhance the quality of life of all our collective fans.”

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal said, “I want to congratulate and thank everyone on this exciting news. What a great Louisiana success story. I want to thank Wan for not only growing this brand across the country and around the world, but for expanding Smoothie King’s headquarters and keeping it here in Southeast Louisiana. This is a great marriage between Smoothie King and our New Orleans Pelicans. I know the Smoothie King Center is going to be home to many exciting games and events, starting with next weekend’s NBA All-Star Game.”

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu said, “We are thrilled to have a hometown company supporting both the New Orleans Pelicans and one of our premier event facilities. This exciting partnership with Smoothie King will help promote the ongoing events we welcome to our city every month starting with the upcoming 2014 NBA All-Star Game.”

The naming rights agreement between the Pelicans, the State of Louisiana and Smoothie King is for 10 years. A new Smoothie King Center logo will adorn the roof of the building and the new Smoothie King Center name and logo will appear on the facility’s exterior facade, on the Pelicans home basketball court, the team’s scoreboard and in numerous locations throughout the facility.

The Smoothie King Center will also feature visuals that reinforce the brand’s new purpose-driven positioning. Fans will see messages encouraging them to “Feel Taller” and “Get More Jump in Your Game” with Smoothie King’s Energy and Fitness Blends.

With the NBA hosting its annual All-Star Game and associated activities in New Orleans the weekend of February 14-16, fans attending the newly-named Smoothie King Center will be greeted by a 20-foot high Smoothie King cup at the building’s main entrance on Gravier Street across from the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. A new Smoothie King retail outlet will offer visitors numerous varieties of its signature purposeful smoothies to enjoy for sporting events and other entertainment offerings held at the Smoothie King Center.

Media Contact

Ashley Rodriguez – Fish Consulting
arodriguez@fish-consulting.com
571.312.6174

Originally Published by Franchise Times.

Nearly five years, almost 40 stores and $9 million into his effort to introduce smoothies to his fellow South Koreans, Smoothie King franchisee Wan Kim was starting to sweat.

He had defied his father in a culture that forbids rebellion, when he left his place as heir-apparent to a $200-million electronics manufacturer that supplied the storied likes of Samsung and Sony.

He raised $15 million from individual investors to start a venture capital firm in Seoul, dazzled just a few years earlier by soaring tech stocks while in graduate school in the Silicon Valley. But the company went bust, and his investors lost their money.

Now his Smoothie King stores were slurping up cash—because they were flashy, the way Kim believed they had to be to impress his countrymen, not like the modest shops in the United States where Smoothie King began. “I wanted to make sure our stores looked premium,” he says. “I needed to make the market.”

His store in Seoul’s version of Times Square, for example, was two stories tall with 150 seats, required a $1.3-million deposit to secure the lease and cost $33,000 a month for rent—at only one location, and he had bested two much-larger competitors in 2003 to win the rights to build 50 stores over five years in South Korea.

“For the first five years we were struggling a lot. We were losing a lot of money,” Kim recalls. “Even my father was saying, ‘You failed. Close the business.’” But then Kim’s fortunes began to turn, perhaps because he finally had opened enough stores to establish the brand in a chaotic and crowded city, although Kim himself can’t pinpoint the exact reason even today.

Stores became profitable and he started sub-franchising, zooming to 130 stores total over the next five years. But the biggest move was yet to come. He convinced Standard Chartered Bank Private Equity, the investment arm of the venerable U.K. institution, and National Pension of the Republic of Korea to back his $50-million buyout of the 40-year-old Smoothie King system, based in an outpost near New Orleans and still in the hands of the founders, Steve and Cindy Kuhnau.

Now Kim, who just turned 41 and looks easily a decade younger, has a major challenge ahead. He aims to pump money into a system that has stagnated, add 1,000 stores by 2017 (on top of 621 now, $180 million in systemwide sales and No. 230 on the Franchise Times Top 200) and return the brand to its founders’ core mission—healthy eating, when competitors as formidable as McDonald’s tout their smoothies as a treat.

