Two friends bought a takeaway in Rosettenville for about R80,000. Nando’s now has more than 1,200 outlets in 30 countries.
In 1987 Fernando Duarte and Robert Brozin bought a small Portuguese-Mozambican chicken takeaway in Johannesburg, tried the peri-peri sauce and renamed it.
The story of a global restaurant brand starts at a small takeaway in Rosettenville, Johannesburg, in 1987. Portuguese-born Fernando Duarte and South African-born Robert Brozin visited a Portuguese Mozambican takeaway called Chickenland, tried the chicken with peri-peri, and bought the restaurant for about 80,000 rand, roughly £25,000 at the time.
A new name
They renamed it Nando’s, after Fernando’s firstborn son. By 1989 there were three outlets in Johannesburg and one in Portugal. Capricorn Ventures International acquired the chain in 1992, the year the first branch opened in Ealing in London, where a bank branch once stood.
Growing out
Nando’s spread across southern Africa, in Botswana since 1993, Zimbabwe since 1995 and Zambia since 2002, and reached its 1,000th store worldwide in 2012. In 2010 Advertising Age named it one of the world’s 30 hottest marketing brands, and The Guardian wrote that it had “changed the face of British fast food”. Today it operates over 1,200 outlets in 30 countries.
It is a useful founding story for small restaurant owners: a good product, a recipe worth copying, a clear name, and a first outlet small enough to buy.
