The queue is there. The franchisees are not: in Brazil, the person who opens the store does the sums against the bank.
In April 2026 the largest food chain in the world by number of outlets opened in São Paulo. Mixue, the Chinese ice cream and iced tea group with around fifty thousand stores, announced 60 to 100 units in the city by the end of the year and one thousand in the country by 2030. Six months later, according to an investigation by the Brazilian news outlet UOL, it had opened four.
The queues were there. The product, at three reais for an ice cream, was selling. The company says its interest in Brazil remains and that expansion will now be gradual. This is not a story of failure, and it may still end well. It is a story of a target missed by a wide margin, and the reasons are worth more to a European franchisor than any success story.
The full article explains what did not work and why none of it concerns the customer, how Brazilian interest rates turn a franchise into a contest with the bank, and the twelve features a franchise model needs to hold in Brazil, from the entry ticket to the disclosure document the law requires ten days before signing.