But those are items on a to-do list, and this earnest young man who appears more like a prep-schooler than a business mogul has grand thoughts, too. “I think I always wanted to be bigger than my father,” he says quietly at one point during a lengthy interview in the company’s new offices, with an expansive view of the massive Lake Pontchartrain in Metairie and a metaphor for new horizons.

Kim’s wish to transform Smoothie King is personal, yes, a vindication for this oldest son who broke with his father when he couldn’t take the rigid hierarchy that rules South Korean life. But he’s also thinking of his franchisees around the world and his employees at headquarters.

“If my dream is not big enough to hold everyone else’s dream, then they should not work for me,” he says.

The day after the interview is July 25, the first day of Smoothie King’s annual convention, and franchisees are pouring in to meet their new CEO—more than 700 attendees in all are expected, a record for the system.

The executive team is nervous. They’ve been promising changes for the franchisees since the transaction closed, almost a year earlier, but everything is taking a lot longer than planned.

Kim was focusing on reducing COGS, for example, or the cost of goods sold, but then learned those contracts for food and supplies have terms and he has to wait for them to end. The entire year of 2012 and half of 2013 came and went without the introduction of a new smoothie flavor—an eternity in the fast-food business where customers crave the next hot thing.

“I think for the last year I haven’t delivered something to them. I said this will change, that will change,” he says. “I am trying to deliver some of the promises and explain what has happened.”

As a former franchisee himself, he knows the drill. “Franchisees always, always have to make some complaints, and trust me—for 10 years I made the complaints,” he says.

Now it’s show time for the new CEO, and as franchisees file in, greeting each other loudly, he and his team are intense. Kim bounds on stage to a heavy beat, then exhorts those assembled to get back to the company’s mission: to inspire people to live healthy and active lifestyles, he says, in heavily accented English that’s tough to understand in the large space. But the franchisees are leaning forward to catch every word, appearing eager for change.

The Kuhnaus are beloved in the company, and Kim and all the other executives express their admiration for what the husband-and-wife team built. But there’s also this: When companies last 40 years, without an infusion of capital or management, change needs to come.

Kim had said it himself in the interview the day before. “I felt so sorry for it,” about the brand in the years right before his purchase, although he worried he sounded disloyal, and he repeated his high regard for the founders. “If you love something and they’re not doing it right, you feel sorry.”

The big reveal this morning is Smoothie King’s new logo, which they paid “seven figures” to WD Partners, a design and branding firm in Dublin, Ohio, to develop over the past year. After all the focus groups and market research and design iterations—and WD created “hundreds” of different logos for Smoothie King execs to consider—today is the day, and it’s obvious how much is riding on franchisees’ reaction because the build-up is massive.

“Forty years and we’re finally going under the knife, like a middle-aged crisis,” the marketing veep is explaining on stage. They flash dozens of logos on screen, such as Starbucks and Apple and McDonald’s and Jamba Juice, and report consumers’ reaction to those. McCafe “looks like a classier McDonald’s,” according to consumers. Planet Smoothie, “like George Jetson.” Pinkberry screams “desserts, candy, girly, girly, girly.”

Then comes the feedback for Smoothie King’s logo, itself 20 years old: Focus groups said it looks like a fast-food sign for a 1970s-era drive-thru, and then it gets worse. “It looks like a car wash,” many people said in focus groups, or “It looks like a quick-lube express.” The audience groans.

Finally is the ta-da moment. “We’re on the freight train right now in fresh and healthy and companies are scrambling to get on board. The globe is changing,” the executive enthuses. And the new logo appears: Red, with three splashes that evoke the Smoothie King crown, or a community of people joining their hands together, or fresh strawberries like in their smoothies, whatever the viewer prefers.

Applause follows—louder than a golf clap, for sure, but not by much, and the audience gets up to take a break.

