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Crunch Fitness is deepening its push into the Upper Midwest. On June 3, 2026, the brand announced Crunch St. Paul Highland Park, a $6 million club set to open this fall at 2128 Ford Parkway in St. Paul, Minnesota. Operated by franchisee The Undefeated Tribe, it becomes the group’s fourth Crunch gym in the Minneapolis–St. Paul metropolitan area, with presale opening this summer.
The club adopts the brand’s Crunch 3.0 format and will offer memberships starting at $9.99 per month. That price point captures Crunch’s defining strategy: deliver a premium, amenity-rich facility at a high-value, low-cost membership tier in one of the most crowded categories in fitness franchising.
Crunch 3.0 is the brand’s newest club design, pairing modern aesthetics with an expanded amenity mix built to fuse “serious exercise” with entertainment. The St. Paul Highland Park location will feature:
The Undefeated Tribe is opening at least four Minnesota clubs in 2026, making the St. Paul region a concentrated growth corridor for the franchisee. The operator is betting that round-the-clock access, value pricing, and a standardized big-box format can win share quickly across the Twin Cities suburbs.
“We are so excited to bring the Crunch Fitness brand to St. Paul,” said Tony Hartl.
Crunch competes on scale and price where boutique concepts compete on specialization. Its sub-$10 entry membership undercuts boutique studios that often charge several times more per month, a contrast visible in the rapid multiplication of boutique studio models such as Club Pilates. At the same time, full-service clubs are leaning into recovery and medical-adjacent wellness services to lift retention, and recent research on muscle memory is reshaping how operators win lapsed members back.
For investors weighing fitness franchises in Asia and the MENA region, the Crunch playbook is instructive: a value-priced, high-density rollout depends on disciplined multi-unit operators who can open several clubs in a single metro within a year. Markets with rising middle-class memberships and underbuilt big-box supply, from the Gulf to Southeast Asia, mirror the suburban dynamics driving Crunch’s U.S. expansion, making operator quality and site selection the decisive variables.
