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Pardo's Chicken: Growth, Franchising and the Recipe for Success

Arnold Wu and his brother Edwin have managed over the course of twelve years to turn the Peruvian brand of Pardo’s Chicken into a chain of restaurants with a presence in Peru, Chile and the United States. Their recipe seems simple: Combine the franchising model, which they helped to pioneer in Peru, together with the growing popularity of Peruvian cuisine, a fusion of the flavors of the country’s European, Asian and Inca populations.

In 1998 the brothers decided to buy the Peruvian brand called Pardo’s Chicken with the idea of making the only chain of grilled chicken locations in Lima into a chain of restaurants. The goal was to grow rapidly so they set up a system involving both franchises and locally owned restaurants. In 1998, the goal was to become the leaders of the Lima grilled chicken sector within a period of five years, and they achieved that goal in 2002. Over those five years, they opened 10 new locations. This encouraged the company to venture into Chile in 2003, and later on into the United States in 2010, but always by using the franchise format. Currently, there are a total of 25 restaurants under the brand of Pardo’s Chicken, of which 12 are franchises.

The decline in the average consumer’s income forces people to look for more economical alternatives when they go out to eat. With just five or six dollars [to spend], a customer can have quite a satisfactory experience in one of our restaurants. In addition, the flavor of Pardo's grilled chicken is unmatched because of the basting sauce that is used, which includes 14 different ingredients and high-quality spices. On the other hand, each locations have a distinctive characteristic: Each one of them is -350-800 square meters [in size], and has an investment of as much as $650.000 in each one. They are comfortable, welcoming spaces with waiters who provide service to your table. Clearly, if a customer goes to another restaurant that has the same infrastructure as Pardo's, he is going to pay at least double the price.

ZipList's Everywhere Recipe Box Lures 1M Cooks

When ZipList launched its digital grocery list and recipe clipping service in 2010, it dreamed of becoming the premier destination website for home cooks. But those dreams were quickly dashed. Founder and Chief Executive Officer Geoff Allen said ZipList not only had to face off against a growing number of recipe aggregation and shopping services, like Paprika, Yummly, and Grocery IQ, but also found it couldn’t compete for attention against entrenched cooking brands on the Web, such as the Food Network and Epicurious.
So ZipList changed tack. Last summer it began partnering with big food brands MarthaStewart.com (MSO) and the Daily Meal, as well as small food blogs that began integrating the ZipList recipe box directly into their sites. The results were impressive: In nine months it signed up 120 big-name food sites and 6,500 small blogs, which in turn generated 1 million customer accounts for its digital recipe and shopping list service. This week it plans to launch its recipe box with one of the giants of online cuisine, Simply Recipes, a cooking site that boasts 7 million unique visitors per month.
“It’s hard to build your own brand name in the face of these powerful consumer-focused food sites,” Allen said. But ZipList could give those sites something they weren’t able to create on their own, he said. “If you look at all of them, they’re a mess—not just the blogger sites. It’s the biggest ones, too. There is really no taxonomy to how to organize recipes and ingredients. We were able to provide that taxonomy.”
Unlike the recipe boxes that the food sites typically offer their customers, ZipList’s isn’t locked in silo. Once you save a recipe or a shopping list on MarthaStewart.com, for example, it appears in your box even if you access it on Simply Recipes and vice versa. The idea, Allen said, was to create a recipe box and notepad that travel with you as move through the culinary universe on the Web instead of forcing you to go to a specific app or Web portal to access the content. ZipList provides its own destination Web portal and iPhone and Android apps (an iPad app is in development), but most of its customers are accessing their recipe boxes through its partner sites, Allen said.
So far, ZipList has indexed 350,000 recipes, which have been clipped by its customers 4 million times. Those recipes generate targeted ads, the revenues from which ZipList splits with its partners. The recipes are being converted into shopping lists at a rate of four items for every recipe stored, and those lists are driving use of ZipList’s mobile apps as customers access their lists while shopping for dinner.
I have written in the past about the difficulties of creating a universal online recipe library and the need for a common digital recipe media format. ZipList doesn’t solve either problem completely, but it goes a long way toward bridging the disconnect between the people creating recipes and the services that organize them digitally.
Recipe box services such as Hindsight Labs’ Paprika, HungrySeacow’s YummySoup, and Pepperplate all have wonderful tools for scraping, storing, and organizing recipes you find on the Web, but there’s a natural friction between the food sites and those aggregators. As recipes are whisked off to online or app-based storage lockers, they no longer generate page views, and customers have less incentive to engage with the food site itself.
Cooking community portals like KeepRecipes have tried to bridge that gap by encouraging its members to engage and even purchase content from recipe creators, creating an iTunes for cookbooks, but ZipList goes further by keeping content local. While it stores metadata such as ingredients and measurements to make searching and generating shopping lists easier, customers are ultimately interacting with their recipe boxes within ZipList’s partner sites, not apart from them.
If ZipList continues to grow, it also might wind up being a catalyst for creating a common language for food on the Web. ZipList encourages its partners to render their recipes in hRecipe or Schema.org’s recipe formats optimized for digital search and discovery. (Update: Like other recipe box services, ZipList has also developed indexing algorithms that scrape unstructured recipe data when those formats aren’t used.) Consequently thousands of blogs and hundreds of big food sites are translating recipes from mere text floating on the Web into clearly identifiable and parsable digital data, something they have never had any incentive to do. ZipList uses that data to manage its customers’ recipe collections, but everyone benefits, as that information can be accessed and sorted by any app or search engine.

