How Much Money Can I Make?

Pollo Campero is a proven business model with the potential for strong financial returns

Now is a great time to invest in a Pollo Campero franchise. Not only is the chicken QSR category booming at $34 billion annually, America is rapidly becoming more diverse while, at the same time, international cuisine is on the rise. As a Guatemalan-based chicken franchise, the changing demographics and ever-expanding interest in foreign cuisine gives Pollo Campero an enormous edge over other chicken concepts.

Pollo Campero stands out because we serve chicken with bold Latin flavors, and while we’re only beginning to make our brand a household name, we have enormous brand equity. Founded in 1971, Pollo Campero has millions of die-hard brand champions who line up around the block every time we open a restaurant in their communities. This means our franchise owners don’t ever start from scratch. Our fans, who grew up with the brand in Guatemala and El Salvator, cannot wait for us to enter their markets.

While the built-in customer base is an obvious benefit for franchise owners in the early months of getting their businesses established, the real driver of Pollo Campero’s success in the United States since we opened our first location in 2002 is our ability to win crossover customers and convert them into loyal brand champions. This is why Pollo Campero has experienced same-store sales increases of 4% for the past four years.

“We started by appealing to the Hispanic demographic that loves our brand, but what’s exciting for us is our ability to appeal to crossover customers,” says Fernando Perez, Director of Operations with Pollo Campero. “We’ve proven that everyone, no matter their race, background, gender or age, truly loves our brand as soon as they get a chance to try our food. We’re very different from any other chicken franchise from the very first bite. Our same-store sales increases, which are higher than the industry average, reflect this. This means that the growth potential for Pollo Campero is unlimited.”

Our Restaurants are Designed to Maximize Profitability

Over the past 18 years in business in the United States, Pollo Campero has taken significant steps to engineer our restaurants to maximize profitability. In fact, few brands in the chicken QSR segment are as operationally excellent as Pollo Campero – and this focus on efficiency not only provides our restaurants with strong profit-potential, but it also makes our restaurants easy to scale up to multi-unit ownership.

Our restaurants are designed to maximize labor productivity by cross training employees with an emphasis on taking care of the guest, as well as laying out the kitchen to make preparing and serving the products easy.

“At most of our competitor concepts, you have specialized tasks that require specialized individuals,” says Christopher Livingston, Area Manager of North Texas with Pollo Campero. “That person will have to do that task throughout the entire day. Our process is designed in the opposite way – we maximize on the level of productivity within our team. We’re able to cut back on tasks that are labor intensive, and we crosstrain our employees to be able to transition members of our teams to perform other roles in the restaurant. This means we get to be double or triple productive, which is what you are looking for as an operator. You want to be able to be efficient, precise and be able to serve as many guests as possible.

“This drives profitability,” Livingston continues. “When you look at your P&Ls, you want to impact labor in a way that makes you more efficient, as well as streamline costs of goods sold without impacting the integrity of your product. If you’re able to maximize on those two areas alone, any efficiencies that are made translate into bottom line revenue.”

Family Style Meals Drive Higher Sales

Another benefit of being a Guatemalan-based brand is that our menu is much different than our competitors. Traditionally, chicken QSR concepts go after the individual consumer, leading to low tickets and therefore the reliance on heavy traffic at lunch and dinner to drive profitability. Pollo Campero targets the entire family, with family portions that can be taken away to be eaten at home or enjoyed in our beautiful, colorful restaurants on real china and with real silverware.

“Our competitors rely on single-serve transactions,” Livingston says. “Our guests are different, because when a customer comes in, they order for their entire family. Instead of selling just three pieces of chicken, you’re selling 20 pieces of chicken, as well as sides. This leads to not only higher tickets – which are much higher than our competitors – but it’s also a lot easier on your building, your equipment and your staff. As an operator, you want to impact as many people as possible, and with family style meals you get to grow brand awareness that much quicker because you’re impacting many people with every interaction.”

Our Success is Replicable By Design

By keeping the business model simple, cross training employees to be able to focus on exceptional customer service, and providing a unique spin on chicken that Americans crave, Pollo Campero is primed for rapid growth.

“The Pollo Campero platform is one designed for growth and replicability,” says Fernando Palarea, Director of Supply Chain and R&D with Pollo Campero. “When entrepreneurs see the flow of our restaurants, they see that we have flexibility in our labor, technology that allows us to deploy and allocate labor to certain areas, and most importantly, focus on the guests during peak times. Our business model has been the key to our success, and most franchisees that have opened a Pollo Campero are ready to open another one.”

For a detailed overview as to how well our locations perform, please view the chart from Item 19 of our most recent Franchise Disclosure Document below: