7/01/1999 01:21:14 PM|||Scott Lewis|||

Central European Foods, franchisee of Dunkin' Donuts has announced that it intends to open 400 new restaurants in Poland, Czech Republic and Slovakia in the next eight years. 280 of these outlets will be in this country.

The US chain is the second largest franchising operation in the world after McDonalds and has 14 branches in Poland. The company sees growth largely in its sale of doughnuts, which they claim, being totally different to traditional Polish doughnuts are an entirely new product. Furthermore 20 percent of their sales is coffee. Like McDonalds, they have a 'minimalist' policy offering a much smaller range of products than in other countries although there may be plans to offer bagels and similar foodstuffs in the future.

In the USA they have one restaurant for every 30,000 inhabitants in certain areas, in Poland it is currently 1:1.5m, although lower in Warsaw. The company has two bakeries in Poland, one in Warsaw and the other near Katowice and consider that they could supply a considerably larger amount of outlets than those currently in service. Expansion, they claim, will not cost the same as for McDonalds which may be as much as USD800,000 per restaurant, a large part of this cost being made up of food preparation facilities. Dunkin' Donuts only has the very final elements prepared in the place of consumption.

The cost of expansion will be met by a share issue aimed largely at instititutional investors and quoted on the Warsaw stock exchange.
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|||110512568465366918|||Dunkin' Donuts plan major expansion in Poland