HTEAO OPENS NINE STORES IN Q3, PUSHES TOWARD 200 UNITS UNDER NEW PRIVATE EQUITY OWNERSHIP

HTeaO opened nine new locations in the third quarter of 2026. The stores landed in Katy, Lufkin, El Campo, El Paso and Presidio, Texas, plus Altus and Bixby, Oklahoma, and Lowell and Fort Smith, Arkansas, according to QSR Magazine. The Amarillo-based iced tea chain is now aiming for just under 200 units by year-end, a target that would roughly triple its footprint since 2022.

HTeaO was founded in 2009 in Amarillo by Justin Howe along with Gary Hutchens and Kim Hutchens. The idea was simple: tea is only as good as the water behind it. Stores run municipal water through reverse osmosis, add back a specific mineral blend, then brew any of 20 base tea flavors that customers can customize with flavor shots and sweeteners. The chain has grown from 67 locations at the end of 2022 to more than 180 today. Entrepreneur, citing 2025 figures, put sales at $147 million, up 26.7% year over year, with 178 locations across eight states. Franchise Times, drawing on more recent company disclosures, counted 187 units across 11 states.

HTeaO isn't the same company that built those first stores. Dallas-based private equity firms Trive Capital and Crux Capital started backing it in 2023 and took a majority stake in April 2026, Franchise Times reported. Three months after that, HTeaO named Brian Wise chief executive. He came over from Freddy's Frozen Custard & Steakburgers, where he'd spent four years as chief operating officer after 15 years as a franchisee partner. Co-founder Justin Howe moved into the role of executive chairman.

"Building HTeaO into the category leader it is today has been one of the greatest privileges of my life," Howe said in the company's announcement of Wise's appointment. Wise, he added, is "an exceptional leader" for what comes next.

Wise is pretty direct about what he sees as HTeaO's edge in picking sites. The chain can run as a drive-thru-only box, a walk-up window, or a full in-store format, and that widens the pool of real estate it can consider. "The ability to have in-store, drive-thru, off-premises really allows us to seek real estate in a variety of places," he told Franchise Times. You can see that logic in the Q3 store list itself: Katy is a sizable Houston suburb, Presidio is a small West Texas border town, Altus is a town of about 18,000 in southwest Oklahoma. Wise has talked about targeting both dense urban corridors, the Phoenix metro among them, and the smaller towns bigger chains tend to skip.

Average unit volume at HTeaO's freestanding franchise locations ran about $1.1 million in 2025, per Franchise Times. That's the kind of number that gets private equity interested in a concept before it even has a full menu built out. The company is now developing new store prototypes for 2027 and putting money into dedicated pickup areas for mobile and delivery orders, alongside plans to add food and coffee to the menu. HTeaO marketing director Brittany Knollmiller put the current push more simply, telling QSR Magazine: "We want every promotion and product launch to give our guests another reason to enjoy HTeaO."

The format flexibility is the detail worth sitting with. A tea chain that can profitably run out of a drive-thru pad, a small end cap, or a full in-line suite has a bigger set of available boxes than a typical QSR competing for the same corners. That matters more in tight markets where good pads are scarce. The jump from 67 to roughly 187 units in under four years, now with two private equity firms behind it, suggests this chain keeps showing up in smaller secondary markets rather than only chasing the big metros, a pattern worth watching alongside how Dutch Bros and 7 Brew have built out density in the same drive-thru beverage category. Whether HTeaO can hold onto those unit economics once food and coffee are part of the equation is a real question. Both categories run thinner margins and carry more operational complexity than a tea-and-water concept. And the gap between Entrepreneur's 178-store count and Franchise Times' 187, both describing 2026, says something on its own: brokers tracking HTeaO as a prospective tenant are probably working off a public unit count that already trails what the company has actually signed.