Alan Laughlin, President of Burger King AmRest, said the company will end 2019 with three restaurants opened in Bucharest and the target for 2020 is to open five or six new units in Bucharest too.
Amrest Group, which operates on some 20 global markets, will open the first Burger King restaurant in Romania in September, market sources told ZF. The company already has 46 Starbucks cafés in the country.
This is the second try for Burger King in Romania. The US fast-food chain Burger King, which has almost 18,000 restaurants globally, initially arrived in Romania in 2008 (the last year of economic boom), being introduced by businessmen Eli Davidai and Marius Nasta. Four years later, the company that was operating the business went insolvent at the request of Liberty Center mall (a shopping mall which was taken over, following a foreclosure process, by the three banks that had funded it – Alpha, Bancpost and Bank of Cyprus). The company closed the last few restaurants it still had in Romania that year, too.
Amrest also owns 46 Starbucks cafés in Romania. Romania is the only place where Amrest has introduced only one brand so far, while on the other markets, it has three to eight brands (either of its own or franchised). Amrest has therefore established a dedicated company to run the restaurant division on the local market. Each of the two brands, Burger King and Starbucks, will therefore be independently operated.