A local phenomenon or the “not so fast food” global revolution
António Cunha Araújo, one of the three friends who founded the Portuguese start-up H3 and the person responsible for the company’s expansion, was sitting comfortably in his office when he summarized the success story of the restaurant company, then three years old: “Fortunately, our main challenge has always been choosing between good and excellent.” On the other side of the office, a world map artistically engraved on the wall displayed the caption “H3 Future Stores,” marked with a light blue pin. The entire world was covered with pins in H3’s distinctive color… except for India, since “they don’t consume beef.”
By the end of 2010, H3 was competing in 33 of Portugal’s main shopping centers, in their respective food courts, producing approximately 10,000 hamburgers per day and about to reach an annual turnover of 22 million euros. This record growth in the domestic market gave wings to the dream of international expansion. H3 was preparing to enter Poland and Spain during the first half of 2011, thus marking the first two countries in the internationalization process of the Portuguese “Not So Fast Food” phenomenon.
However, while the company was preparing to replicate its successful concept in distant Warsaw, expansion in Spain would require H3’s fast and trendy stores to step out of their comfort zone: food courts. Painting the world map light blue had become the company’s greatest ambition, and deciding where and how to place the next pins was an increasingly critical dilemma for the “hamburgologists.”
