The owner of Hyper Energy Bar said his goal is to build a generational company with a national footprint that will triple in size over the next year.

Hyper Energy Bar, the drive-thru energy drink and coffee business, has been sprouting up across the metro, with its latest opening recently in Ankeny. It now has six metro locations and one in Iowa City. Next year, Hyper Energy Bar plans to open six stores, including expanding into eastern Nebraska, including Grand Island, Lincoln and the Omaha area, and in the Kansas City, Kan., area, owner Chris Whalen said.

Whalen, 35, is the son of Mike Whalen of Heart of America Group and grew up around the hospitality industry. He said he was looking for an opportunity to expand beyond the company’s core hotel and restaurant businesses and began forming his vision for Hyper Energy Bar, a vision that took off during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

“I had been working on this concept of doing something more of a quick service, and in 2020, as stressful as it was, it was also a time to be reflective and we really got running.”

Whalen said he’s been a fan of energy drinks and wanted to  do an energy drink concept, but do it in a way that brought the full-service hospitality experience to the quick service concept.

“One determining principal was where we build relationships and have that same attachment,” he said. “I saw during 2020 some of the only places you could go were quick service, but the quality of the interaction was deteriorating as fast as the business was picking up. I said that can’t be the only way to do it. So I said we have to do something different. We have to do it face to face.

Today, Hyper Energy employs just over 100 people and offers 120 flavors of energy drinks and coffee with up to 250,000 flavor combinations.

“The goal is to build a foundation of a business that has unlimited potential for the people who want to stay with Hyper,” he said. “We can scale them up into an equity partnership deal because I think that’s the long-term strategy of growth.”

Whalen said the goal is to build a national footprint, “but also build the next great Iowa company.”

He said his vision is to continue expanding across the Midwest and into the Sunbelt states over the next five years.

He said he’s learned several lessons since he opened the first store in Waukee in 2021.

“We’ve gotten a lot better at our craft and being able to hire the right people,” he said. “We’ve learned leadership at the top is so important. We don’t have a ton of employees and we’ve brought some people from some great concepts over but maybe they didn’t have the Hyper mindset. They were maybe more operator focused and we quickly realized they were great but not great for this. So we learned personality is key. Driving energy at the top is key. That was a big lesson.”

He also learned that scaling is not easy.

“You want to get pumped up and say we got lightning in a bottle and it shouldn’t be hard, but it is hard,” he said. “It’s easier to scale in your own backyard. I think the next step of lessons will be scaling away from home but we’re ready for it. It will be challenging but it will be a lot of fun.”

The first stores were modular in design, allowing Whalen to focus on operation and creating a menu rather than construction. The Ankeny store, at 1101 S. Ankeny Blvd, was the first to be built on-site, he said.

Whalen, who is married with two young children — a 4-year-old daughter and a 1-year-old son — said he sees Hyper Energy Bar as an opportunity to build a business to pass onto the next generation of his family.

“I think we are building something that is generational,” he said. “My goal is to build a company that is nationwide, even further, but do it the right way. We’re going to build something and grow the right way with the right people.”