Utah Valley has exported a lot of things. Software, direct sales, home security, a soda format that is now a national category. It has exported exactly one fast-food chain, and almost nobody under thirty has heard of it.
Hogi Yogi was founded here in 1989 by two brothers who were still students. At its height it had dozens of locations across at least five states. Today its own ordering system lists four.
The concept, which sounded like a joke
Take hoagie-style submarine sandwiches. Put them in the same store as a soft-serve frozen yogurt counter. Call the sandwiches hogis and the yogurt yogis and put both in the name.
Mike Clayton, who had worked at Subway, opened the first one in 1989. His brother Rick joined as co-founder. The founders have said since that people initially thought the name was not serious — and also that this was precisely why it worked. It was memorable in a market where every competitor was named after its owner or its street.
The pitch underneath the name was health, or at least the late-1980s version of it. Frozen yogurt was in the middle of its first national boom and was widely understood as the virtuous alternative to ice cream. A sandwich shop with a yogurt machine was positioned as a place you could take the family without feeling like you had been to a burger drive-through.
The part nobody agrees on: where it started
Here is where the record gets strange.
Hogi Yogi is Provo-based. Every business filing, every news story and every directory entry places the company here. Utah County is where the stores concentrated, and a franchisee expanding into Idaho in 2001 explicitly described his target market as similar to Utah County "where most of the Hogi Yogi / Teriyaki Stix stores are concentrated."
But franchise-recruitment material attributed to the company itself says something different about the beginning: that the first restaurant was built in Logan, with restaurants in Provo, Orem and West Valley City following.
Logan is Utah State University, ninety minutes north. If that is right, then the chain everyone thinks of as a Provo institution — as a BYU institution, specifically, which is the assumption most people make — actually opened first in a different valley next to a different university. And the fact that Hogi Yogi and Teriyaki Stix both operated inside Utah State's student center until at least 2013 would fit that origin better than it fits the Provo one.
We are not asserting it. The source is a franchise directory reproducing company copy, not a primary document, and we could not corroborate it against contemporaneous reporting. But the shape of this is familiar enough around here to be worth naming: a company's headquarters city and its founding city are not the same fact, and directories habitually collapse them.
Franchising, and then a second brand
Franchising began in 1993, four years in — a slower ramp than most food concepts attempt, and the company later described those first years as deliberate development time.
Then in 1995 the Claytons launched Teriyaki Stix, a Japanese-inflected concept built around a bowl of rice topped with meat or vegetables and finished with a teriyaki, orange or sweet-and-sour glaze.
The strategic move was co-location. A Teriyaki Stix went into the same building as a Hogi Yogi, sharing space and staff. Two brands, one lease, one crew, two menus. It is why so many people in this valley remember the pair as a single restaurant, and why the company's own materials from the era usually write the name as a compound.
That structure also doubled the appeal of a franchise unit without doubling the rent, which is a genuinely clever answer to the biggest fixed cost in the business.
Then Glazies, then Yoasis
The group kept adding brands. Glazies, a doughnut concept, ran until March 2008. Yoasis — a yogurt-and-smoothie format whose name is a compression of "yogurt oasis" — replaced it.
By the late 2000s the parent holding company, HYATS LLC, held three restaurant brands, all run out of Provo.
How big did it actually get?
This is the second place the record refuses to settle, and the range is wide enough to be worth showing rather than averaging.
- Reporting at the time of the 2009 sale said the company had 46 corporate-owned and franchise stores at its peak, and 40 locations at the time of the deal.
- A company-derived profile says the chain expanded to 70 Hogi Yogis and 50 Teriyaki Stix.
- Franchise-recruitment material claims more than 70 restaurants across Utah, California, Idaho, Arizona, Nevada, Texas and North Dakota.
- An encyclopedia entry drawn from the company's own site says approximately 50 locations across five states.
Some of that spread is real — the peak and the 2009 figure are different moments — and some of it is a brand counting co-located Hogi Yogi and Teriyaki Stix units as one store or as two, depending on who is doing the counting and why.
What is not in dispute is the concentration. At the time of the sale, 11 Utah County stores generated about $4 million in revenue, the company employed roughly 520 people, 480 of them in Utah and 225 in Utah County, and it was run out of the Riverwoods Business Park in north Provo.
For a locally founded restaurant company, those are real numbers.
June 2009: the sale
Sopra Capital II LLC, a Salt Lake City private equity firm, acquired HYATS LLC and placed the three brands under a franchise division called Peak Brands, alongside an existing home-inspection franchise it owned.
Mike Clayton stayed on as chief financial officer. The public framing was expansion. Rick Clayton, quoted at the time, put it plainly: they were going from a mom-and-pop operation to taking the brand nationally, and the plan was to move into Idaho, California, Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming and Nevada first.
The company said it would stay based at Riverwoods and would likely add workers.
It is worth pausing on the honesty of that quote, because it explains the sale better than any analysis would. Two brothers who started a sandwich shop as students had, twenty years later, hit the ceiling of what two people wearing every hat can run. Selling was not a failure. It was the recognized end of a founder-scale business.
What happened next
Not the expansion.
By February 2013, Utah State University's dining services had replaced the Hogi Yogi in its student center with an in-house sandwich concept and the Teriyaki Stix with an in-house rice-bowl concept. The executive director of dining services told the student paper that the new owner had closed many of the corporate stores, that the company had essentially gone out of business, and that franchisees had been left — in his words — a little bit high and dry.
His specific complaint is the one franchisees always make when a system stops functioning: he was still paying a percentage every month and receiving no marketing, no support and no brand momentum in return.
That is one dining director's account of one campus, and it is not a full corporate history. But it is a dated, on-the-record description of the system's condition four years after the sale, and it matches what happened to the store count.
