Lonetree bucks the trend

Source: Food and Drink Digital

Date :06/12/2007 09:01:36

Despite challenging times for the fast food industry, McDonalds franchise Lonetree Ltd has managed to produce consistently strong performances in all its restaurants.

Written by James Hurley & Produced by James Smith.

McDonald’s has had an image problem for as long as most people can remember. The company’s troubled relationship with the media reached its nadir in 2000 when Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me took an unscientific and rather excitable brickbat to its marketing practices and the nutritional qualities of its products.

While the corporation responded with reduced fat and salt content, a healthier menu and the scrapping of its supersize option, the media remained broadly unimpressed, suggesting that the company had merely shut the stable door long after the horse had bolted. With the range and size of the competition in the UK fast service food industry constantly increasing, McDonald’s has experienced difficult times recently and has had profits hit in a number of its restaurants. Those owned by McDonald’s franchisee Lonetree Ltd, however, aren’t amongst them.

While McDonald’s share of the UK industry may be temporarily shrinking, Lonetree recently acquired two more franchises, taking the total number of restaurants headed by Ron Mounsey, Lonetree’s managing director, to five. Mounsey says that his company have been bucking the trend of the quick service restaurant business for the last four years. “The acquisition of the two new franchises expanded my business by about 40 percent,” he says.

“Sales in my existing restaurants increased by just short of ten percent. There’s been a decline in profit terms across the whole of the quick service restaurant business. As much as anything, we’ve been seeing increased competition. Yet we’ve been growing for the last three or four years by just short of double digits. We’re fairly buoyant, we’ve got quite a progressive business…”

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