Restauratour: El Pollo Loco's Color Commentary
The vivid palette of Latin America lifts El Pollo Loco's interior from drab to dramatic.
By Lisa Bertagnoli, Contributing Editor -- Chain Leader, 2/1/2006 12:00:00 AM
 Take an online tour of El Pollo Loco |
Here’s the downside of asking customers what they think: Those opinions aren’t always easy to hear.
While conducting customer research, El Pollo Loco executives learned that a catered event such as an office lunch provided many non-Hispanic customers with their first taste of El Pollo Loco’s signature marinated, grilled chicken. Those same customers said they would never set foot inside an El Pollo Loco restaurant.
“They didn’t feel comfortable going into the restaurant,” says Steve Carley, CEO of the Irvine, Calif.-based quick-service chain. The drab, brownish interior “looked too downscale,” he says.
El Pollo Loco had a clear challenge: to make the interiors as vibrant and appealing as the food. Executives responded by launching a two-year design process that resulted in an interior that replaces blah brown with rich purple, fuchsia and yellow, a palette found in the residences and public spaces of Mexico and other Latin American countries.
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Wood tabletops and chairs and handcrafted tiles also express a Latin American feeling. Cues that evoke the freshness and Mexican heritage of El Pollo Loco’s chicken exist in an open grill behind the ordering counter and in wall murals peppered with phrases such as “sabor,” “taste the fire” and “citrus garlic and spice.”
The new look is comfortable as well: Booths, banquettes, and moveable chairs and tables accommodate small groups and the families with which El Pollo Loco is popular. A small salsa bar, stocked with five house-made salsas, lets patrons make their food as spicy as they want.
A Balancing Act
El Pollo Loco’s first location was in Mexico; the chicken’s marinating and grilling process is a Mexican recipe. So the in-house design team sought to replicate the feeling and colors of Mexico in the new design.
The team, including Carley, Chief Marketing Officer Karen Eadon, Vice President of Development Brian Berkhausen and Director of Development Brian Charmichall, created the new prototype. For assistance, they called on Maite D’Amico, president and chief creative officer at Cruz Kravitz, El Pollo Loco’s Hispanic advertising agency.
“Color was lacking in the interior,” says D’Amico. “In Mexico, color is everywhere. Architecture, food, textiles—every expression has to do with really brilliant colors.”
The design team also sought “the sweet spot between fast casual and quick service” to attract new users yet not alienate the Hispanic families that are El Pollo Loco’s core customers, Charmichall says.
The team found the balance by mixing traditional quick-service and contemporary fast-casual touches. As in quick service, customers queue up to order their food; as in fast casual, their orders are brought to their tables. The quick-service-style menu board hangs above the counter, while the salsa bar feels fast casual. The seating is mostly banquettes and moveable two-tops. But in bigger stores, a seating mix of 30 percent booths adds a fast-casual ambience. Some finishes, for instance the light-wood tabletops and quarry-tile floors, are quick-service touches. However, the brilliant color palette, plus custom-made wall graphics, look more like fast casual.
The wall graphics are key to the new look, Eadon says. The chain hired a Los Angeles art student to create a master mural; sections of the mural cover a restaurant’s walls as space permits. For instance, because the endcap unit in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood has little wall space, the restaurant contains only three sections of the mural.
Kitchen Magicians
The new interior helps El Pollo Loco, now at 191 franchised and 14 company stores, prepare to add 130 new units by 2009, primarily via multiunit franchise agreements.
A newly engineered back of the house will help as well. Previously, El Pollo Loco’s chicken was hand-marinated for an hour and then cooked over an open flame. “It took six months to train a cook,” Carley says. While the process resulted in good-tasting chicken, it was too labor-intensive for franchisees.
SRE, a Columbus, Ohio-based kitchen-design firm, engineered a new process by which chicken is marinated for 50 minutes in an automated tumbler, cooked in a convection oven, then finished to order on a flame broiler. The process also eliminates the need for 40 running feet of flame broilers, equipment that couldn’t fit in smaller restaurants.
All told, the new prototype doesn’t cost any more than the old and is more profitable: “We are maintaining or improving capital costs and margins,” Carley says.
The new freestanding stores average $1.5 million in sales a year, and several are breaking sales records, though Carley won’t give specific figures.
Still, in the process of opening 15 new-design stores, El Pollo Loco has made several cost-saving moves; among them: using paint instead of custom-made wallpaper and eliminating a video screen that played message loops to customers in line. The screen appeared in the first prototype, which opened in Los Angeles in 2004; El Pollo Loco dropped it from the design after research revealed that customers didn’t even notice it.
What customers do notice, however, are freshness cues such as the open grill and salsa bar. To test the new look, El Pollo Loco sent customers to an older store in Los Angeles, then to the prototype.
The response? Customers said the new look “sets the expectation that the food will be more flavorful, more authentic and better tasting,” Eadon says. “I’ve never seen that in a remodel before.”
Menu Sampler
Chicken Meals
Two pieces plus two sides, served with corn or flour tortillas and salsa; leg and thigh, $4.79; breast and wing, $5.49
Burritos
Twice Grilled Burrito, with chicken breast, cheese, guacamole, sour cream and pico de gallo, $4.99
Pollo Bowls
Chicken Caesar Bowl: chicken breast, romaine lettuce, rice, creamy cilantro dressing, cotija cheese, pico de gallo and tortilla strips, $3.99
Pollo Salads
Tostada Salad: chicken breast, lettuce, pinto beans, rice, cheese, sour cream and pico de gallo in a tostada shell, $4.79
Loco Additions
Chicken Tortilla Soup, $2.99
Taco al Carbon, $1.29
