Scooters Pizza reached its tenth site this month and says it wants twenty trading by 30 November. Getting there means selling ten more franchises, and the pitch is built mostly on fees it says it is not charging.
The brand passed 100 outlets by 2010. Then Taste Holdings signed a master agreement to roll Domino's out across southern Africa in 2014 and invited Scooters franchisees to convert, retiring the name over the following years. Juan Engelbrecht, the brand's Western Cape master franchisor in its first life, secured the trademarks independently in early 2025 and reopened in Melville that October.
A franchise is two businesses stacked on one till. The franchisee buys the store, pays the staff and carries the risk. The franchisor takes a cut of the turnover, and usually also runs the central kitchen that sells the franchisee its cheese and its dough, at a markup. Scooters says it will not run one, on the grounds that marking up stock to somebody you are also charging a royalty is a conflict of interest, so franchisees buy their own inputs.
Getting in costs R1.66 million to R2 million, of which R125,000 is the fee for the name itself. The rest is the build, the stock and the wages paid before the doors open. Scooters wants R600,000 of your own unborrowed money before it will talk.
Staying in costs 6% of turnover as a royalty, which the company says undercuts an industry standard closer to 7%. On top of that sits a fixed R2,500 a month for national marketing and a local marketing spend of at least 3% of revenue. It puts its setup cost R500,000 to R1 million below what it calls conventional benchmarks. Both comparisons are the company's own, and there is no audited industry average to hold them against.
The bikes are the business
Scooters was built in 2000, before Mr D and Uber Eats existed. It still runs its own fleet, which brings in between a tenth and a fifth of what a store takes. Every order routed through an aggregator pays a commission to somebody else. The 39-minute delivery guarantee is back on the menu too, the promise the brand was known for and the one that gets expensive when the traffic is bad.
Where the next ten stores come from
Demand is not the constraint, on the company's telling: more than 1,200 people have enquired since it reopened, at least 650 of them from KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape. It has appointed a master franchise holder for both provinces, Vernon Marais, who owned eight Nando's outlets and now runs Skedadel, a last-mile delivery platform handling about 100,000 deliveries a month for other fast-food brands. Scooters intends to push its own orders through it.
Ten sites are counted, though Parow is still being shopfitted. Rustenburg is due in September, and the first KwaZulu-Natal stores, in Ballito and Umhlanga, have to open before the end of November for the target to hold.
