El Pollo Loco
El Pollo Loco is a successful regional restaurant chain with over 300 restaurants and a devoted following in California, Arizona, Nevada, Texas as well as internationally. From the beginning, El Pollo Loco’s claim to fame has been its signature flame-broiled and hand-cut chicken.
CHALLENGE
The company had succeeded despite the complexity of cooking and handling its core product. This complexity had resulted in challenges with consistent food production, predictable labor costs and site selection due to an inflexible layout.
El Pollo Loco tapped The Culinary Edge to create a new restaurant operation management system for the company that would tackle these challenges.
SOLUTION
We proposed and proved a new operational system that would ensure the same authentic chicken but with tremendous operational efficiencies across the menu.
RESULTS
El Pollo Loco executed The Culinary Edge’s new system in a test market and it launched with the lowest labor costs that the company had ever seen combined with high customer satisfaction.
Additionally, the test market was able to prepare orders twice as fast, increasing capacity by 50%.