Sides, the Nashville-style hot chicken brand founded by British YouTube collective the Sidemen, has signed a Middle East franchise agreement with Kuwait’s Al Kharafi Group covering 51 restaurants, with the first sites due to open in Egypt and Kuwait before the end of this year. MCA Insight reported the agreement on 9 September 2026. For a brand that opened its first physical restaurant in 2021, it is by some distance the largest single territory commitment it has made outside the United Kingdom.
The structure is the one the Gulf has used for four decades: a single regional partner takes a block of units across multiple countries and builds the supply chain, property pipeline and management bench once rather than market by market. Fifty-one restaurants is a serious number for a five-year-old concept, and it signals that Al Kharafi is treating Sides as a portfolio brand rather than a test.
Egypt and Kuwait going first is not accidental. Kuwait is where the partner’s own infrastructure sits; Egypt is the volume play, with a young, dense, price-sensitive consumer base that has absorbed international chicken concepts faster than almost any other market in the region. Running both in parallel lets the operator learn on a home market while proving the format at scale next door.
Sides launched in 2021 as a hot chicken concept built with UK franchise group Hero Brands, trading on the combined reach of the seven Sidemen — Olajide Olatunji (KSI), Harry Lewis, Simon Minter, Vik Barn, Josh Bradley, Ethan Payne and Tobi Brown. The menu runs Nashville-style fried chicken across tenders, wings, burgers and wraps, with heat levels stepping from a mild chicken salt up to the brand’s “Insane” tier.
What began as an audience-first experiment has become a physical estate. The brand has opened sites including Lakeside in Essex, the Arndale in Manchester, Merry Hill in the West Midlands, Bluewater in Kent and Boxpark Wembley, and earlier this year set out plans for 15 new restaurants in 2026 — a target that would take it to roughly 20 locations worldwide by year end, with franchised openings lined up in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Livingston, Cardiff and Liverpool.
Speaking to lexpress-franchise in February, Sides managing director Aaron Moore Saxton framed 2026 as a year of compounding momentum, flagging pipeline in India, Malaysia and the UAE alongside the UK core.
“Demand is high and growing internationally.”
Seven months on, the Al Kharafi agreement converts that statement into a signed regional development commitment.
There is a pattern here that master franchise investors across Asia Pacific and MENA should read carefully. Gulf family groups have repeatedly secured first rights to Western concepts at the exact moment those concepts stop being novel and start being scalable — the same window in which Alshaya locked in Primark’s Bahrain and Qatar entries and Americana brought Taco Bell back to the UAE. They win because they can underwrite a 51-unit commitment on signature, not on a pilot.
The second lesson is about brand origin. A concept whose equity sits in an audience rather than in a heritage recipe travels differently: awareness arrives before the first store does, which compresses the ramp-up curve but raises the execution bar, because a disappointed first visit is broadcast rather than forgotten. Operators evaluating creator-led brands in Southeast Asia and the Gulf should be pricing that asymmetry into their site selection and opening plans, not just their sales forecasts.
Egypt, meanwhile, continues to be under-modelled by international franchisors. The market rewards operators who can localise cost structures rather than import them — which is precisely why a regional conglomerate, not a single-country franchisee, is the counterparty in this deal. For anyone mapping entry routes into Kuwait or the wider Gulf, the question raised by this agreement is not whether hot chicken works in the region — local chicken concepts have already proved it does — but how many more creator-built brands are one conversation away from a regional block deal. You can review the brand’s own franchise proposition on the official Sides franchise site.
Source: MCA Insight — Sides signs major Middle East franchise deal
