There is a burger chain in America that spent 2025 doing the opposite of what every growth story is supposed to do. It closed restaurants - dozens of them - and its leadership described the year not as a collapse but as a correction. Wahlburgers, the company built by chef Paul Wahlberg and his brothers Donnie and Mark, went from roughly 109 locations in 2023 to about 32 by mid-2025. Then it started talking about growth again.
The story of how a family gets from a Dorchester kitchen to that sentence is more interesting than the celebrity names on the sign. Wahlburgers is part restaurant, part consumer-goods brand, part reality television, and the pieces do not always move together. Understanding it means separating the fame from the food business - and the food business turns out to be run by the brother most people can't name.
01 / THE ORIGINA menu built from Mom's recipes
Wahlburgers opened in 2011 in a strip mall in Hingham, Massachusetts, a few steps from Alma Nove, the upscale Italian restaurant chef Paul Wahlberg was already running in the same plaza. Paul is the founder who does the actual cooking. He worked professional kitchens from high school onward and reached executive chef before the family lent its name to a burger stand. Donnie, of New Kids on the Block and later network television, and Mark, one of the more bankable actors of his generation, put their profile behind it.
The concept was literal: put the family on the plate. Menu items carry names like Paul's Choice. The dining rooms use a green-and-black identity and hang family photographs on the walls. The pitch, printed on the brand's own materials, is plain enough - "our family, our story, our burgers."
One detail people enjoy: the company had to license the name. "Wahlburger" already belonged to Tom Wahl's, an unrelated burger chain in Rochester, New York, so the famous Wahlbergs paid for the rights to be called what they already were.
The division of labor matters here. Mark and Donnie are the reason a camera crew showed up and a name recognizes on a highway sign, but Paul is the operator - the chef who spent years in kitchens before any of this, and the one whose recipes and decisions define what the brand actually sells. Read the company that way and it stops looking like a vanity project. The famous brothers are distribution; the chef brother is the product.
02 / THE FLYWHEELA reality show doing the marketing
In January 2014, A&E premiered Wahlburgers, a reality series about the family and the restaurant. It ran 10 seasons over five years and earned an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Unstructured Reality Program. For a single strip-mall location, that is an extraordinary marketing engine - a decade of national exposure that turned a burger stand into a destination people would drive hours to reach.
The show ended in 2019. The brand equity it built did not. By then the single Massachusetts store had become a multi-country chain, and the family had a recognizable food name to attach to things beyond restaurants.
03 / THE PRODUCTWhat is actually on the menu
At its core Wahlburgers is a casual-dining, bar-forward burger restaurant with dine-in, take-out and third-party delivery. The signature burgers are recreated from family recipes by Paul; there is a plant-based Impossible option for the crowd that wants one. Around the burgers sits the familiar supporting cast.
The loyalty layer is the WahlClub: free to join, $5 off at sign-up, a free shake on your birthday, and a stream of email offers and menu drops. It is lightweight by design - a low-friction way to convert a TV-driven first visit into a habit. Alongside the restaurants sit catering and a line of branded merchandise sold online, both small but on-brand extensions of the same family story.
Who eats here? The customer base is broad casual-dining traffic - families, groups, and the curious who came because of the show or the name - spread across the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The grocery line reaches a second, larger audience entirely: supermarket shoppers who may never sit in a Wahlburgers but will drop a pack of the patties in a cart. That split is the whole point of the model.
04 / THE SECOND BUSINESSSelling the burger where there is no restaurant
The most strategically important thing Wahlburgers did may not be a restaurant at all. In 2018 it partnered with ARKK Food to put fresh Angus beef - a brisket, chuck and short-rib blend - into more than 1,300 supermarkets, including Shaw's. That grew into Wahlburgers at Home, a retail line spanning premium patties, Chef Paul's signature sauces, dill pickles, uncured bacon and beef hot dogs.
That is the hedge. A restaurant chain lives and dies on foot traffic and leases; a grocery brand keeps earning on a shelf whether or not the nearest location is still open. When the restaurant count fell in 2025, the retail line was still sitting in supermarket cases nationwide. Distribution, in other words, did some of the work that footprint used to.
05 / THE RESETFrom 109 to 32, and why
The contraction has a specific cause. A 2017 franchising agreement with the supermarket operator Hy-Vee had placed Wahlburgers counters inside dozens of Midwest stores. In early 2025 that arrangement unwound, and roughly 79 of those locations closed at once. The chain's total dropped from about 109 in 2023 to around 32.
Leadership's framing, under CEO Randy Sharpe, is that the Hy-Vee sites were never meaningful revenue and that the company is choosing quality of location over quantity. Whether you read that as spin or strategy, the numbers underneath support the pivot: the brand did not disappear when the count fell, because so much of its reach lives in grocery aisles and on television reruns rather than in individual leases.
It is not the first time the chain overreached and pulled back. Wahlburgers briefly ran a London location around 2019-2020 and a German presence from roughly 2020 to 2022, and an earlier planned Asian expansion never materialized. Each retreat taught the same lesson the 2025 reset made unavoidable: a burger brand can travel further than its restaurants can profitably follow. The 2026 answer is to let someone else own the real estate.
06 / THE NEXT MOVETrailers, airports and Bass Pro Shops
The 2026 plan is a deliberate turn away from malls and standalone stores toward non-traditional sites - places with captive traffic and a partner already paying the rent. The company announced accelerated national expansion across airports, hotels and casinos, plus two eye-catching retail tie-ins.
2026 expansion, in short
- Home DepotWahlburgers trailers outside select stores, via Adaptiv Provisions
- Bass Pro ShopsNew sites including Irvine, CA and Sayreville, NJ
- AirportsSarasota-Bradenton (Concourse B) and Detroit Metro
- HospitalityMemphis at Big Cypress Lodge; Resorts World Las Vegas
07 / THE POSITIONWhere it sits in the burger wars
Wahlburgers competes in a crowded better-burger field - Shake Shack, Five Guys, In-N-Out, Smashburger and BurgerFi among them - but it does not really play their game. Those brands compete on operational tightness and cult devotion to the food itself. Wahlburgers competes on a story: a real family, named recipes, a decade of television, and a distribution footprint that runs through grocery stores as much as dining rooms. Its retail beef puts it up against premium grocery patty lines as often as it faces another burger counter.
The through-line is that the family did not sell when the model strained. Plenty of celebrity restaurants fold at the first bad year. This one pruned itself - closing the weak locations, keeping the retail line, and leaning on the non-traditional sites where a landlord partner absorbs the risk. It is a quieter second act than the one that played out on A&E, and a more durable-looking one.