Crux Capital Launches Uncommon Brands to Grow Emerging Restaurant Concepts

Original Article: Nation's Restaurant News - February 14, 2024

Garrett Mills and Wayne Moore Layout a New Playbook for Investing in Uncommon Brands!

When a mutual friend introduced Wayne Moore and Garrett Mills, they had a lot to taco ’bout (pun intended) – quickly bonding over their shared passion for the restaurant industry.

At a time when much of the private equity world was shifting its attention elsewhere, Wayne saw a clear opportunity to focus on smaller brands instead. Together, he and Garrett effectively created a new playbook to operate within, one focused on side-stepping the mediocre and chasing only the most exceptional of restaurant concepts.

Wayne’s deep background in managing consumer hedge funds, paired with Garrett’s leadership experience within the restaurant industry (achievements that came after his successful career playing for the NFL) eventually led to the formation of a new holding company called Uncommon Brands.

The launch of Uncommon Brands also coincides with the holding company’s initial acquisition: Fuego Tortilla Grill, a value-oriented Tex-Mex concept with four locations in Texas and a customer-pleasing menu packed with made-from-scratch tacos, salads, soups, and tasty sides and appetizers.

Both Wayne and Garrett acknowledge that Fuego may not seem like a booming business yet; with its inconsistency around online ordering, indistinct branding, lack of mobile app and static website, but these deficiencies are the exact problems that Uncommon Brands was built to solve for.

Over the next decade, the plan is to continue to grow Uncommon’s portfolio until it is full of similar concepts – exceptional restaurant brands with strong fundamentals that might initially be missing the infrastructure needed to bring them to the next level. Under the guardianship of Wayne and Garrett, the ultimate goal is to firmly establish Uncommon Brands and its restaurant concepts as world-class organizations.

Sounds like all that and a bag of (tortilla) chips to us.