The frozen yogurt timing, which mattered more than the sandwiches
To understand why this concept worked in 1989 and struggled later, you have to look at what frozen yogurt was doing.
The late 1980s were the peak of frozen yogurt's first American wave. It was marketed as the guilt-free dessert, it was in every mall, and a soft-serve machine was a genuine draw rather than an afterthought. Pairing it with sandwiches gave a lunch counter a dessert business and gave a dessert counter a lunch business. Two dayparts, one rent.
Then the category collapsed and came back as something else. The 2000s brought the self-serve, weigh-and-pay model — a wall of dispensers, a toppings bar, a scale at the register — and that format ate the soft-serve counter's lunch. It was more fun, it felt bigger, and crucially it made the yogurt itself the destination rather than the add-on.
A store built around the older model was suddenly competing against a newer one on the same street, with half the machine wall and none of the toppings theater. By the time the second boom peaked and receded, the strategic logic that had made Hogi Yogi distinctive in 1989 had been overtaken twice.
None of that is a mistake anyone made. It is what happens to a concept anchored to a food trend across a thirty-year life.
The franchise math underneath all of it
The 2013 complaint from a franchisee is worth understanding structurally rather than as a grievance, because it explains how a chain this size unwinds.
A franchisee pays a percentage of revenue every month. In exchange the system is supposed to supply brand recognition, national or regional marketing, supply-chain leverage, operational support and new-product development. When those flow, the percentage is cheap. When corporate stores close and the marketing stops, the percentage becomes a pure tax on a business the operator is now running alone.
At that point the rational franchisee converts. They keep the location, the staff and the recipes, drop the name, and stop paying. Which is precisely what Utah State's dining services did — an in-house sandwich concept where the Hogi Yogi had been, an in-house rice-bowl concept where the Teriyaki Stix had been, same counter, same kitchen.
Every conversion like that removes a location from the system, which reduces brand visibility, which weakens the value proposition for the franchisees who remain. Systems of this size do not usually fail by collapse. They fail by subtraction.
Where it stands now
The chain's own online ordering system currently lists four locations: Riverwoods in Provo, Riverdale in Ogden, Rexburg in Idaho, and Redlands in California.
Four stores, three states, from a company that once claimed seven.
The listing ecosystem has not caught up, and this is a live example of a problem this site runs into constantly. Review platforms mark the Springville and Nephi locations closed. Other directory sites still publish Springville's hours and phone number as though it were trading normally. Both cannot be right, and the aggregators have no mechanism for resolving it.
The company's own location page is the only list worth acting on, and even then a phone call before a drive is not paranoia.
Why the Provo store is the right one to visit
The surviving Utah County location is at Riverwoods in north Provo, on Edgewood Drive — a few minutes from where the company's headquarters sat during the years it was growing fastest.
A chain that started with two students, spread across the Mountain West, sold to a private equity firm promising a national rollout, and contracted back to a handful of stores, still has one of them a short walk from its own former head office. The Shops at Riverwoods guide covers what else is in that development.
What the story is actually about
Provo's food history is usually told as a story of what arrived — the chains that finally came, the downtown revival, the dirty soda boom that got exported. Our Provo food scene history tells that version, and it is the right version for most purposes.
Hogi Yogi is the other kind of story, and this valley has fewer of them than it thinks.
It is a genuinely original local concept, built here, scaled from here, that reached seven states and then came home to four addresses. Not a cautionary tale exactly — the founders sold, which is the outcome most small operators want — but a reminder that going national is a thing that happens to a brand as often as it is a thing a brand does.
The county's business history is usually written about software. The list of companies founded in Utah Valley is mostly WordPerfect, Novell, Omniture, Qualtrics, Nu Skin, doTERRA. A sandwich-and-frozen-yogurt chain does not belong on that list by revenue.
It belongs on it by nerve. In 1989, in this valley, two students looked at a sandwich shop and a yogurt machine and decided the correct move was both, and then put both words in the name.
What we could not establish
Worth stating plainly, because the gaps in this story are as informative as the parts we could pin down.
Whether the first store was in Logan or Provo. Covered above. One company-attributed source says Logan; every other source describes a Provo company without addressing the founding location at all.
What happened to Peak Brands and Sopra's ownership after the early 2010s. The acquisition is well documented. The unwinding is not, and small private-equity food deals rarely generate an exit story.
Whether the current stores are corporate or independently franchised. Four locations across three states, sharing an ordering system, is a structure that could describe either. The distinction matters for anyone assessing whether the brand is being actively run or simply persisting.
The precise peak store count, for the counting reasons described above.
None of these are unknowable. They are the kind of thing a business filing search or a conversation with the founders would settle in an afternoon, and this page will be updated if we get there.
Practical notes if you go
Check the hours before you leave. Sunday closure is the norm for the remaining stores, consistent with almost everything else in this county.
The rice bowls have outlived the sandwiches in most people's memory of the brand, which is a slightly awkward outcome for a company named after the sandwiches. The teriyaki bowl is what people describe when they say they miss it.
The frozen yogurt is soft-serve, not the self-serve weigh-and-pay format that took over in the 2010s. If your reference point is the frozen yogurt boom of fifteen years ago, this predates it by two decades and does not work the same way.
Do not expect a heritage experience. These are functioning fast-food counters, not a museum. The history is interesting; the lunch is lunch.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Hogi Yogi still open?
Who founded Hogi Yogi?
What does the name mean?
What is Teriyaki Stix and how is it related?
Was the first Hogi Yogi in Provo?
What happened to the company?
What was Yoasis, and what was Glazies?
Where can I still get one in Utah County?