Jollibee invades carinderia industry, launches Tio Pepe
After putting up restaurant outlets in Vietnam, Indonesia China, and in the US, the country's most famous bee heads home to professionalize the Philippine carinderia business.
Fastfood icon Jollibee Foods Corp., the country's largest restaurant operator, is entering the biggest and cheapest segment in the food service industry and has put up its pilot restaurant "Tio Pepe's Karinderia" in Edsa Central in Mandaluyong.
"Tio Pepe's image is Bulakeņo," said John Victor Tence, vice president for corporate and human resources at Jollibee, when asked about the smiling mascot who is garbed in orange apron.
"Food is good and cheap. At P39, one can enjoy meal of pork adobo, rice, and soup," he said in an ABS-CBN interview.
Other dishes on the menu include laing, the classic Filipino dish of taro leaves cooked in coconut cream, and dinuguan, which is a pork blood stew.
Tio Pepe also serves his dishes on plates instead of styrofoam. Service to go is also available.
Jollibee -- which also operates Chinese fastfood Chowking, pizza and pasta Greenwich, cake shop Red Ribbon, and pastry outlet Delifrance -- said it found the carinderia business highly-fragmented and inefficient.
"If the venture becomes successful, Jollibee would be able to raise this industry segment to a higher level of quality and efficiency," it said.
"It would provide more consistency in food quality, better hygine, and better restaurant condition at food prices the ordinary Filipino worker can afford."
Jollibee said it will initially use a commissary servicing Chowking but will eventually put up a new one for Tio Pepe.
http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/storypage.aspx?StoryId=85848
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