Romanian restaurant chain Spartan, sold by businessman Stefan Mandachi, is planning an aggressive expansion both locally and abroad. “Our plan is to surpass the 100-restaurant mark in the next three years, 60% of which will be franchises. We intend to enter strongly in the street locations area and more on expresses of the convenience-food restaurant type, i.e. at the customer’s doorstep. If until now you had to come to the mall to eat at Spartan, now Spartan will come closer to you. This is the direction, because good shopping centers are no longer being built or the good ones are already built. We still have cities in Romania with development potential in mall-type locations, such as Bucharest, Iași, Brașov, but in the future, it will be the second type of Spartan restaurant. We are not giving up on mall locations. The shopping centers still manage to bring a healthy traffic, even if the competition in the QSR area is increasing. We will not give up these locations, our plan is not to get out of shopping centers, but to grow the new segment,” said Gabriel Melniciuc, CEO of Spartan, who believes that there is still a lot of room in Romania for the development of the restaurant network. “We have big cities that we haven’t covered very well, like Brasov, Iași, Bucharest. I think in Bucharest alone we can still open at least 20 restaurants. The challenge arises for our development colleagues in identifying the right spaces for us, where supply and demand meet, to give us enough visibility and enough traffic. But there is still potential in Romania,” he adds. In terms of international expansion, countries such as Spain and the UK are being targeted initially, with Albania, Macedonia, Hungary and even Germany to follow.
Spartan restaurant chain plans a major expansion
