Popular Chinese “crispy burger” restaurant Bingz has secured funding for a planned 300 new stores in the US within the next 5 years, sources confirmed.
Founded in 2014 in Beijing by a software engineer, Bingz, known in China as “Xi Shao Ye”, took a popular Chinese street food snack of stewed pork stuffed in a crispy bun and repackaged it into a standardized chain restaurant with professional branding, contactless ordering systems, and prime locations side by side international restaurant chains. The brand quickly grew with hundreds of locations across China. By 2018 the restaurant had already sold 20 million of these crispy burgers in China.
After international expansion with stores opening in Canada and Singapore under the Bingz brand name, the company’s California-based US brand is now planning 300 new stores in the US market. Sources familiar with the company confirmed that Bingz has secured angel round funding from American investors at a $50 million valuation for this expansion in the US, starting in California.
Few Chinese restaurant chains have been able to penetrate the US market outside of an ethnic Chinese customer base. The general public the US is largely unfamiliar with more authentic Chinese dishes as well as how to order them resulting in a unique brand of “Americanized Chinese” food. With international success already under its belt, Bingz is set to change that.
The Bingz crispy burger, known in Chinese as “rou jia mo”, has a history dating back over 2,000 years from central China’s Shaanxi province. Bingz signature pork crispy burgers are made with in-house baked crispy buns and pork loin stewed in 32 natural spices. Other burger options include black pepper beef, spicy cumin pork loin, and vegetables.
Bingz owes much of its success in China to repacking this traditional Chinese food into a more modern, trendy, and standardized fast-food restaurant. Its initial expansion in Canada has brought that same aesthetic with a store setting, ordering options, and locally familiar concepts like “crispy burger” which helped the restaurant chain gain traction among a non-Chinese customer base.
The restaurant chain has expanded its menu options to also include chili noodles, a cold noodle with chili oil and sesame sauce called liangpi, wonton soup, tofu pudding, hot and sour glass noodles, as well as spicy fries, soy milk, and plum cold brew beverages. Another more localized feature of the US stores will be the chain’s first drive-through ordering options.
These planned 300 US stores are expected to generate $5 million in annual revenue each, putting the company’s forecasted US revenue at $1.5 billion.
This ambitious expansion plan in the US and impressive funding round are showing that the company might have found the secret sauce to crack the US fast-food market with a wholly unique offering.
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