Teriyaki Madness Names Amy Burhorn CFO Amid Growth Surge
Teriyaki Madness hires Amy Burhorn as CFO to lead finance, tech and AI strategy as the fast-casual brand outpaces industry sales and traffic growth.
A Finance Leader With AI Roots Joins the Team
Teriyaki Madness is growing faster than almost anyone else in fast casual right now, and it just handed the keys to its finance and technology operation to someone who has spent the last five years inside the AI industry itself. The Seattle-style teriyaki franchise, known for cooked-to-order bowls built around premium proteins and fresh stir-fry vegetables, has named Amy Burhorn as chief financial officer.
She arrives with more than two decades of finance experience and a mandate that extends well past the ledger: overseeing accounting, finance and technology departments while helping steer a brand that is currently outrunning its category by a wide margin.
A Resume Built for This Exact Moment
Burhorn's resume reads like a deliberate build toward this exact moment. She joins TMAD from Tribe AI, where she served as CFO and watched, up close, what happens when artificial intelligence gets deployed across an entire company rather than parked inside a technical team.
Before that, she spent four years at Hakkoda, building its finance organization from scratch and guiding the company through its 2025 acquisition by IBM. Earlier stops include finance roles at Vail Resorts, Crocs and Natural Grocers, the latter during its 2012 public offering.
She holds a bachelor's degree in business administration and a master's in accounting from the University of Colorado Boulder, where she also captained a national champion women's club soccer team, and she still coaches competitive youth soccer and volunteers as a ski instructor with the National Sports Center for the Disabled. Her path, tech consultancy to startup-acquired-by-IBM to consumer brand finance leadership, makes her an unusually fitting hire for a franchise actively leaning into technology as a growth lever.
Turning Scattered Data Into Shop-Level Decisions
That lever is already in motion. Teriyaki Madness relies on a familiar sprawl of technology partners, point-of-sale systems, back-of-house platforms, online ordering, loyalty programs and accounting tools, each throwing off its own stream of data.
The company's strategy is to pull that data together, organize it, layer AI analysis on top, and push the resulting insights out to everyone from the support center to the franchisee running a single shop. The goal isn't technology for its own sake. It's faster, better-informed decisions that show up as well-run locations and stronger customer experiences, and Burhorn has been tasked with making sure every dollar spent on these tools earns its keep.
'We've Never Been Short on Madness Around Here'
She put it plainly herself: "I learned so much from my last five years in the technology industry, but it's great to be back on the operator side, where the end product is a shop you can walk into, a bowl you can taste and a community of customers behind the brand." She added that her focus is "making sure the tools we use, including AI, earn their keep, whether that's opening the next shop or helping an existing one become more profitable."
CEO Michael Haith framed the hire as part of a broader redefinition of the role itself: "The CFO role has changed, and while balancing the books still matters, the job today is just as much about giving franchisees the financial insight and confidence to make their next big decisions." He added, "Behind every dollar we manage is someone who believes in this brand, and Amy never loses sight of that. We've never been short on Madness around here, and Amy brings the method."
Outpacing a Rough Year for Fast Casual
The numbers behind that confidence are striking against a rough year for fast casual traffic broadly. Through the first nine months of the year, TMAD posted same-store sales growth of 6.7 percent and traffic growth of 2.7 percent, dwarfing category benchmarks of 0.9 percent and negative 2.1 percent.
The gap widened further in the third quarter: comparable sales up 10.3 percent, traffic up 5.5 percent, against category averages of just 1.6 percent and negative 2.4 percent. Systemwide sales are tracking 28 percent ahead of last year's pace, and the brand expects to close December with 245 shops, a 22.5 percent jump in unit count.
Keeping the Growth Engine Running in Lockstep
That combination, unit growth and sales growth moving together while most competitors fight to hold traffic steady, suggests the brand's technology and franchisee-support investments are translating into real results rather than just good intentions. Burhorn's background scaling finance functions through rapid growth, most notably at Hakkoda in the run-up to its IBM acquisition, lines up well with the task ahead: keeping financial discipline and infrastructure intact while the brand keeps adding shops at this pace.
She's stepping into the job at a moment of genuine momentum, which changes the nature of the assignment. This isn't a turnaround story. It's a question of whether Teriyaki Madness can keep its finance, technology and franchisee-support functions moving in lockstep as the unit count keeps climbing and the AI layer she's building starts actually paying out at the shop level.