El Pollo Rico CEO Ramon Momin on Growing the Family Business
At El Pollo Rico, the star of the menu is the chicken. It’s flavorful. It’s juicy. It’s charcoal grilled—hot, fresh, and fast—before it’s delivered to your table or your car window. It’s surrounded by authentic sides like charro beans, grilled onions, and pico de gallo.
El Pollo Rico CEO Ramon Momin never thought he would join the family business, grilling and selling chicken. In fact, he’s not even a chef. He’s a dentist: he graduated from dental school in San Antonio, Texas and still practices part time.
But when Ramon’s father—who founded El Pollo Rico in the early 2000s—needed help to run the rapidly growing business, Ramon jumped in. He began commuting between San Antonio and Austin, splitting his time between operating a chain of 15 restaurants and practicing dentistry.
“People love food, people love eating food,” Ramon says with a smile. “Nobody loves going to the dentist.”
When Ramon joined El Pollo Rico in 2020, his first priority was designing a tech stack for the company. ”I started January 2020, right before the pandemic. We were not really that technologically advanced before that point. Four days before the shutdown in March, I was able to get a new website and online ordering stet up,” he says. “Everybody has to be innovative. Every restaurant, in order to survive, needs to be flexible and roll with the punches.”
Today, his goal is simple: Keep growing. With plans for more locations across central Texas, Ramon is excited to expand the future of the family business.
At Sysco LABS, we build the ecommerce platforms Sysco customers like Ramon use to shop for their restaurants’ ingredients online. Every day, we’re striving to push the restaurant industry forward through technology. So, we’re always curious to learn from the most innovative restaurants about what helps them succeed.
In this interview, we asked Ramon to share three pieces of advice for restaurant owners embracing technology.
1. Handle the basics
To get started, focus on the basics. Set up a good foundation to improve upon as you grow.
”Before I began in 2020 we didn’t have a functioning website, we didn’t have online ordering, we didn’t have curbside pickup,” Ramon says. “I think I brought just enough young energy to recognize these big things that we needed.”
Up first was launching faster ordering. “The drive through gets to be super long, and people don’t want to wait that long, so we created online ordering to help customers get their food faster,” Ramon explains. Online ordering required updating the website and point of sale system, so Ramon did those things too. Today, customers can use the El Pollo Rico website to find the closest locations near them, browse the menu, and place their order in a few clicks.
Behind the scenes, it’s a bit more complicated. “[Our] new POS system helps us be more analytical with our menu,” Ramon says. “It helps us determine which items to keep on our menu and which to rethink. We can ask, ‘Is it because we need to change the recipe, or is it that there are already better options on our menu?’ Then we can make changes.”
2. Prioritize Simplicity
Implementing technology across your business can save time and money. “During these past two years, a lot of my time has gone into updating things,” Ramon says. “At our central office in Round Rock, there used to be a lot of things that we would do manually, that we’re now doing electronically. Record keeping, invoicing—things that used to take us two weeks to do are now taking us three days to do. There’s a lot of time saved through automation.”
But, Ramon cautions against throwing out all of your business processes in the switch from analogue to digital. Remember, the goal of technology is to solve problems, not create new headaches for your team. Ramon’s advice is to keep things simple.
”At the end of the day, time is the most valuable thing. Unless it significantly improves your time, it might not be worth investing in. If I can do something as simple as say ‘Hey, here’s an invoice,’ and drop in it in a box, and that takes me three seconds rather than creating a fifteen step process, that might be better. If it’s going to take significantly longer, and you have to get extra help to manage that new technology, it may not be worth it for you right at that moment.”
”Technology is great, but you don’t have to always do it. It can make things easier, but sometimes it may not be reasonable.”
3. Culture is Everything
Even with the proliferation of third-party delivery apps, to-go ordering, and curbside pickup, Ramon doesn’t see the culture of the restaurant business changing anytime soon.
”I think people want to dine in,” he says. “There is definitely a culture of eating in a restaurant of any sort, whether its your five star or your one star. You want to sit around the table and face the people you’re eating with. There’s something about that: sitting down and really communicating with the people you’re eating with.”
Creating that culture starts with the team at El Pollo Rico. Regardless of market conditions, Ramon says, culture is what matters most.
”My dad started El Pollo Rico when I was in high school. Back then, everyone knew me as my dad’s son, and I knew them. I’ve known some of our employees for 15 years,” he says. “At that age, you don’t understand employer / employee relationships, you just see people as friends.”
“That’s something my dad has imparted to me: our job is to work just as hard as anyone else on the team. Without them, there is no El Pollo Rico. Everybody is important, and we all need to do our part to work hard and treat each other with respect. And at the end of the day, we have to have fun.”
Want to learn more about the intersection of food and technology? Explore careers at Sysco LABS today.