The company’s long-time printing vendor, Hank Cacamo of American Solutions for Business, is one of the few outside the inner circle who had seen the logo before the convention. He likes it, but he predicts trouble, especially from the “old guard,” the long-time New Orleans franchisees who were with the Kuhnaus from the beginning. They’ll be offended by the knocks on the old logo just presented on stage.

But in the hallway afterward they don’t seem so, and in fact Wan Kim & Co. are getting good reviews. “We need to go to a new level and he’s going to take us there. He’s got a track record,” says Charlene Carrouche, in her 24th year as a franchisee in New Orleans.

Tyronne Astugue is a 15-year franchisee. “He’s looking to move us into the future,” he says about Kim. “Change is good sometimes. We were getting a little stagnated.”

In a longer interview over lunch, Carla Desormot-Saintil, the franchisee who owns Store 860 in Atlanta, and whose favorite smoothie is Mangosteen Madness as it says on her business card, is enthused about the new identity. “It’s taking us to another level. It will be an international brand, not just the U.S. I think it’s going to take us very far.”

And Paul and Paula McCulloch from Nashville, one of the brand’s few multi-unit franchisees with six stores and the company’s first mobile Smoothie King truck, call the changes “completely positive,” and in line with Paula’s long-time devotion to healthy eating.

“I think they’re going to take Smoothie King even more in my direction,” she says, cutting out the “Grape Expectations” smoothie, for example, which corporate did last year because it implied a sugary treat, and adding “even more of those green energy drinks.”

The husband-and-wife pair tend to tease each other. “I have to tell on him,” Paula says about Paul when they were first deciding which franchise to buy. “He wanted to put in a donut shop.”

Back at the offices, again the day before the convention, some 60 employees in corporate headquarters are presenting a birthday cake to Kim with 41 candles. “I’m a little older than Smoothie King,” Kim says after the very brief party. Kim’s father, Hyojo, is visiting this week, in town for the convention, and he makes a stern and silent appearance, unable to speak much English, before retreating to his son’s office.

Kim grew up enjoying his father’s wealth, generated by the electronics company he built from scratch. Hyojo was 8 when his father was killed, during the Korean War that tore apart the populace, and the hard times after forged the elder Kim’s psyche. “It’s in his DNA, that anything can happen. It’s pretty much like survival mode,” Kim says.

Kim’s mother, a housewife, indulged him and his younger brother. “My mother and father’s philosophies are different. She would put me in first class” to encourage him to be successful so he could travel that way again and again. “He would put me in economy,” Kim says, “and said you had to stay humble.”

In his youth, Kim recalls Seoul as a go-go city in a developing country, growing at 7, 8, 9 percent a year. “I could feel it,” Kim says, especially compared to the 2 or 3 percent growth rate now. “The city was dynamic.”

Kim was sent to Boston University for his undergrad degree because he had cousins there, and it scared him silent at first. English was taught in school back home, but the South Korean culture prohibited the experimentation required to learn to be fluent. “In Korea, if you get it wrong, they blame you, but if you’re learning you’ll get it wrong.”

Diving into America was a shock. “When I came to Boston it was really hard. I lost 25 pounds. I didn’t have friends,” Kim says. “The culture was so different. It’s a bigger society and the openness—I couldn’t accept it. When I grew up there was a boundary, but when the boundary is gone, it’s scary.”

After three months, he says, “I start to realize, what the heck. It’s a great opportunity. So I started to speak,” and the diverse student body at Boston was a revelation. “I start to realize, different culture isn’t wrong, it’s different.”

A couple of years working for his father, in San Diego to supervise their Tijuana plant, went badly. He chafed when his father would enter the room and everyone would fall obediently silent, as expected in South Korea. He wanted to grow the company, called Kyung In, and expand the customer base, maybe selling to some rising Chinese companies, including in one instance the biggest company in China.

