Habit Burger & Grill is launching Habit & Co., a rotating chef-in-residency platform designed to bring celebrity-chef-driven limited menus to its national footprint, with the debut collaboration featuring chef Jet Tila's Korean Street Menu available at all locations beginning July 22.
The move positions Habit Burger — owned by Yum! Brands — alongside a growing cohort of fast-casual and quick-service operators using chef partnerships to drive traffic and differentiate their menus in an increasingly competitive limited-service landscape. Rather than a one-off promotional item, Habit & Co. is structured as an ongoing platform, implying a pipeline of future chef collaborators beyond Tila.
Why It Matters
Chef-residency and culinary-collaboration formats have gained traction across foodservice as operators seek to generate earned media, attract food-curious consumers, and rotate limited-time offers with built-in credibility. For Habit Burger, which competes in the premium fast-casual burger segment against Five Guys, Shake Shack, and Smashburger, a chef-led platform offers a mechanism to extend menu storytelling beyond its core beef offering — and to do so with a recognizable culinary name. Jet Tila, a Food Network personality and James Beard-nominated chef known for his expertise in Asian cuisines, lends cross-cultural credibility to a Korean-inflected street-food menu, a format that has shown sustained consumer demand across both foodservice and retail grocery channels.
The Korean food segment has been one of the more durable trends in American dining over the past several years, moving from specialty and ethnic-focused restaurants into mainstream fast-casual formats. Operators from major sandwich chains to ghost-kitchen concepts have tested Korean flavor profiles — gochujang glazes, bulgogi-style proteins, kimchi-adjacent condiments — as the cuisine's familiarity among younger consumers has grown. Habit Burger's decision to anchor its debut Habit & Co. residency in this space reflects that broader category momentum.
Competitive Framing
For Yum! Brands, which also operates Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut, the Habit Burger unit has historically been a smaller-scale growth vehicle with a West Coast heritage. Expanding the brand's cultural relevance through chef partnerships is consistent with how other Yum! concepts have used limited-time offers and collaborations to drive same-store sales and franchisee engagement. The Habit & Co. platform, if it achieves consistent cadence, could become a structural tool for the brand's marketing calendar rather than a one-time activation.
Food & Beverage Magazine, a sister publication covering culinary trends and operator strategies, has tracked the rise of chef-partnership models across casual and fast-casual dining as operators compete for share of stomach in a high-cost, traffic-challenged environment.
Details on menu pricing, the duration of the Tila residency, and the cadence of future Habit & Co. chef collaborations were not disclosed in the announcement. Operators and franchise partners will be watching whether the platform generates measurable same-store traffic lifts — the metric that ultimately determines whether the format earns a permanent place in the brand's growth toolkit. For more on fast-casual menu innovation and limited-time offer strategy, see our coverage of restaurant menu trends and fast-casual operator moves.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
