Pinkberry is back in Lebanon. The frozen yogurt brand has reopened at ABC Achrafieh in Beirut under a new franchise partnership with Brain Bites SAL, the food and beverage venture founded by Najib Khatib and Khalil Khamis. Brain Bites plans 10 stores across Lebanon within three years, and — unusually for a market re-entry — intends to operate every one of them directly rather than sub-franchising.
Brain Bites secured the rights after an extended approval process with Pinkberry’s parent company, following several years in which the brand was absent from the Lebanese market. ABC Achrafieh is the launch site, with ABC Dbayeh and ABC Verdun expected to follow. Anchoring all three inside the same mall operator’s portfolio is a deliberate choice: it concentrates the rollout in proven, high-traffic retail environments rather than scattering early units across untested high streets.
Reported figures put the initial investment at approximately US$500,000, sitting inside a broader five-year development plan valued at US$1.5 million. That is a modest number by MENA master franchise standards, and it reflects the format — small-footprint dessert retail inside existing malls carries a fraction of the build cost of a full-service restaurant.
A US$1.5 million five-year plan, with every unit held under direct operation
Choosing to own and run all 10 units rather than sub-franchise is the detail worth noting. Sub-franchising accelerates unit count and moves capital risk down the chain, but it dilutes control over service standards — the thing a dessert brand actually sells. Brain Bites is taking the slower, heavier route. For franchisors assessing Lebanese and wider Levant partners, an operator willing to carry that weight is generally a stronger covenant than one optimising for fee income, a pattern also visible in how Gulf dessert and juice operators structure territory rights.
International brands returning to markets they once served face a specific problem: the consumer memory is intact but the operating infrastructure is gone. Pinkberry’s route through Brain Bites shows how that gap is being closed — a locally credentialled operator with restaurant and franchising experience, a mall-anchored site strategy that borrows someone else’s footfall, and a development schedule slow enough to prove unit economics before committing the full plan.
For family offices and multi-unit operators evaluating MENA dessert and quick-service assets, the transaction is a useful benchmark. Half a million dollars to open, a three-year horizon to ten units, and no sub-franchising is a shape that appears repeatedly across the region’s smaller markets — and it contrasts sharply with the scale of deals such as the 51-restaurant Middle East agreement signed in Egypt and Kuwait. Both structures work. They simply answer different questions about how much control an operator wants to keep, a distinction worth mapping against the entry routes available across Gulf markets and the formats covered in our review of specialty drinks and dessert franchises.
Source: Franchise TV / Indian Retailer — Pinkberry Returns to Lebanon with 10-Store Expansion Plan · Brand site: Pinkberry