Forget Recipes, Food52 Wants to Crowdsource Cooking Itself

When Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs founded Food52 in 2009, they were looking for a way to create the world’s first crowdsourced cookbook. After 52 weeks (hence the name) of online recipe contests, they had the 140 dishes needed for their cookbook, but they also discovered they had inadvertently created a community of passionate home and professional cooks, all willing to share their recipes and their culinary wisdom.
Since then, Food52 has become a premier destination for community-vetted recipes online, but its founders have grown even more ambitious. Hesser and Stubbs want to crowdsource how we actually cook.
In a recent interview with GigaOM, Hesser laid out how Food52 plans to become a central clearinghouse for cooking questions and food knowledge throughout the Web—a sort of Quora or Yahoo! Answers for food. The idea is that anytime a cook has a question about a specific recipe, technique, or general cooking topic, he or she would be able to ask that question from any cooking website—or from a mobile app or social media site—and get an answer within minutes.
Food52 has already laid out the groundwork with a service called Hotline, which Hesser describes as a Butterball Turkey Talk-Line for any food question. Cooks can ask their questions from Food52’s website, via Twitter, through its iPhone app, or in its iPad cookbook, the Holiday Recipe & Survival Guide. Anyone can respond, as well as agree or disagree with someone else’s answer, but most of the responses come from Food52’s core membership of 50,000 highly active professional and home cooks (who account for about 10 percent of its 500,000 monthly unique visitors).
“Right now it’s a very solid proof of concept within our world, but you can imagine how powerful this could be if we integrated it with other sites,” Hesser said. “We want to distribute what we do around the Web. We’re building a widget that can be embedded in food blogs and sites that would expand our reach to a much wider audience.”
Whole Foods Market is already experimenting with the platform, incorporating Hotline into a series of local food portals it’s launching across the country, rebranding the service as FoodPickle. Food52 isn’t working with any other companies or sites just yet. First, Hesser said, it needs to refine and scale its platform.
Currently, Food52 is only getting about 20 to 40 questions per day—though during the holidays volumes increase dramatically—a number that’s handled easily by its membership and moderated by the startup’s small staff of eight. In order to support what it eventually hopes will be thousands of questions per day, Food52 is developing an automated system for streamlining the Q&A and process, identifying which questions pertain to a particular field of cookery and pushing those queries to the relevant experts among its members. For instance, a question about a sourdough bread recipe would go not only into the overall question feed, but would also be pushed automatically to the recipe’s author and Food52’s baking cognoscente.
Ultimately, Hesser said, Food 52 wants to get every query answered in as close to real time as possible, because people most often have cooking questions while they’re actually cooking. A 20-minute response lag to the question “How do I know when my quiche is done?” doesn’t do you much good if your quiche is already burning.
“Over the Christmas holidays we saved a lot of meals,” Hesser said, but she added that Food52 can do better. “One challenge for us is to get that critical mass of activity necessary to get questions answered in less than five minutes.”
Next, Food52 is trying to refine how questions are asked. While users can submit general Hotline queries via its Web and app tools, the company is embedding code into its recipes pages that allows customers to ask questions about specific ingredients, techniques, or steps described within those recipes. The engine then loads that relevant information into the posted question itself, making it easier for the site’s members to provide specific answers. Hesser said Food52 will eventually expand those capabilities to its partners.
Food52 is also building a database of questions and highly rated answers, giving users instant access to a repository of stored knowledge about particular recipes or techniques. The more people use Hotline, the smarter it becomes, Hesser said. And finally, the startup is looking to take advantage of its higher-profile members to provide both authority and nuance to some of the more complex queries fielded by the site. Food52 has designated a group of 10 famous chefs, food writers, and cookbook authors such as Michael Ruhlman and Dorie Greenspan as “MVPs.”