“He said no, because they’re not a No. 1 credit like Samsung or Sony,” Kim says, recalling his father’s adamant stance. “No debt. He always told me using debt is a dangerous idea. All the money he made he put in the bank. Not one dollar of debt” is on the company’s books. Add the fact that he didn’t like manufacturing—“there’s no interaction with customers, there’s no branding”—and the inevitable split came within two years.

So Kim went to the University of California-Irvine for an MBA, and reveled in the Silicon Valley boom—a time when Yahoo’s stock, for example, went up 1,000 percent over only a dozen months. “It was crazy time, but because I was young I thought that was the future.”

He took his optimism back to Korea and started that VC firm, “and in three years we blew up. The day we founded the company the stock market was at its peak.” And what did he learn? “We learned, in the good times prepare for the bad times”—a philosophy his father would likely approve. “And, you cannot bet against the trend.”

The trend in Korea, he says—which no longer is a fast-growing country but rather one with first-world concerns like obesity—was toward healthy food. He researched Jamba Juice, the leader in the smoothie sector, and Smoothie King, and found the former to be more formal and the latter “more like a family business,” each type with its pros and cons.

Steve Kuhnau impressed Kim with his passion for his products. By now Kuhnau had been blending smoothies for more than 30 years—long before they hit the mainstream—as meal replacements that he used at first to treat his own allergies and then his patients’ health concerns. Kuhnau worked as a nurse in a burn center early in his career, and he discovered patients thrived on his nutritious drinks, which he, like Kim, considers a meal replacement, not a snack.

But Kim wasn’t the only one trying to ride the trend. “There were three companies that wanted to bring Smoothie King to Korea, so I was competing for it,” Kim recalls, and he ended up impressing Kuhnau with his zeal. “While I was in New Orleans, negotiating with Steve, I had a lot of smoothies, and he liked that,” Kim says. “For a week I think I had like 100 smoothies. It gave him a good impression.”

Once he won the rights as master franchisee, Kim had to learn the food business, which to him is about consistency, not innovation. For example, he explains, if you love the iPhone you want the latest model with fancy new features every time a new one is released. But if you crave a Big Mac, you want it exactly the same as the last.

“In our business we need to figure out how to deliver that consistently, and we don’t need geniuses to deliver that,” he says. Rather, he needs dedicated people who are passionate about the product, and Kim set about surrounding himself with same.

Kuhnau resisted offers to sell the company for years, and he refused to consider private equity firms as suitors. “He doesn’t think private equity guys can run the business; they’ll ruin it,” Kim says.

But Kim kept bringing up the subject starting in 2009, and one day Kuhnau called and said he was ready. Kim got moving. Standard Chartered had asked Kim to be COO for another brand they wanted to expand in Asia, but Kim had a better idea: Why don’t they invest in Smoothie King instead?

Kuhnau was firm on the price: He would accept $50 million, the amount he had written on a check made to himself when he first started the company. Literally, Kim says, Kuhnau pulled out that very document and showed it to Kim during negotiations. Kim walked around the office for a while, then decided he’d meet the price, and a few months later he owned the whole system.

ut first he had to convince his wife, Hosun, to move to New Orleans with their three young children. She had visited only once, in 2003, and hated it. “She saw Bourbon Street and thought it’s not a good place to raise the kids. She said, that’s a sin city.”

He was planning to move the company to Dallas or Atlanta, a bigger metro where he was sure his employees would be happier—until he asked them. “It was shocking that nobody wanted to move,” he says, and he changed his plans because he likes loyal people working for him. So he ran around videotaping the parts of New Orleans more suited to family life, and sending them to Hosun—and she relented at last.

He hired Tom O’Keefe as president and chief operating officer, wooing him with a low-key conversation that O’Keefe’s describes “like two guys sitting in an airplane, talking business.” O’Keefe became an instant fan. “I had the unmistakable impression that he would achieve everything he set out to do and I wanted to help him,” O’Keefe says. “He’s personally committed to making his dream come true.” O’Keefe’s task is to triple the domestic footprint and quadruple the international.

