A Filipino entrepreneur’s idea more than two decades ago has evolved into a leading brand in the food industry with more than 500 branches in the Philippines, and around the world.
Jose Magsaysay Jr., the current president of Potato Corner, is an entrepreneur of humble beginnings. He worked at Wendy’s as a dishwasher, eventually climbing his way up to become a district manager of Wendy’s before opening his first Potato Corner stall in 1992.
As the company expanded, more stalls opened and Potato Corner grew more popular in the country.
By 1997, a total of 120 kiosks were opened, but everything changed when the Asian crisis hit, resulting in decreasing of active kiosks to 40 by year 2000.
Given that the crisis was a result of currency devaluation which caused prices to increase and imports to become more costly, Potato Corner was directly affected by the crisis because most of its potatoes were imported from Belgium and America.
Despite this obstacle, Potato Corner was able to surpass this and achieved even more by expanding their brand into the United States, Panama, Indonesia, Thailand and Australia.
This truly showed the resilience of the company in hard times.
A unique selling proposition is what makes a given product one of a kind. The factors inherent in Potato Corner’s unique selling proposition are low costs and high efficiency.
What Potato Corner did in order to increase sales and further expand the company was to introduce franchising to the company. By means of franchising, interested partners could help expand the business by paying royalties, and this in turn made Potato Corner an even more publicly-recognized company.
As a result, Potato Corner became a 75 per cent publicly-owned company with franchisees all over the globe.
The difference between other commercial french fries in the market is that Potato Corner adds powder flavouring to theirs; namely cheese, barbecue, and sour cream and onion.
Upon expanding to different areas around the world, Potato Corner had to change its approach. This was exhibited through introducing new flavours based on the given country, such as a cinnamon-flavoured fries in America.
As Jose Magsaysay said in an interview with ABS-CBN News Channel, “Our entry to the international. We don’t benchmark with Jollibee, McDonald’s or all foreign brands because we know we’re different, we’re a microbusiness. We’re a kiosk or a small hole in a wall business […] We design every country we go into differently for every franchise.”
This year, Potato Corner has announced that it opened its 1000th store, and it is now available nationwide.
The company also has plans to open more stores beyond just Philippines – namely in Cambodia, Vietnam and Kuwait.
Its sales figures have also exceeded the 1 billion peso mark, with a 40 per cent growth rate expected for Potato Corner in the near future.
Source: Vulcan Post
