Magdalena Rivas, a large woman with violet-tinted hair, scarlet nails and a Bible by her side, has just finished her shift at the funeral parlour where she puts make-up on the dead. Now she is sitting in her favourite lunch venue: the Pollo Campero on Guatemala City’s Seventh Avenue.
She has been going to the Central American fast-food chain about twice a week for decades and on this Sunday afternoon she is savouring the last of her Super Campero combo – three pieces of fried chicken in breadcrumbs, a side order of coleslaw, French fries, a bread roll and a fizzy drink.
“It’s so tender,” she says with a big grin. Other fast-food outlets such as McDonald’s or KFC are much too greasy and anyway, she says, she is on a diet. “I don’t eat that rubbish,” she insists.
Loyalty such as hers has helped Pollo Campero, which roughly translates as “Country Chicken”, to defend its territory successfully against foreign competition.
When Kentucky Fried Chicken eyed the Guatemalan market and established its first branch 30 years ago, the future might for a moment have looked difficult for Pollo Campero. As it turned out, the US-based fast-food group packed up and left within a couple of years (although it did return eventually). “Who knows?” says Eddy Weaver, Pollo Campero’s vice-president, modestly. “It could have had something to do with us.”
Food brand that won respect from armed guerrillas
How do you start a fast-food restaurant chain in a country immersed in bloody armed conflict and make sure that it not only survives but it prospers too?
Ask the people at Pollo Campero. When the Gutiérrez family opened its first outlet in Guatemala City in 1971, the idea was to add value to its poultry-farming business. But the country was virtually at war, and had been for years. The conflict that eventually ended in 1996 had left 100,000 dead and, by some estimates, 1m refugees.
Eddy Weaver, vice-president, says positioning the company as wholly Guatemalan proved crucial, as did organising and paying for special events, such as a now- famous annual fireworks display.
“We did have difficulties in distribution during the conflict but the brand commanded a lot of respect among the guerrillas,” he says. “They saw us as a sort of national symbol.”
Even with peace officially restored, high levels of violence continue. That makes many people think twice before going out in the evening. One of Pollo Campero’s responses in the 1990s was to invest heavily in technology to set up one of Guatemala’s first nationwide home-delivery services. Dial 1777 and one of 157 operators takes the order and co-ordinates with the nearest restaurant to ensure delivery – usually within 30 minutes.
Not only has it survived intruders, but Pollo Campero has for years been expanding abroad, and is now one of Central America’s most successful “multilatinas” – multinational companies from Latin America.
Since opening its first restaurant in Guatemala City in 1971, it has added 120 restaurants in Guatemala and another 162 around the world, including 35 in the US, two in Spain, one in Indonesia and, most recently, one in China.
The company, part of the Corporación Multi Inversiones, a diversified privately owned group with interests including finance, real estate, construction and agriculture, does not post earnings. But, according to reliable sources, total income last year was between $380m and $400m (£199m) (€254m). That is about 1.2 per cent of Guatemala’s gross domestic product.
So what is the secret of Pollo Campero’s success next to the world’s biggest and best-known brands, such as McDonald’s and KFC? After all, the chain’s speciality is not a traditional Guatemalan dish but a variant on simple fried chicken.
For a start, the company, which has about 10,000 employees, understands its domestic market perhaps better than any other restaurant chain.
Guatemala is a poor country with more than half of its 13m population living below the poverty line. But Pollo Campero was quick to realise there is also a significant segment that wants to eat in a restaurant offering products and ambience that symbolise first-world progress, quality and service while continuing to appeal to Guatemalans’ sense of national pride.
Pollo Campero achieves the “first-world-progress” part through a combination of internernational-style fast food with a slightly less “fast-food” environment.
There are no plastic bucket chairs attached to the tables. Instead, the restaurants have hefty, rustic-looking seating. The tables are big and spaced out. “We have tried to create a more personal atmosphere – one in which our customers feel they are getting more value,” says Mr Weaver.
Julio Waldemar, a 33-year-old parking attendant, is one of those customers. He and his smiling family come two to three times a month. “We come because it’s modern, clean and the children love the food,” says Mr Waldemar. He particularly likes Pollo Campero’s full-table service, in which waitresses with electronic hand-held computers and headsets send orders electronically to the kitchens. “It makes you feel like you’re being looked after more,” he says.
Yet the business has been careful to remain wholly “Guatemalan”, appealing to customers’ sense of national identity and patriotism. At the restaurant where Ms Rivas is having lunch, one wall displays a huge photographic montage of a smiling Guatemalan Indian girl, close-ups of bright textiles and a panoramic view of a lake and volcano. The company logo is “Pollo Campero – Lo llevo dentro” – “Pollo Campero – It’s part of me”.
Success abroad has come from adapting this formula and tailoring it to specific markets. In the US, for instance, the company made its restaurants self-service after research showed their target audience had less time.
But the best example of how it has adapted its image is China, where the company used its heritage to appeal to the local crowd – even though Guatemala is not usually associated with things most foreigners identify as Latin American, such as soccer and Salsa.
“Chinese people are obsessed with Latin pop culture but they don’t really distinguish between countries,” says Mr Weaver. “So we tried to associate ourselves with figures such as Ricky Martin as well as with Latin American and Spanish football,” he says.
So far, thanks also in part to a new “extra crisp” line of chicken, sales are reportedly strong. Juan José Gutiérrez, Pollo Campero’s chief executive, recently told La Opinión, the US Spanish language daily newspaper, that: “The Latin concept is well received and they loved our chicken.”
As for the future in the world’s most populous nation, Mr Gutiérrez said: “If we don’t open at least 500 restaurants in the next five years we might as well go home.”
