New Portillo's CEO on why suburbs want Portillo's in town
Portillo's chief executive officer Keith Kinsey talked to the Daily Herald about the chain during a grand opening Tuesday in Gurnee. Kinsey, a former Noodles & Co. executive, took over Portillo's in July. Founder Dick Portillo, who sold the chain to the Boston-based Berkshire Partners private equity firm in 2014, remains a consultant. Here are some topics Kinsey addressed.
• On suburban elected officials often heard wanting a Portillo's: "It's the employment piece. It's a great place. We hire a lot of young people. So it's a great place for someone to kind of start. Whether or not they stay with Portillo's, it's just a great place to learn some job skills. And since we do hire young people, we are definitely at a higher-than-average hourly wage. So, from that perspective, it's a good opportunity."
• On employees having a career with the company: "If you look at the people who are here today on the management side, long-term Portillo's people, career opportunities, growth opportunities. And I think that's one of the strengths that we bring, is that a lot of our internal development and a lot of our internal promotions are internal people."
• On expansion: "After this (in Gurnee), we go out to the Florida market. ... We have a lot of people that are transplants from Chicago. A lot of our online ordering, the No. 1 market is the Tampa market, so we use those types of data points to determine when we do markets outside of kind of the Midwest, to determine where we go next."