The Napaqaro restaurant group, owner of Buffalo Grill, announced on Wednesday that it was going to sell the Courtepaille restaurants just over two years after taking over the brand in difficulties since the health crisis for 17 million euros.
Napaqaro had informed Courtepaille employees the day before, during a CSE, of its intention to sell the brand, which has 144 directly operated restaurants and 76 franchises and employs 2,089 employees, a spokeswoman told AFP, confirming information from the newspaper Les Echos.
In September 2020, the commercial court of Evry (Essonne) preferred the takeover bid for Courtepaille by Buffalo Grill, which has since become Napaqaro, a phonetic rewriting of “checkered tablecloth”, to that of Groupe Bertrand .
Owned by the TDR fund, the red-roofed steak house brand wanted to inject a “new dynamic” into Courtepaille and its restaurants, often located along roadsides, with a family-oriented clientele and a somewhat aged image. It had been placed in receivership at the end of July 2020.
client arbitrations
Courtepaille -which before its absorption by Napaqaro had 2,477 employees in 187 directly managed restaurants and 91 franchisees- suffered many months of closing room service and new post-Covid consumption habits: the generalization of teleworking that has weighed on the assistance and the delivery boom in particular.
The family brand has not recovered its level of attendance in 2019, before the health crisis, still 25% below last year with a turnover of 190 million euros.
Courtepaille has also suffered, like the rest of the traditional restaurant industry, rising inflation in recent months, which has increased its supply costs and forced families with tight budgets to make concessions in their consumption.
Owned by the British fund ICG since 2011, Courtepaille, born in 1961, had been declared bankrupt on July 29, 2020 by the Evry commercial court, after a drop in activity due to Covid-19 and the denial of a loan guaranteed by the state.
Recently, Napaqaro has focused its strategy on new brands, developing US chicken fast food chain Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen as a franchise and creating the “Bun meat bun” burger delivery brand.
Source: BFM TV