Kim also hired Paul Ahn, his countryman and the new CFO of Smoothie King. Ahn lived in New Jersey in middle school so he doesn’t have an accent like Kim’s, which is one reason he seems like a taller, cooler counterpart to Kim with the laid-back attitude to match. They have been friends since high school.

Kim is only the third South Korean who has bought a U.S. firm, Ahn claims—usually it’s the other way around—and he gained great prestige in the republic when it happened. “When I saw the news it gave me the goosebumps,” Ahn says.

Ahn believes the firm has plenty of cash—20 percent of the equity raised is still available after the buyout—and will easily raise debt financing when needed, which is likely when it begins to build the 200 corporate-owned stores now in the planning stages.

“I do believe why the brand was born. The brand was born to help people live a healthy lifestyle,” Kim says. That’s his biggest task now, he believes: to return to the company’s roots, to change the perception so consumers consider Smoothie King smoothies as a healthy meal replacement, and align all of the company’s systems to fit that mission.

“Now it’s time, they need to believe me, and it’s not just my team but all our franchisees. We need to show the world that we will own it. Then I think it can be very powerful.”

Smoothie King Franchises, Inc., premier smoothie bar and nutritional lifestyle center, announced today its recent appointment of Tom O’Keefe as the company’s new President and Chief Operating Officer, along with the re-appointment of Joe Lewis—one of the original Smoothie King executives—as General Counsel. Coming in on the heels of the recent acquisition of the company by SK USA and executive leadership takeover by CEO Wan Kim , O’Keefe and Lewis will be key players on Smoothie King’s new management team, bringing with them over 50 years combined experience to help scale global growth for the franchise.

“Smoothie King is in the midst of an accelerated growth plan both nationally and internationally – which requires a seasoned leadership team to take this brand to new heights,” said SK USA CEO, Wan Kim . “We are thrilled to appoint Tom O’Keefe as President and COO; Tom is an ideal fit who understands the iconic success of four decades of the Smoothie King brand, with a unique depth of franchise and brand knowledge that will poise us for terrific growth in 2013 and beyond.”

“We are also excited to bring back Joe Lewis as General Counsel to the executive team, ” said Kim. “Joe was a critical team member in the early success of Smoothie King and this legacy knowledge will allow us to tap into the creative and driven mindset of the Smoothie King brand.”

O’Keefe is a seasoned executive in the franchise industry with past employment inclusive of high profile leadership roles at Anytime Fitness, Popeyes/Church’s and Ruth’s Hospitality Group. He will leverage over two decades of experience and bring a strong understanding of the current global franchise landscape to the rapidly growing Smoothie King brand. O’Keefe’s role will be focused on overseeing, developing and setting the direction for the company’s day-to-day operating activities. While serving as Senior Vice President at Anytime Fitness, LLC, the franchise eclipsed 2,000 units and entered seven new foreign markets.

Lewis, a strategic business-oriented franchise professional who grew Sicily’s Franchise Systems from under $1mm to over $10mm, returns to an executive seat at Smoothie King after thirteen years. An integral part of Smoothie King’s growth throughout the 90′s, Lewis helped expand the company from 39 stores to over 220 across 22 states. Under his management, system-wide revenues grew over $50mm. Lewis will utilize his franchise, trademark and corporate law experience to drive and further develop the company’s legal program, created by him during his original position at Smoothie King.

Both O’Keefe and Lewis are New Orleans residents, supporting the brand’s mission to create and maintain more jobs in Louisiana.

Smoothie King® is committed to providing guests a variety of healthy, delicious and functional meals for those on the go. Smoothie King has encountered three consecutive years of same store sales growth and in 2012 alone Smoothie King® experienced double-digit growth, is ranked number one juice bar for the 19th year by Entrepreneur and was honored in QSR Magazine’s first ever The Global 30.

Click the link below to view the article posted on restaurantnews.com

Tom O’Keefe, the new president and chief operating officer of
Smoothie King Franchises Inc., says the company will create a new
division for company-owned units as the 626-unit chain looks to expand
under new ownership.

