A Utah restaurant chain’s owner is ready to sell — and hopes a longtime employee can take it over

The owner of a Utah chain of restaurants that has been serving soup to the Salt Lake City area for 50 years is looking to sell. And, so far, he has one party who’s eager to throw her hat into the ring.

Stuart Aitken, the owner of The Soup Kitchen, made public his intentions to sell the business about two weeks ago, when he posted an ad in KSL.com’s classifieds because “KSL gets response,” he told The Salt Lake Tribune. In the online ad, he wrote that The Soup Kitchen business was recently evaluated to be worth approximately $1.3 million, and that he was accepting offers of cash.

To be clear, The Soup Kitchen isn’t closed, Aitken said. In fact, they just reopened their Marmalade location at 422 W. 600 North, which is open for walk-up customers and is also the commissary kitchen where all of the soup and bread for the chain’s other locations is prepared.

But Aitken said he’s ready to move on to other things. He and his wife don’t have any children, and “at the end of the day, it doesn’t make any sense for me to sit there [and] continue this food business when I don’t really have anybody to pass the ball to,” he said.

“Time is more valuable than money. ... I don’t think I’ve taken a day off ever since 2019,” continued Aitken, who took over The Soup Kitchen from his father that year. Ever since, he said, he has been constantly rushing around to his four locations.

Aitken — who’s originally from California, and is used to traveling the world for work with his wife, who’s from the Philippines and now retired — said he wants to spend time with her “instead of working 24/7.”

Nobody knows more about The Soup Kitchen than Aitken. Except, maybe, Robi Huss-Sassé, who has been involved with The Soup Kitchen on and off for more than 30 years. (She’s currently the general manager over wholesale, retail, manufacturing and production.)

Let’s put it this way: None of The Soup Kitchen’s recipes are written down. Instead, they’re contained inside the heads of just two people: Aitken and Huss-Sassé.

Her passion for The Soup Kitchen is one of the reasons Aitken is considering her plan to buy the business. But he also said the preferred choice would be to find investors with the funds to acquire a mom-and-pop business and “take it to the next level.”

In the meantime, to make a serious offer, Huss-Sassé needs to raise enough money for a deposit, so Aitken launched a GoFundMe campaign this week in an effort to collect the cash. The goal is set at $100,000, which would be used for a deposit and also go toward The Soup Kitchen’s COVID-19 Economic Injury Disaster Loan from the Small Business Administration. As of Tuesday afternoon, no donations had come in.

“There’s a lot of goodwill here in Salt Lake City,” Aitken said. “I’ve been told many times it’s a community-based business. Now’s the time for the community to step up and help out.”

The Soup Kitchen’s future?

The Soup Kitchen, as Utahns know it, got its start when Aitken’s father, John Aitken — who emigrated from Scotland to the United States when he was 18 — bought the business in 1976, two years after it was started at 2012 S. 1100 East in Sugar House. Today, that location is The Soup Kitchen’s flagship. John Aitken went on to establish what Huss-Sassé calls a “soup empire.”

All of The Soup Kitchen’s locations have been “challenged” ever since COVID-19, Stuart Aitken said, but Sugar House has been hit the hardest. Ongoing road construction on 1100 East and 2100 South has made the restaurant difficult to access, and “people avoid that area,” he said. The restaurant sits in a 100-year-old building that has plumbing and roof issues, he said.

Aitken also said the prepared food industry overall is facing challenges, due to the fact that “people don’t have to go out of their way to have food,” he said. “They can easily stop at a Maverik or a grocery store and purchase elsewhere.”

COVID wasn’t all bad for The Soup Kitchen, however. Before the pandemic, “we were like a soup boutique,” Huss-Sassé said, where people had to physically come to the restaurants to dine in, carry out or pick up call-in orders. But once COVID hit, The Soup Kitchen started fulfilling orders through such food delivery apps as Grubhub and DoorDash.

If she is successful in purchasing The Soup Kitchen, Huss-Sassé said she plans to boost the Sugar House location especially by focusing on food delivery apps and social media. She said she would also like to bring back The Soup Kitchen’s cheese breadsticks, and reach more into the vegetarian and vegan communities by creating a vegan breadstick and serving plant-based soups. Seasonal and gluten-free items might also be added to the menu, she said.

“My vision of The Soup Kitchen is to promote it into the future and take the nostalgia into the future for our young, new Salt Lake people,” said Huss-Sassé, adding that she would also like to get the business’s soups into grocery stores.

Huss-Sassé has been a proud “Sugarhoodian,” as she calls residents of Sugar House, since 1995. She’s also Dakotah, of the Sioux Nation, and an enrolled member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate tribe. Each of her four children have worked at The Soup Kitchen.

She said she’s not working to purchase The Soup Kitchen for the “glory.” Instead, “I just need to keep serving the community that supported The Soup Kitchen,” she said.