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El Pollo Loco: Launching a New Platform for Growth
Profile
El Pollo Loco is a successful regional restaurant chain with 275 restaurants and a devoted following in California, Arizona, Nevada, and Texas, and internationally in the Philippines and Malaysia . Started in Mexico in 1975, El Pollo Loco is now the nation's leading quick-service restaurant chain specializing in marinated, flame-broiled chicken. From the beginning, the secret to El Pollo Loco's success has been its signature chicken -- chicken marinated in special herbs, spices and fruit juices and then flame-broiled and hand-cut.
El Pollo Loco's popularity has led to continued expansion; in 2002 alone, the company opened 13 new restaurants and reported record sales of $364 million.
Challenge
While El Pollo Loco was doing well in their existing markets, they hoped to expand across the country. Their existing operational model needed to be updated to allow them to transform themselves into a nationally recognized brand.
Despite El Pollo Loco's tremendous success to date, the company had succeeded in spite of having very little flexibility or scalability in their original concept. The chain had found that their signature cooking process was too complex and training for cooks prohibitively time-consuming. In addition, the footprint needed for El Pollo Loco's specialized equipment was found to be 30% bigger than would fit in many locations. With quick-service restaurants trending toward smaller, in-line locations like food courts and airports, the company knew it needed a better operations plan to succeed consistently moving forward.
El Pollo Loco tapped The Culinary Edge to build a new operational methodology for the company that would tackle these challenges. The Culinary Edge researched El Pollo Loco's operations carefully, shadowing the cooking process from start to finish and conducting time-and-motion studies to test various solutions.
Solution
The Culinary Edge proposed a new plan that would ensure the same authentic, mouth-watering chicken but with tremendous operational efficiencies. The plan involved reducing preparation complexity and designing a new, carefully staged cooking process with more off-peak flexibility and a lower response time for meeting peak hour demand.
Results
New El Pollo Loco's will save significant space with a reduction of 30% in the equipment footprint for cooking chicken. Orders can be cooked twice as fast. El Pollo Loco's original goal of a 22% increase in capacity became a 50% increase in the number of orders that can be cooked at one time. The result has been a blueprint for maximum flexibility and consistency that allows the restaurants' great time-honored recipes to shine.
The plan has been a complete success and El Pollo Loco is now poised to provide its authentic marinated broiled chicken nationwide.