O’Keefe, who took the helm of the Covington, La.-based chain in
January, said Smoothie King recently acquired a franchised unit in
Miami, bringing the total to six company-owned units. He said the
company has another franchised unit under contract in the Dallas-Fort
Worth area, and he foresees 30 company-owned units by the end of the
year.

Read the Full Article by clicking the link here.

In November, Smoothie King Franchises, Inc. opened its 19th store in the South Florida market, marking the beginning of the brand’s accelerated expansion plan under new Global CEO Wan Kim.

The company reports it opened 51 new stores worldwide in 2012 and has plans to open more than 1,000 across the United States over the next 5 years, with 40 new stores slated for the South Florida market.

The Covington, La.-based company, which currently operates more than 600 units, reports it has extensive franchise opportunities available in the Southeast, mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions, as well as Texas. International development includes master franchise and corporate expansion in Korea, Singapore and Malaysia, with 50 new stores planned in Korea and 10 in Singapore in 2013.

Read the Full Article by clicking here.

NEW ORLEANS, La – SK USA, Inc. has agreed to purchase Smoothie King Franchises, Inc., both companies announced Monday. Smoothie King Co-founders Steve and Cindy Kuhnau to sell controlling interest of the Louisiana based company to SK USA, Inc., headed by CEO Wan Kim.

“The sale of Smoothie King represents terrific news for the future of our employees and Smoothie King Franchisees,” said President and CEO Steve Kuhnau. “Cindy and I have dedicated our lives to growing Smoothie King for nearly 40 years and share great confidence in Wan for continued expansion.”

Wan is a Boston University Graduate. He was introduced to the Smoothie while he was earning his MBA at the University of California at Irvine. Wan became a huge fan of the concept and opened the first international Smoothie King location in 2003. As the CEO of Smoothies Korea he and his company have been an integral part of the Smoothie King organization for nearly 10 years.

Kuhnau adds, “Wan has been an enthusiastic believer and supporter of the Smoothie King Brand since he and his team opened the first Smoothie King in Seoul. They have been tremendously successful opening and operating over 100 Smoothie King locations in South Korea since 2003. The sale of our company will allow Cindy and I to spend more time with our family while ensuring that the Smoothie King Brand which we love will be in very capable hands.”

“We are extremely positive and excited,” said Smoothies Korea CEO Wan Kim. “Smoothie King maintains potential for tremendous growth both here in the U.S. as well as in International markets. Our plans are to continue to expand and build on the great foundation that Steve, Cindy, members of the Smoothie King home office and the best franchisees in the QSR industry have worked to create.”

Wan continued, “Smoothie King is a company with well over 20 years of aggressive growth ahead of it, both in the U.S. and globally. We are making a long-term commitment to realize this potential. We plan to open more than 1,000 new locations both in the United States and internationally by the end of 2017.” A new international location is already scheduled to open in Singapore by December of 2012. More new international locations across Southeast Asia and China will follow beginning in 2013.

As part of this purchase Standard Charter Private Equity (one of the major top 10 banks in the world) and National Pension Fund (world’s fourth largest public pension fund) are making a significant financial investment in the Smoothie King brand.

Based on this strong capital injection, Smoothie King has set its sights on moving very quickly to ensure Smoothie King is recognized worldwide as the fastest growing health conscious QSR Brand.

Steve Kuhnau will remain with the company and serve as a consultant and brand ambassador representing Smoothie King domestically and internationally as Smoothie King’s original founder and passionate advocate for health and wellness.

Media inquiries should be directed to Katy Saeger on behalf of Smoothie King at 310-597-2337, katy@saegermediagroup.com All other inquiries should be directed to the Smoothie King home office in Covington, LA to the attention of either Bobby Williams VP of Marketing or Katherine Meariman Executive VP of Administration: Phone number 985-635-6973.

Media Contact

Katy Saeger – Saeger Media Group
katy@saegermediagroup.com
310.597.2337