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FINGER-LICKIN’ BUENO

More gringos get to taste Guatemala’s Pollo Campero

BY JOSEPH DiSTEFANO

There was certainly nothing fast about the food at Pollo Campero’s first U.S. restaurant on opening day two years ago in Los Angeles. Central American immigrants lined up for hours for the distinctive Guatemalan fried chicken.

Before that, they used to have friends and relatives bring the chicken up from Guatemala. Some describe it as addictive.

“It’s the Krispy Kreme of fast food,” said Craig Hardy, director of real estate at the Littleton, Colo.-based Nanshe Group, which handles site selection and construction services for the company, called ADIR Restaurants Corp. dba Pollo Campero, and for other Campero franchises in the U.S. “You have people lining up for nine hours for chicken. It’s a taste that takes them back home to Central America.”

Hardy himself is no stranger to the quick-service restaurant sector. He was a franchise development director for 12 years at Yum! Brands, parent company of KFC and Taco Bell.

The Guatemala City-based purveyor of fried chicken with a Latino accent currently has more than 200 restaurants in Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama and El Salvador. In the United States, Pollo Campero has 14 restaurants: six in Los Angeles, four in Houston, two in New York City and two in Washington, D.C.

The company, whose name translates as “country chicken,” plans to open five more units by year-end. Two of those will operate in Los Angeles, but the company will also be entering the Dallas and suburban Maryland markets. By the second quarter it will open five more in Los Angeles, plus one in Chicago, and it has targeted Florida for the end of 2005.

But many more will follow, predicts José Cofiño, president of ADIR Restaurants Corp. dba Pollo Campero. The company is a subsidiary of ADIR Restaurants created to handle ADIR’s master franchise operations. Cofiño says he’ll have no trouble expanding the chain to 100 units in his own six-state trade area (Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington) by 2008. By then, Pollo Campero could easily have 200 units nationwide, he adds.

Festive yellow-and-orange decor, flags of the countries it calls home, Spanish signage and an upbeat salsa soundtrack make Pollo Campero a decidedly Latin experience. The menu features the chain’s lightly floured signature fried chicken, which is injection-marinated with a special spice blend. Sides include rice, beans and tortillas. In addition to french fries, Pollo Campero offers tostones — deep-fried disks of green plantain, a favorite among South and Central Americans. There are also Latin drinks, including tamarindo, a tart-sweet beverage made from tamarind root and horchata, a sweet cinnamon-flavored drink.

Crossover campero
But the company is finding that the appeal of its food goes beyond Latin Americans. One indicator of this is the performance of its first mall unit, which opened in January in the food court of Glendale (Calif.) Galleria, the 1.3 million-square-foot super-regional owned by General Growth Properties. The 870-square-foot unit is doing well, according to Janet La Fevre, CMD, the mall’s senior marketing director. “Their sales are strong and getting stronger every month,” she said. “It’s not your traditional chicken, it’s Guatemalan. So it has a different feel and flavor to it.”

Pollo Campero chose Glendale Galleria for its high traffic and because it “provides an opportunity to test the concept in a multiethnic environment,” Cofiño said. Some 55 percent of the customers at Pollo Campero’s Glendale Galleria restaurant are Hispanic, 30 percent are non-Hispanic whites and roughly 15 percent are Asian.

“Once people taste the product, they get hooked,” Cofiño said. “We’re seeing that with Asians at Glendale.”

Cofiño says he always knew Pollo Campero would appeal to other ethnicities. “We now see that crossover can happen much faster,” he said. In fact, the chain’s next three restaurants going up in Los Angeles are all in multiethnic areas.

The Glendale Galleria unit is a departure from the company’s strategy of choosing freestanding pads in primarily Central American communities. Those restaurants typically span 2,800 square feet. Pollo Campero also has some streetfront units in urban areas, and those range between 2,500 and 4,000 square feet.

For now Pollo Campero plans to focus on freestanding units and pads in neighborhood, community and power center parking lots, says Cofiño, but the chain will probably take another look at malls in three to five years. Pollo Campero’s reasons for holding off on openings in malls are twofold, according to Sonia Carstensen, ADIR dba Pollo Campero’s director of marketing: The principal customer is Hispanic, and sales at the nonmall units run some 380 percent higher than at its other restaurants. “You have to go where the fish are biting,” Carstensen said.

As for co-tenants, Pollo Campero looks for the same thing many other quick-service restaurants do: service-oriented retail, such as supermarkets and drugstores. But home improvement stores have proved to be a good co-tenant too, because of the high number of Latinos that patronize them, says Cofiño.

Pollo Campero has come a long way since 1971, when Don Dionisio Gutierrez and his father, Don Bautista Gutierrez, opened their first restaurant on Guatemala City’s South Side. Soon afterward the company expanded to El Salvador. By 1998 Pollo Campero was so popular that scores of people at Guatemala City Airport were boarding planes carrying yellow, orange and white bags stuffed with boxes of chicken for homesick relatives in the United States.

“That’s how we knew there was a built-in market in the U.S.,” said Cofiño. Among the chain’s busiest restaurants was the one at the airport. “Most of the sales were takeout — as in take out of the country.”

In fact, chicken trafficking grew to such a level that executives at TACA Airlines, an El Salvador-based carrier that services Central America and the Caribbean, complained about the pungent aroma permeating airplane cabins.

Pollo Campero officials found that the chain had huge name recognition in the United States, particularly in Los Angeles, which has the country’s largest Central American population, according to the 2000 U.S. census. Of those, 65,537 are Guatemalan. The company chose ADIR to open a franchise in the city’s Pico-Union neighborhood. People began arriving at 5 a.m. the day the restaurant opened. By 11 p.m. there were still nearly 700 Pollo Campero fans lined up along Olympic Boulevard, according to Pollo Campero. In its first seven weeks of operation Pollo Campero’s first U.S. restaurant racked up $1.4 million in sales, according to ADIR.

Beyond that, the closely held Central American company would not divulge sales figures. But judging by the lines at its U.S. restaurants, they are probably something to write home to Guatemala about.