By BETH EWEN, FRANCHISE TIMES | MAY 28, 2021
Chaac is the ancient Mayan god of rain, so Chaac Foods is the evocative name chosen by its founder, Luis Ibarguengoytia, for his restaurant operation started in 2018. “You need rain in order to harvest, so we really liked it,” said the man born in Mexico City and educated in Monterrey, Mexico, who moved to Dallas a couple of decades ago.
Chaac Foods bought 40 corporate-owned Bojangles restaurants in Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee, plus signed a deal to build 40 new stores over seven years. That adds to about 30 Pizza Hut stores bought in Ohio at the end of 2019, followed by another 110 Pizza Huts in Maryland, Washington, D.C., New York and New Jersey.
“When we were looking for our fried chicken partner, we met with all the usual suspects, and we found Bojangles. It has tremendous history, tremendous following, and at the same time it has a lot of opportunities for growth,” he said. “With Bojangles we found steady, very well established companies in the Southeast, but at the same time with great UVAs,”or average sales, “so the brand matched the two things we wanted.”
Gauge Capital is the private equity firm that backs Chaac Foods in a 75/25 percent partnership, with Ibarguengoytia holding the minority stake. “Yes, of course they have more capital than I do, but it is a true partnership where they really handed off control of the company as far as operations to me. We work incredibly close together,” he said about Gauge.
“That’s why, in less than a year and a half, I’ve gone from a handful of stores to hopefully we’re going to surpass the 200-store mark by the end of the year.”
He worked for his brother-in-law’s restaurant operation for 20 years before that. “I took the company from one store to 1,000 stores in 11 states. In 2018, I decided to part ways and create my own,” he said.
Drew Johnson and Tom McKelvey are co-founders and managing partners at Gauge, which invests in consumer and retail, education, fintech, food services and healthcare services, among other sectors. Gauge has more than $2 billion in assets under management, its website says.
So they’ve got plenty of capital to continue backing Chaac Foods? “As long as we continue performing, I guess,” he says with a laugh. “Performance goes away, and the faucet closes really, really quick.”
“We are thrilled to join forces with the accomplished team at Chaac Foods,” Bojangles chief development officer Jose Costa said in the release. “The company’s caliber of operations is well-recognized, and to have a partner with that pedigree invest in Bojangles speaks volumes about our brand and our growth plans for the future.”
Eight Bojangles in Central Florida, from Leesburg to St. Cloud, closed in 2015 when the local franchisee at the time decided to leave the business.
Orlando fans of the restaurant have still been in driving distance of the chicken chain, with 10 Florida locations including one in Ocala and one in St. Augustine.
The Bojangles announcement comes on the heels of White Castle returning to Florida with its first restaurant in the state since the 1960s. It opened Monday.
The White Castle near Walt Disney World set a single-day sales record for the chain. With long lines for their hamburger sliders, the company posted on Twitter Tuesday that customers must be in line by 10 p.m., even though 1 a.m. was the restaurant’s original closing time.
