Two founders and a schoolyard rhyme.

Wetzel’s Pretzels was started in 1994 by Bill Phelps and Rick Wetzel, and the chain is based in Pasadena, California. Wikipedia places its opening shop that year at the South Bay Galleria in nearby Redondo Beach, a mall in the beach towns south of Los Angeles.

The name is a joke at a co-founder’s expense. The Los Angeles Times reported in February 2007 that it came from the taunts children aimed at Wetzel in the schoolyard — “Hey Wetzel, you pretzel!” — and quoted the company’s website of the time: “This primordial message twisted little Rick Wetzel’s impressionable mind.” The paper described the business as a Pasadena-based bakery chain and named two of its products, the Wetzel’s Original and the Cin-A-Yum, as examples of what it sold.

In 1997 the founders brought in outside investors. The Times named the film producer John Davis, the Hollywood lawyer Jake Bloom and Gary Wilson, then chairman of Northwest Airlines and a former director of the Walt Disney Co., and said the investors’ business and entertainment connections had helped Wetzel’s into cinemas, malls and the Disneyland and Walt Disney World theme parks. Wikipedia says Wilson’s Disney connections opened the way to the park locations. Phelps was chief executive at the time, and both founders were to remain with the company after it changed hands in 2007.

Wetzel’s grew up as a mall brand. In 2018 rd+d magazine reported that the company aimed its kiosks at the fashion wings of upmarket malls rather than the food court, and the chain’s store design, described below, was shaped by what mall landlords asked of it.

Private equity, then MTY and Kahala Brands.

On 1 February 2007 the Los Angeles Times reported that the investor group had sold the chain, for an undisclosed price, to Levine Leichtman Capital Partners, a Los Angeles private-equity firm whose chief executive, Lauren Leichtman, called Wetzel’s a highly recognisable brand that the firm would expand. Phelps told the paper that the founders had turned down offers from strategic buyers and preferred a deal that would keep the existing team in place. Levine Leichtman still held a stake in Wetzel’s in 2014, Nation’s Restaurant News noted that August, when another of its portfolio companies, Global Franchise Group, bought Hot Dog on a Stick.

Wikipedia records that Levine Leichtman sold its majority stake to the Dallas firm CenterOak Partners in October 2016, and that Jennifer Schuler succeeded Phelps as chief executive in 2019; Nation’s Restaurant News was already describing Schuler as the chain’s president in 2018. On 8 December 2022 Restaurant Business reported that MTY Food Group, the Montreal-based owner of brands including Cold Stone Creamery, Pinkberry and Papa Murphy’s, had completed its purchase of Wetzel’s Pretzels from CenterOak. MTY has owned the chain since 2022. Franchise Times reported in April 2025 that Wetzel’s sits within MTY’s US arm, Kahala Brands, alongside Cold Stone, Pinkberry, Planet Smoothie, Blimpie and Baja Fresh.

The same Franchise Times article described a shift from regional malls toward other kinds of site: bakeries inside Walmart stores, food trucks mostly in California, a location at Los Angeles International Airport opened in 2022 with the franchisee Concord Collective, a store on the Stanford University campus in 2024, and openings abroad including Kuala Lumpur International Airport. Jon Fischer, who had led development since October 2019, told the magazine that being part of a larger company brought shared services in international development, legal work and supply, and that the brand was exploring co-branding with its sister brand Cold Stone Creamery.

Design and documentation.

A mall treat shop has to be read from a distance and in a hurry. Many of its customers are walking past, often with somewhere else to be, so the name above the counter, the colour of the canopy and the shape of the sign do most of the work before anyone reaches the menu board. In a food court or on a concourse, a kiosk may stand only a few steps from a rival, which puts weight on a short name, a strong colour and a sign that can be seen from the escalator.

Up close, the identity moves onto smaller things: the cup, the cone sleeve, the spoon, the napkin, the take-home tub and the paper bag. These are the pieces that leave the shop, and they often carry the brand further than the storefront does. The counter itself, with its freezer cases, mixing stations or display glass, is part of the show.

Each guide in this group looks at who started the name, who owns it now, and how its signs, cups, characters and packaging have been described in dated sources, and marks plainly what rests on the company’s own word.

White kiosks, wood and a glowing lemonade glass.

The kiosk design changed in 2017, when, according to Nation’s Restaurant News, Wetzel’s quietly introduced a new prototype at Westfield Garden State Plaza in New Jersey after the upmarket mall, fresh from its own makeover, asked for décor that would sit better beside neighbouring tenants. “They don’t want the center of store to look like a swap meet,” Schuler told the paper in March 2018, when the company was extending the look to further new and existing locations.

Martha Lares, the company’s vice president of store design and construction, described the prototype to rd+d magazine in September 2018. Landlords wanted something more muted, so the kiosk used a lot of white with wood detailing, which she said suited a simple, traditional product while still reading as modern; colour came from coloured lighting and “pops of branding” within the kiosk instead of saturated finishes. A new lemonade glass, transparent with lemon wedges etched into it and lit from below in yellow so that it glowed, was becoming part of the signature design, she said, and would be added to older stores as they came up for refurbishment. The dough-rolling counter was cleared so guests could watch, and an oven topper told them the oven was hot. The new kiosks kept roughly the same footprint as the old ones, the magazine noted.

In 2023 the company launched a street-front variant, Twisted by Wetzel’s. The design studio Serious Studio says on its website that it created the identity for the concept, describing bright colours, dough-like illustrations and bold type treatments. In 2024 the chain changed the name and signage of those stores back to Wetzel’s Pretzels; Fischer told Franchise Times that customers were mostly buying the core products anyway and that the change simplified operations and avoided brand confusion, while products developed for the concept moved into limited-time offers across the chain.

For a design guide, Wetzel’s Pretzels shows how a founder’s surname that rhymes with the product can carry a whole brand, and how a small kiosk can be restyled with white surfaces, wood and lit glass to suit mall landlords while its colour moves into the lighting. Compare it with Auntie Anne’s, a Pennsylvania pretzel chain built for the same malls, and Cold Stone Creamery, its sister brand at Kahala Brands. For this guide we use lemonade yellow, kiosk white and warm wood with a chunky sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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