PLANS ARE IN train for a 16th Chefette restaurant as the fast food chain continues to stamp its footprint across Barbados.
Managing director Ryan Haloute gave word of the expansion plans during the grand opening of Chefette’s 15th restaurant at Welches, St Thomas, yesterday.
Haloute said Chefette had chosen to develop its brand in Barbados rather that franchising as was constantly being suggested to the company. He told guests, including some of Barbados’ top business leaders, that although the option of franchising remained open, “right now our country is really in turmoil, we need to focus all of Chefette’s efforts, our resources, our staff, on our country”.
With 800 employees, Chefette is one of the largest employers in Barbados and the managing director said the company would continue to build on the vision of his father Assad Haloute who opened the first Chefette restaurant 42 years ago, and remains at the helm as chairman.
Remarking on the decision to make the investment in the new ultra-modern restaurant in recessionary times, Haloute said “What better time than now when our country really needs this development. They need this input of cash injection in the economy (and) the preservation of jobs.”
He said while his company was not immune to the recession currently gripping Barbados, it refused to “lay down and play dead”.
He added his father had taken the unprecedented step of selling the Holetown restaurant in 2008 “as a step backward, to a giant leap, ten steps forward.”
That sale, which reportedly raked in about $40 million for the company, was a move Ryan Haloute said was designed to acquire the capital to pay off bank debt and reinvest in the company, since his father anticipated the recession would grow worse.
Haloute said continuous investment demonstrated his company’s commitment to restoring confidence in the island and to “help the government to come out of this recession” at a time when confidence and consumer confidence were “wavering”. (GC)
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