Industry Restaurant Owner Dr Sam Prince Founder Sam Prince CEO Karim Messih (Dec 2015–) Type of business franchise system | Products Mexican Food Website www.zambrero.com Founded 2005 Number of locations 145 | |
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Zambrero
Zambrero is an Australian restaurant chain serving Mexican food. It was founded in 2005 in Canberra by then-medical student Sam Prince with the idea of using the profits to support humanitarian causes. The chain donates a meal to someone in need in the developing world for every meal purchased through their Plate4Plate program.
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It opened its first store in Lonsdale Street, Braddon in 2005. Zambreros later expanded nationally, and then into New Zealand and Bangkok, Thailand. In 2016 opened its first European restaurant in Dublin, Ireland. It had a total of 110 outlets as of March 2016. Zambrero appeared on the BRW Fast Franchise list for four years from 2011.
In conjunction with partner organisation Stop Hunger Now, they have donated almost 8,000,000 meals. The company had shifted from an earlier goal of supplying educational resources to indigenous communities and developing countries, for which Prince had founded the E-magine Foundation in 2007, to reducing global hunger, with CEO Stuart Cook stating "we decided to focus on the basic human rights … you aren’t gonna get to school if you’re hungry". In April 2015 it was reported that they had given 4.3 million meals in the previous eighteen months. Prince was named the Australian of the Year for the ACT in 2012 for his Zambreros-funded philanthropy.
A 2016 study by the George Institute for Global Health, analysing 229 small meals and snacks from 25 fast food chains, found Zambreros pork nachos to have the highest kilojoule count.