Spain has 62 outlets of the largest açaí chain. Portugal, with five times fewer people, has 71. This study measures how much room is left, what margin each model leaves, and from how many tickets a day a shop stops merely surviving and starts paying back.
The world’s largest açaí chain declares more than 900 outlets across 48 countries. In Spain it runs 62, of which 27 are company-owned and 35 franchised. In Portugal it runs 71.
Per million inhabitants, Spain sits at 1.26 outlets and Portugal at 6.70. If Spain reached that density it would hold 329 outlets: 267 still to open, 81% of the runway.
It is a density benchmark, not a forecast. But while the brand only commits to passing 120 outlets in five years, the gap between what exists and what fits remains very large.
One asks 6% royalty plus a 2% advertising fund. Another charges 80 € a week, a flat fee that does not grow with you. The third publishes no royalty in any source we found.
On the revenue of the shop we measured, that gap is over twenty thousand euros a year. A percentage royalty grows with you, a flat one dilutes, and that condition appears in no franchise comparison site.
Entry costs between 60,000 and 150,000 € depending on brand and format. The study puts them side by side.
A shop open twelve hours a day, 362 days a year, has 8,688 working hours to cover. Under the annual hours in the hospitality collective agreement, that means 4.89 full-time staff, not two.
This is the mistake that breaks almost every franchise business plan: you budget the staff you see at the counter, not the staff needed to cover the schedule. The difference is almost three full salaries a year.
It moves the result by ten to fifteen margin points, and it has nothing to do with which brand you pick or which city you open in.
It is what separates a shop that pays back in eighteen months from one that never does. It is inside the study, worked out for all three models, with the table beside it so you can reproduce it with your own numbers.
The full study has the fourth finding, the three brands compared, both daily-ticket thresholds, the complete field count and the five situations where the answer is do not open. Every figure with its source, its date and its class.