News Track: Local Popeyes rebuilding customer volume

In 2014, Jeff Braverman and business partner Scott Akers started building a chain of locally run Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen restaurants.

Background

Both Braverman's and Akers' backgrounds in the food industry have ties to an Iowa City company, Hawkeye Foodservice Distribution.

Hawkeye's roots run back to Braverman's grandfather, who moved to Iowa from Russia in the 1920s and started peddling fruit to earn money. He built that into a corner grocery store, his grandson said, and then a supermarket with a distribution warehouse. Eventually, the business spun off the warehouse from the supermarket and moved to Coralville.

The company grew as Braverman's father, and then Braverman himself, took over leadership for about 20 years each. U.S. Foods bought Hawkeye Foodservice in 2012.

Although Braverman stayed on after the sale, he said he found himself out of a job when Sysco announced it would purchase U.S. Foods (although that merger did not go through).

'I was used to working a lot more than 40 hours a week and all of a sudden I had no job,” Braverman said.

Akers later asked Braverman if he wanted to invest in a restaurant with him. The two formed SASAJ LLC and bought a Popeyes in Waterloo in 2014.

What's happened since

SASAJ now operates five Popeyes restaurants - known for their fried chicken - around the Corridor. Two are in Cedar Rapids, with one in Coralville and another in Dubuque.

It's a seemingly fast growth rate, but Braverman said there was motivation to do so. Popeyes wants its franchisees to grow, he said, and there were 'a couple of pretty aggressive developers” to the west and east.

Plus, having five restaurants can help make back-end operations easier and more affordable.

'With five you're able to put it all together in a nice package … and provide the kind of returns that are reasonable for the investment,” Braverman said.

Braverman said SASAJ has its eyes on opening more restaurants, but there are no immediate plans. The company still is recovering, he said, from a video last year that drew considerable attention online and became the basis for some news stories.

A customer sitting in the drive-thru lane of one of the Cedar Rapids locations that had closed for the day recorded audio of two employees discussing what some believed to be the mishandling of food. The video, which Braverman said misconstrues what the employees were discussing, caused a storm online and hurt sales, he said.

'Our long-term plans are to add more restaurants but in the current environment with our volume in Cedar Rapids, we're just trying to recover from where we were,” Braverman said. 'That's probably most important to us.”

While there may not be new restaurants popping up soon, Braverman said he and Akers are focused on creating 'the family culture that we had at Hawkeye Foodservice.”

'Every person, no matter what function they perform, it's important. Every function is important,” he said. 'That's what I was taught. It didn't matter what job you had, you were appreciated” for the work you did.

l Comments: (319) 398-8366; matthew.patane@thegazette.com