The board of directors of Planet Fitness governs the largest gym chain in the United States. Over nineteen million members. More than 2,500 locations. Ten dollars a month. The most accessible on-ramp to fitness in the country, built for exactly the kind of person who has never felt comfortable in a gym before.
Here are the résumés of the people running Planet Fitness:
Bernard Acoca, Director, currently serves as CEO of Zaxby’s Chicken. Previously CEO of El Pollo Loco. Before that, a decade at Yum! Brands (parent company of KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell) and seven years at Starbucks.
Cammie Dunaway, Director, spent thirteen years at Frito-Lay, most recently the Vice President of Kids and Teens brands. Also was an Executive Vice President at Nintendo. In addition to being on the Planet Fitness board of directors, she also sits on the board of Red Robin Burgers.
Christopher Tanco, Director, was COO of 7-Eleven, overseeing 15,000 convenience stores. Before that, he was Chief Franchise Officer for Pizza Hut.
Craig Benson, Director and Interim CEO of Planet Fitness, operates 147 Dunkin’ Donuts franchises. Not formerly. Currently.
Frances Gregg Rathke, Director, serves as CFO of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream.
None of this is hidden. These biographies are on the company’s investor relations page, filed with the SEC. The people governing America’s most popular gym built their careers in fast food, snack brands, convenience stores, donuts, ice cream, and video games. They didn’t switch industries. They followed the customer… and their money.
Planet Fitness is not the exception. It is the only company honest enough to put the quiet part in its SEC filings. If you want to see the same logic without even that thin layer of separation, look at Roark Capital Group.
Roark is an Atlanta-based private equity firm with $37 billion in assets under management. Roark owns Inspire Brands (Arby’s, Baskin-Robbins, Buffalo Wild Wings, Dunkin’ Donuts, Jimmy John’s, Sonic), CKE Restaurants (Carl’s Jr., Hardee’s), GoTo Foods (Cinnabon, Auntie Anne’s, Carvel Ice Cream, Jamba, Moe’s Southwest Grill), and Subway. Yes, this is why Subway now has Cinnabon and Baskin-Robbins tie-ins.
Roark also owns Orangetheory Fitness, Anytime Fitness, Fitness Connection, and Massage Envy.
One firm. The Cinnabon and the Orangetheory. The Carl’s Jr. Western Bacon Cheeseburger and the heart-rate-monitored interval class you take to work it off. The customer who walks into a Dunkin’ at 7 a.m. is the same customer who books an Orangetheory at 6 p.m., and Roark collects on both ends. The only thing separating the sickness from the cure in their portfolio is a page break — and they have a financial interest in making sure you never fully commit to either side. Not too unhealthy, not too disciplined. Just enough of both to keep the cycle turning.
The loop extends beyond food and fitness. It is embedded in the financial architecture of American healthcare.
In 1995, researchers at Harvard Medical School published a study in The Lancet documenting that life and health insurance companies were major investors in tobacco stocks — holding billions in the companies that manufactured the leading preventable cause of death in the United States. The researchers called for divestiture. No one divested. They came back in 2009 with an update in the New England Journal of Medicine and found the holdings had grown to $4.4 billion. Prudential Financial held $264 million across Philip Morris and R.J. Reynolds. Sun Life Financial held over $1 billion. Cigna held tens of millions in Philip Morris.
The mechanism is simple: insurers profit when tobacco stock prices rise, then profit again by charging smokers higher premiums. Co-author David Himmelstein called it “the combined taxidermist-and-veterinarian approach: either way, you get your dog back.”
A year later, the same team found the identical pattern in fast food. Health Insurance companies held $1.88 billion in McDonald’s, Burger King, Yum! Brands, and others. Invest in the cause, bill for the consequence. The researchers called for divestiture again. The industry’s response, across fifteen years and three studies in three of the most respected medical journals in the world, was nothing. They profit when you buy the food that makes you sick, and they profit when you pay the premiums to treat it.
None of this requires conspiracy. That is what makes it worse. The Planet Fitness board did not scheme to make America fat and then sell it a gym membership. The analysts at Roark Capital did not cackle while putting Cinnabon and Orangetheory under the same fund. The insurance companies did not convene to decide they should invest in the products that generate their claims. No one had to. The system requires only incentives. The same expertise that scales 15,000 convenience stores scales 2,500 gym franchises. The same executive who can move fried chicken at volume can move treadmill access at volume.
This is the most profitable loop in America. You are not a customer. You are a circuit. The dollar you spend at the Dunkin’ drive-through is the same dollar you spend on the Orangetheory class is the same dollar your insurance company invests back into the tobacco company. At every station — the franchise, the gym, the insurer, the fund — someone takes a cut, files a quarterly report, and calls it growth.
Planet Fitness calls its gyms the Judgement Free Zone. They may be right. Judgment would require the system to look at its own board, its own portfolio, its own holdings, and ask a question it already knows the answer to.