Chicken company teams with Wal-Mart
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) - May 12, 2008 A restaurant bearing the Guatemalan chain's mascot chicken in a
cowboy hat now sells its famed product inside a /*Wal-Mart*/
Supercenter in Rowlett, Texas. Officials with the chain's fledging
U.S. arm, Campero USA Corp., hopes to expand its reach into more
than 20 Wal-Mart locations across the country by the end of 2009.
For the world's largest retailer, Pollo Campero offers a new
opportunity to reach out to its diverse range of shoppers as it
customizes some aisles in its mammoth stores to sell culturally
attuned products.
"It's kind of like when we're looking at salsa versus ketchup
and tortillas versus bread," said Lorenzo Lopez, a spokesman for
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. "All those things have crossed over very well
with customers in general and this has the potential to very well
do the same thing."
Wal-Mart, which largely abandoned running its own restaurants
inside its stores, now leases out space for companies such as
McDonald's Corp., Blimpie International Inc. and Subway. Recently,
the company offered Camille's Sidewalk Cafe, a Tulsa, Okla.-based
chain offering healthy fast food, to begin franchising its brand
inside stores.
Pollo Campero, Spanish for "country chicken," offers a chance
to capture a different, but lucrative kind of clientele. The
fast-food chain, created in 1971, talked for years about moving
into the U.S. market. The final push came in 1999, after Grupo
Taca, Central America's main airline, began complaining about the
smell of chicken overwhelming its planes.
Now the company has more than 40 locations in the United States.
Rodolfo Jimenez, an executive vice president of business
development with Pollo Campero, said Wal-Mart approached his
company after a restaurant expo last year as part of an effort to
reach Hispanic customers.
"They always said that they had a very big Hispanic component
in their customer base," Jimenez said. "They wanted to bring in
an authentic Latin brand to really be able to please those
customers."
Jimenez said Pollo Campero, owned by Corporacion
Multi-Inversiones, continues to discuss with Wal-Mart where it
could next lease space in a store. The possibilities could be large
for the brand, as even Wal-Mart's hometown of Bentonville has seen
its Hispanic population explode since the 1990s.
But the push isn't limited to Hispanics. Jimenez said the chain
now offers grilled chicken as part of an effort to please
discerning U.S. customers.
The fried chicken, however, continues to be the restaurant's
major draw. Jimenez, who spent time in the chain's new addition in
Rowlett since its opening Thursday, said curious Wal-Mart customers
continue to walk over to examine the Latin fare.
"Most people didn't know the brand," Jimenez said. "But just
the fact of being there, and it's an open space and looks nice. We
just said we were about chicken, so they came over and tried the
product and they were very pleased."
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On the Net:
Pollo Campero: http://www.campero.com
Wal-Mart Stores Inc.: http://www.walmartstores.com
