Pat McMichael is the CEO of Eat’N’Go, Nigeria’s master franchisee for the Domino’s Pizza, Cold Stone Creamery and Pinkberry Gourmet Frozen Yoghurt brands. In this interview with BUNMI BAILEY, McMichael speaks about the company and how it is thriving in the country’s tough business environment.
It has been more than a year since you have been the CEO of Eat’N’Go. How has the experience been so far?
It has been a very exciting learning curve since taking over as CEO of Eat’N’Go. I have worked in many countries around the world and it takes time to understand the culture, the retail environment, the company and the team. I have to say it has been a fun and productive year. I feel very at home in Nigeria. It has been a positive welcome from the team, our supply partners, and our customers. During the year the team has worked hard with me to introduce new retail offers to our customers that have been well-accepted and driven our sales. We have also expanded the business across Nigeria at the same time. I have to say it has been a nonstop year. However, that is how we prefer it to be.
Tell us the story of how Eat’N’Go started in Nigeria
Eat’N’Go is Nigeria’s master franchisee for the Domino’s Pizza, Cold Stone Creamery and Pinkberry Gourmet Frozen Yoghurt brands. We founded this organisation in 2012 to bring the best F&B brands, and great taste, to Nigeria. Eat’N’Go started as a food service company in Saka Tinubu, Victoria Island, Lagos, with enough staff to run one store. We did not have the Pinkberry Yoghurt brand here at the time. Now after 7 years, with over 2,400 employees and over 100 stores later, we have quickly established a reputation for providing exceptional products and services across our three brands.
Many say Nigeria is one of the toughest markets to make pizza in the world. Why is this so?
Nigeria, just like any market in the world today, has its challenges when it comes to doing business regardless of the product or service to be offered. As an organisation, it is key to understand the market you are about to do business in before setting up to succeed. Years ago, before we launched Domino’s Pizza here, many believed that Nigeria was not a viable market for Pizza. But we came in and we introduced our products, tailored our menu’s to fit the unique Nigerian diet and tastes, and grew from there, becoming the market’s largest operator. We had to understand what the market liked, and once we did this, we created offerings to suit those needs.
We believe that there are numerous untapped business opportunities in Nigeria such as the huge population and other commercial advantages to grow a business, which is why we came here to establish our organisation. We believe that with the right mindset, a great team of employees and an effective business plan, you can succeed.
Since adding smaller packages of pizza, what kind of impact has it had on sales? What kinds of margins are you seeing?
We introduced the Smallie Pizza in February, a mini-pizza variant that goes for N550, as a huge innovation targeting a wider segment of the consumers and ensuring everybody can afford a box of pizza. To launch, we organised a campaign to seed over 2,000 Smallie Pizzas to Nigerians, which was a great introduction to the market to this great product. Ever since the launch, we have witnessed a growth in sales of our pizzas – Smallie, Medium and Large and now the Chairman Pizza. Smallie has helped serve as a great option for customers who may not be able to consume a medium box, and really need to enjoy a box of Pizza as lunch or a snack. Beyond sales, Smallie Pizza has impacted our brand by making us closer than ever to our consumers and making our pizzas more accessible and enjoyable to all classes of individuals. As a consumer from a recent study said, ‘’Domino’s brought us to the reality of pizza’’. This is how far the company has touched the lives of Nigerian consumers with its products.
What is behind the drive for new flavours, menus, and packages?
As a business, it is important to always revolutionalise your products and services to meet the trends and shifts in tastes of the consumer. At Eat’N’Go, we are constantly driven by innovation which allows us to keep producing ground-breaking products and services to suit customers’ varying needs. For instance, in April, we launched the Domino’s Xtra Menu, to provide our customers with better value, present them with a wider selection of quality pizza options that are delicious and affordable. Beyond this, we ensure that we continuously develop local menus that suit the dynamic Nigerian taste and diet, and go the extra mile to create some flavours that are locally sourced for our ice cream, and even customize our pizza options – such as the “chicken suya pizza” which is such a huge success that it is now a reference for other global partners. As a brand, we listen to our customers and follow their requests to create products that they love. Our passion for creating new flavours and menus simply lies in our commitment to fulfilling the satisfaction of our customers.
Are there any plans for expansions? Will you list at the Stock Market any time soon?
Indeed there are plans for expansion. So far, we have expanded our presence in eight states in Nigeria – Lagos, Abuja, Oyo, Ogun, Kwara, Akure, and Rivers – adding Calabar and other cities in the third of 2019. As you may know, we have just launched our 100th store in Nigeria, and are up to the construction of our 116th store, employing over 2,400 employees across the country. Our goal is to open 300 stores and employ 8,000 workers in the next 5 years.
How do you source your raw materials?
When Eat’N’Go launched in Nigeria, we made sure to try and source our raw materials locally as much as possible. Now, we have over 65 percent of our products sourced locally, which is another way we work to ensure an impact in the Nigerian economy. We understand the need to buy Nigerian and reduce imports, and that is something we are continuously doing. This is part of our efforts to derive socio-economic growth. We also know that the less we import the more successful we would be.
Nigeria is an infrastructure-heavy market, where you practically have to build most things yourself. How are you dealing with the challenges?
This is part of doing business in Nigeria. We have developed our business model around the need to include basic infrastructure in our development and running costs of the business. We have systems set up to monitor the on-going running and the costs involved with the infrastructure. This is one of the major roadblocks for some international businesses in Nigeria as they don’t understand how to do business with these challenges. We have embraced the challenges and they are second nature to us as we set up in new locations.
How is your partnership with Slum2School going so far?
Our relationship with Slum2School is becoming stronger as both organizations share a passion to promote quality education in Nigeria. We are thankful for the opportunity to send 1,000 children to school, as a way to contribute to creating an impact in the Nigerian educational sector. We recently paid a visit to the kids from Slum2School at their flagship school in Makoko and we were happy with the development we saw. We are almost at our target of N50, 000,000 and would like to enjoin Nigerians to support our vision of sending these children to school by buying our products, so we can raise more donations, and send even more kids to school in the coming years.
You are building a factory in Shagamu. Can you tell us more about that?
We are building our new state-of-the-art Domino’s Pizza central kitchen. This is where we make our dough for all of our Stores in the Lagos region and surrounding cities. This facility will eventually be serving up to 200 stores across this region. It will provide employment for local residents as well as income for the local government to develop more infrastructures. We are also building our national warehouse in this area at the same time. This will serve all of our brands nationally. These are both major infrastructure projects for Eat’N’Go that will support the growth of the company across the next five years, as well as contributing to the local economy.
