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Saturday, July 26, 2025

Royal Castle bitter as KFC enjoys smooth restart

by

Chester Sambrano
1901 days ago
20200511

Pres­tige Hold­ings CEO Si­mon Hardy has de­fend­ed his com­pa­ny in the face of al­le­ga­tions it ben­e­fit­ted from in­for­ma­tion it had ahead of yes­ter­day’s restart­ing of KFC restau­rants as food busi­ness­es re­opened in phase one of Gov­ern­ment’s COVID-19 re­open­ing plan.

The com­plaint was made by KFC’s main com­peti­tor Roy­al Cas­tle, whose man­age­ment was up­set af­ter they could not open all their restau­rants in time for the start of busi­ness yes­ter­day be­cause they could not get a full sup­ply of chick­en from their providers.

In con­trast to Roy­al Cas­tle, KFC was able to re­open the ma­jor­i­ty of their out­lets and drew hun­dreds of cus­tomers who had been starved of it for month af­ter Gov­ern­ment closed all food busi­ness as part of the COVID-19 lock­down mea­sures.

But Hardy said they were sim­ply well pre­pared to restart and had made arrange­ments with their chick­en sup­pli­ers, Arawak Lim­it­ed, so once Gov­ern­ment gave the go-ahead to re­open they would be ready.

“There is ab­solute­ly no truth to the al­le­ga­tion. We found out just like the rest of the coun­try did, just short­ly af­ter 2 pm on Sat­ur­day,” Hardy said as he rub­bished the sug­ges­tion yes­ter­day.

“This ru­mour or al­le­ga­tion, I ex­pect has start­ed be­cause peo­ple saw Arawak chick­en trucks de­liv­er­ing chick­en to our stores on Fri­day, which is where it start­ed from. And what that is, is we were pack­ing ham­pers for our staff - 2,700 ham­pers, that were paid for by the Vic­tor and Sal­ly Mout­tet Foun­da­tion.

“So I was part of the team pack­ing ham­pers on Fri­day with 100 oth­er vol­un­teers and we pro­vid­ed ham­pers to all our hourly paid staff - you know like pow­dered milk and rice and pas­ta and beans and those sorts of stuff. Just to tide peo­ple over dur­ing this dif­fi­cult time.”

He said Awards spon­sored half the cost of the frozen chick­en for the em­ploy­ees and this was de­liv­ered to var­i­ous restau­rants on Sat­ur­day to be dis­trib­uted with the ham­pers.

“That is the fact. Whether a Tri­ni wants to go and be­lieve that or fig­ure that’s a cov­er sto­ry, that’s ob­vi­ous­ly up to pub­lic. I can give you the facts as I have them...From my side of view, cat­e­gor­i­cal­ly, we had no ad­vance no­tice and there was no pref­er­en­tial treat­ment what­so­ev­er,” Hardy said, adding KFC will de­liv­er an­oth­er 513 ham­pers to month­ly paid work­ers on Thurs­day.

Pres­tige Hold­ings is the par­ent com­pa­ny of KFC, Sub­way, TGI Fri­days, Star­bucks and Piz­za Hut.

How­ev­er, a se­nior Roy­al Cas­tle ex­ec­u­tive ex­pressed grave con­cerns about their com­peti­tor’s ap­par­ent edge. The ex­ec­u­tive, who did not want to be named, said the com­pa­ny prides it­self on sup­ply­ing fresh chick­en from the farm but for this to hap­pen, sup­pli­ers have to de­liv­er dai­ly.

He said in the cur­rent sce­nario where the an­nounce­ment was on­ly made by Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley on Sat­ur­day, they were not in a po­si­tion to mo­bilise to be ful­ly ready for yes­ter­day. The ex­ec­u­tive not­ed, how­ev­er, that some oth­er chick­en op­er­a­tors were not in the same po­si­tion.

“I find it fun­ny that an an­nounce­ment could be made to open fast-food restau­rants and there were oth­ers who were pre­pared to open,” he said, not­ing that as late as mid­day yes­ter­day, all Roy­al Cas­tle lo­ca­tions re­mained closed due to a lack of chick­en.

Based on in­for­ma­tion Guardian Me­dia re­ceived, the first de­liv­ery to Roy­al Cas­tle out­lets from their sup­pli­er, Nu­trim­ix, took place around 2 pm.

“I am very dis­ap­point­ed,” the ex­ec­u­tive said.

Di­rec­tor at Church’s Chick­en An­tho­ny Sab­ga Aboud al­so said they con­sid­ered sev­er­al sce­nar­ios ahead of the Prime Min­is­ter’s news con­fer­ence to en­sure they would be ready. He said be­cause of this, they put key sup­pli­ers on stand by and brought out staff over the week­end to pre­pare the stores and ware­house.

“We were able to get chick­en in time to open the stores,” Sab­ga Aboud said.

Guardian Me­dia con­tact­ed Nu­trim­ix to find out how much ad­vanced no­tice is need­ed to fa­cil­i­tate large or­ders to a restau­rant such as Roy­al Cas­tle. In a sit­u­a­tion like the cur­rent one, its vice pres­i­dent Shameer Mo­hammed said, “We would have re­ceived or­ders from Roy­al Cas­tle to­day (Mon­day) and we met de­liv­ery to­day (Mon­day).”

He said the or­der would have had to be placed yes­ter­day be­cause their of­fices are not open on Sat­ur­day.

But Arawak mar­ket­ing di­rec­tor Robin Phillips said they had work­ers on stand­by on Sat­ur­day as they an­tic­i­pat­ed “good news” for the food­ser­vice sec­tor from the PM.

“We were ready from the time we lis­tened to the Prime Min­is­ter on Sat­ur­day,” Phillips said.

He said they got calls and made arrange­ments to de­liv­er on Sun­day and yes­ter­day.

But the Roy­al Cas­tle ex­ec­u­tive said they did not give their sup­pli­ers pri­or no­tice be­cause “we did not know what he (the Prime Min­is­ter) was go­ing to an­nounce.”

He ac­cused KFC of hav­ing in­for­ma­tion which en­abled them to mo­bilise faster. Notwith­stand­ing the chick­en is­sues, he said every­thing else was in place to wel­come cus­tomers. He said dur­ing the clo­sure the com­pa­ny put things in place to en­sure phys­i­cal dis­tanc­ing, prop­er hy­giene and san­i­ta­tion mea­sures would be in place for the re­open­ing.

COVID-19


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