Frankie & Benny's owner sees sales slide

04 March 2009 by
Frankie & Benny's owner sees sales slide

Frankie & Benny's owner The Restaurant Group (TRG) has seen like-for-like sales for the first nine weeks of 2009 slide 2.5%.

Despite this, the company, which also owns the Chiquito and Garfunkels chains, said it was confident it was well positioned to weather the recession, but warned that 2009 would be a challenging year.

TRG added that it plans to open between 15 and 20 new outlets this year including up to five at airport sites.

The update came as the company, which operates 354 restaurants in the UK, posted pre-tax profits of £48.9m for 2008, up 13% on a year earlier.

TRG opened 40 new sites during 2008 and reported 1.5% growth in like-for-like sales.

Chief executive Andrew Page said that against a difficult economic backdrop, 2009 had started well and the group was in good shape with strong cash-flow.

"Having eschewed the trend in recent years of replacing permanent capital with bank debt, we are well placed to weather the recession and take advantage of opportunities to add new restaurants within our selected market segments," he said.

January takings drop at 60% of London restaurants>>

TRG to scale back on new restaurant openings>>

Frankie & Benny's owner defies credit crunch fears>>

Kevin Bacon to leave TRG>>

By Kerstin Kühn

E-mail your comments to Kerstin Kühn here.

Caterersearch.com jobs
Looking for a new job? Find your next restaurant job here with Caterersearch.com jobs

The Caterer Blog](http://www.caterersearch.com/blogs/catering-news-blog/) Catch up with more news and gossip on the Caterer Blog here
[Newsletters For the latest hospitality news, sign up for our e-mail newsletters.
The Caterer Breakfast Briefing Email

Start the working day with The Caterer’s free breakfast briefing email

Sign Up and manage your preferences below

Check mark icon
Thank you

You have successfully signed up for the Caterer Breakfast Briefing Email and will hear from us soon!

Jacobs Media is honoured to be the recipient of the 2020 Queen's Award for Enterprise.

The highest official awards for UK businesses since being established by royal warrant in 1965. Read more.

close

Ad Blocker detected

We have noticed you are using an adblocker and – although we support freedom of choice – we would like to ask you to enable ads on our site. They are an important revenue source which supports free access of our website's content, especially during the COVID-19 crisis.

trade tracker pixel tracking