By Kimberly Wilson ·Updated April 8, 2026 < /> Getting your Trinity Audio player ready… Back in 2003, a nervous kid from Far Rockaway, Queens, showed up to DePauw University two weeks before anyone else, already homesick, wondering what he’d gotten himself into.
When move-in day finally came and the rest of the freshman class arrived, he looked up and saw a woman moving into the dorms with her family. He turned to his boys and said, “I’m going to marry that woman.” He didn’t know her name.
Twenty years later she’s his wife, his partner in every sense of the word, and the person who told him to stop playing it safe and go open a restaurant.
Which is exactly what he did.
Now? Kareem Edwards is the first and only Black owner-operator of a Chick-fil-A in Chicago… but let’s rewind a little.
He grew up in Far Rockaway, raised by his mother, a first-generation American with family roots in Trinidad and Tobago. She didn’t raise him to dream, she raised him to be ready. And if you’ve ever grown up in a Caribbean (or African) household, you know the goals should be simple: get an education, learn something useful, find stable work and be grateful for it. A Posse Foundation scholarship brought him to DePauw, where he studied mathematics. On campus, he ran student government, took on leadership roles, and started realizing he had a knack for bringing people together and getting things done.
After graduation he headed to New York and started climbing. Wall Street, then Lehman Brothers, through the firm’s 2008 collapse and out the other side. By his early thirties he was on the cover of Crain’s Chicago Business as one of the city’s inaugural “20 in Their 20s.” But he started asking himself a different question. What would it feel like to actually love what he did? To wake up excited instead of dreading the day? “I am crushing this industry, even though I’m not happy,” he says. So he left.
“If I go to business school, I understand even more about business and then maybe I go down entrepreneurship or find something that I truly like,” he says.
That thinking took him to Michigan’s Ross School of Business, where he graduated in 2015 and was named a Top MBA to Watch by Poets & Quants. Kraft Heinz came next, where he led their breakthrough innovation team and launched Just Crack an Egg, which Nielsen listed as a top new product. Then Google. Across all of it, the same question kept surfacing: when do I actually do the thing I’ve always wanted to do?
Around 2015 and 2016 he started seriously researching franchises. He looked at laundromats, Subway, McDonald’s. Chick-fil-A kept rising to the top and not because of the food. Their local owner-operator model is different from most. You can’t own twenty locations and manage from a distance. You are the store. You show up, you’re embedded in your neighborhood, your name is on everything that happens inside those walls. “I wanted to make the impact,” he says. “I wanted to be there and really see the change.” He also grew up without his father and wasn’t about to make his kids say the same thing. So when Chick-fil-A interviewed Janelle multiple times during the process, it honestly sealed it for him.
Janelle, of course, is the woman from the dorms. They dated at DePauw, built a life together across every career pivot and city change, and when Kareem was weighing whether to leave Google and finally make the leap, she encouraged him, “Since I’ve known you, you talked about owning a restaurant, owning a lounge, you need to do this.”
He didn’t just quit and go for it overnight. He spent nights working Chick-fil-A counters after his Google shifts, testing whether the reality matched what he’d imagined. He saved money, he prayed, and he thought it through. “I’m going to be resentful to myself for not taking the chance of me and betting on myself,” he says.
The South Loop location at 1106 S. Clinton St. opened in January 2021, right in the middle of a global pandemic, with a team of nearly 100 people looking to him to hold it together.
That people management required things of him no MBA covers. “One day I could be legit the counselor, the father figure, babysitter, semi-doctor,” he says. He built systems, gave himself and his team grace, and kept showing up. But on Saturday mornings he was just dad. Swim lessons, ballet, and then Just Roots Chicago, an urban farming nonprofit eight blocks from the store.
They got to know the team, the director Sean, and what the organization was doing for displaced community members nearby. When a Chick-fil-A corporate grant opportunity came up, he put them forward.
Edwards has moved through a lot of rooms. Finance, CPG, tech, now food. You’d expect him to have a long list of sponsors and career coaches behind him. He doesn’t really have that. His mentors have mostly been women. Black women specifically. “Women leadership has been my mentorship, I think, for the most part,” he says. He’s carried that into how he runs his store.
His circle outside the store is small. Charles Kuykendoll has been his friend since college, a west side of Chicago kid who has been grinding alongside him for years. The last two spring breaks they’ve taken their families on trips together. Dubai last year, Tokyo this year. Reflecting on it, Edwards says, “We are in Tokyo with our family.”
“He’s from the west side of Chicago, I’m from Rockaway, Queens. This is our life.”
Not bad for a kid from Far Rockaway.
The post Kareem Edwards Left Corporate America To Become Chicago’s First Black Chick-Fil-A Owner-Operator—And His Neighborhood Is Better For It appeared first on Essence.