Apparel-Swapping Millennials Eschew Stores and Malls

Retailers from Gap Inc. (GPS) to Urban Outfitters Inc. (URBN) are already struggling to persuade consumers to pay full-price for clothes. Now, it turns out, many of their younger customers prefer trading T-shirts, jeans and designer dresses among themselves than actually buying new gear.
Clothing swaps are a hot ticket for Americans aged 18 to 34. Millennials attend swap house parties from New York to San Francisco. And they gather online, frequenting such sites as Swapstyle.com, which has swelled to more than 55,000 members since its 2002 founding.

 

Frugality has become a way of life for a cohort weighed down by student-loan debt and high joblessness, according to WSL Strategic Retail. In a WSL survey, 80 percent of respondents aged 18 to 34 said it was key to get the lowest price on most things they buy, up from 69 percent two years earlier and the only change among the three age groups surveyed.
“They can stay engaged in fashion without getting themselves in more debt,” Wendy Liebmann, chief executive officer of New York-based WSL, said in a telephone interview. “This generation has also grown up in an online world of Craigslist and EBay where selling something or swapping something has become somewhat second nature.”
The surge in apparel bartering comes as retailers struggle to woo young customers. While consumer spending rose in March, gasoline prices have held at more than $3.80 per gallon for more than a month and the unemployment rate remains above 8 percent. That’s cutting discretionary spending for the newest members of the workforce.
Event-listing website Meetup.com features apparel-exchange groups with hundreds of members, including the Washington D.C. Clothing Swap Society, the Five Boroughs Clothing Swap and the Frugal Fashionista’s Clothing Swap Group. The websites Evite Inc. and Etsy Inc. provide invitation templates for hosting swap parties.
“People are saying, ‘I can at least figure out another way to look like I’m wearing something new and fresh without spending top dollar on it, or waiting for it to go on sale and not being able to find my size,’” said Alison Paul, who leads the retail group at Deloitte LLP in Chicago.
Sarah Smith, a 24-year-old literary assistant in Manhattan, went to a coworker’s apartment in February for her first clothing swap, armed with three dresses and two skirts she hadn’t worn in at least a year. She walked out with a pair of skinny American Eagle army pants, a Simply Vera silk blouse and gray American Apparel T-shirt, pleased with the exchange.

Multiple Parties

Emily Weidner, a 29-year-old who works for the U.S. Forest Service in Washington, has hosted multiple clothing swap parties. She “consciously” tries to limit the amount of money she spends on apparel.
“I’ve been trying to aggressively pay off student loans from undergrad and grad school,” said Weidner. “I’ve heard a lot more about people being interested in participating in clothing swaps and I’ve been invited to a number of them.”
Frugal shoppers also are downloading Poshmark, an iPhone app introduced in December that hosts real-time shopping events for members to buy and sell clothes from their closets. Poshmark lets users follow others with similar taste, such as “animal prints” or “Marc Jacobs.”
The social aspect of shopping made possible by apparel- swapping parties is exactly what retailers need to do more of if they are to attract technologically driven millennials, according to WSL’s Liebmann.

Real Opportunity

“The opportunity to create a party around sharing and seeing new and trading old is a real opportunity to get younger shoppers back into the stores,” she said.
Gap and Urban Outfitters, both seeking to cut back on discounts for merchandise, have increased social-media marketing efforts to target young consumers.
Gap, which has said it’s not comfortable with its market share among 25- to 30-year-olds, worked with fashion bloggers to promote its spring collection this year. Urban Outfitters has promoted “social free shipping,” which gives customers free shipping if they tell friends the option exists.
In a March survey from Deloitte LLP, 52 percent of consumers under 45 years old said they rely more on Web comments and recommendations from others when deciding what to buy instead of marketing messages from retailers. That compares with 37 percent for customers 45 and up.
At the same time, only 22 percent of all respondents said retailers were offering more value for their money this spring than a year ago, compared with 45 percent in 2010.
Hannah Cole-Chu, a 25-year-old in Washington who’s in between jobs, has been attending clothing swaps and once came away with an oft-used Coach Inc. purse that she “loves.” Cole- Chu doesn’t frequent the mall, where it’s frustratingly common to see “a little tank top for $40.”
Clothing swaps offer “a more personal experience than going into a store,” she said. “It’s a nice relaxed social atmosphere. It’s not as high-pressure as shopping is sometimes.”