Innovative Restaurateurs: Sam Fox Aims to Double the Size of His Empire by 2022

If you want to spot future restaurant trends, spend some time following Sam Fox around. Long before vegetarian and vegan dishes started showing up everywhere, he leveraged the clean eating trend into two Phoenix restaurant chains, True Food Kitchen and Flower Child. He also was an early pioneer of all-day restaurants, and got rid of single use plastics after a customer gave him the idea five years ago. But, because his restaurant group, Fox Restaurant Concepts, is based in Phoenix, his efforts went under the restaurant world’s coastal-focused radar. Now, Fox is planning dozens of new restaurant openings outside of his usual orbit, in a bid to go national within the next couple of years. His group, which includes 54 restaurants across a number of different brands and cuisines, plans to open seven locations in the Washington, D.C., area alone this winter. They are among the 24 restaurants that Fox plans to open between now and the second quarter of 2020. And in the next three y